What’s YOUR opinion of Karoline Leavitt?

Karoline Leavitt was born on August 24, 1997, in Atkinson, New Hampshire.[1] She was the third and youngest child[1] of Bob and Erin Leavitt.[2] Her family owned an ice cream stand in Atkinson and her father owned a used truck dealership in Plaistow.[3] Leavitt attended Central Catholic High School, a private Catholic school in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She played softball and was named an Eagle-Tribune All-Star in 2014 and 2015.[4] In interviews, she has credited her Roman Catholic education as formative for her spirituality and instilling her with certain mores, including faith, family, discipline, the importance of public service, and an anti-abortion stance.[5]

Leavitt began attending Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire, in 2015,[6] where she received a scholarship to play softball[7] and majored in communications and minored in political science. She interned with NBC Sports Boston but later shifted toward political journalism. Leavitt became involved with the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in her sophomore year; as the institute’s ambassador, she interned for a United States senator and the television station WMUR.[8] By the end of her sophomore year, she had given up softball.[4] Leavitt applied for an internship at Fox News,[9] but later interned as a writer for the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence writing letters and notes on behalf of the president.[4] Leavitt founded Saint Anselm’s broadcasting club and wrote for its paper, the Saint Anselm Crier. She later described herself as the “token conservative” on campus, and her writings reflected a conservative viewpoint.[5] In a 2016 opinion piece for the Crier, she wrote that the media was “frankly crooked” and “unjust, unfair, and sometimes just plain old false”.[9] For one semester, Leavitt studied at John Cabot University in Rome.[10] She graduated in 2019, becoming the first person in her immediate family to graduate from college.[11]

Career
White House assistant press secretary (2019–2021)
After graduating, Leavitt was offered a full-time job in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence[4] responding to letters sent to president Donald Trump;[12] by June 2020, she was its associate director.[13] That month, she was named as an assistant White House press secretary[13] after a friend who was a personal aide to the president[12] referred her to the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.[4] She attended an event in the White House Rose Garden that later served as the beginning of the White House COVID-19 outbreak;[14] Leavitt later tested positive for the virus.[15] In January 2021, weeks before Donald Trump left office, she became the communications director for New York representative Elise Stefanik.[16]

U.S. congressional campaign in New Hampshire (2021–2022)
Main article: 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in New Hampshire § District 1

Leavitt (center) at the 2022 Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida
On July 19, 2021, Leavitt announced her intention to run in the United States House of Representatives election for New Hampshire’s first congressional district as a Republican in an interview with WMUR. She said she was encouraged to run after President Joe Biden reversed many of the policies enacted by his predecessor, Donald Trump,[17] and after Twitter erroneously suspended her account while she was working for Stefanik.[18] Within three days, her campaign had raised $100,000.[3] Leavitt’s campaign largely leveraged her experience within the Trump administration, as she sought to be viewed as the most pro-Trump candidate in the Republican primary.[19] She officially filed to run in June 2022.[20] Polling in August placed Leavitt second behind Matt Mowers, who had been the Republican nominee in the 2020 House of Representatives election.[21]

Leading up to the primary, Leavitt criticized Mowers as insufficiently pro-Trump,[22] including noting that he was a former advisor to former New Jersey governor Chris Christie.[23] The dichotomy in Leavitt’s firebrand approach and Mowers’s tempered strategy demonstrated a divide in the Republican Party, according to The New York Times; Leavitt received endorsements from Texas senator Ted Cruz and representatives Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, and Stefanik, in a demonstration of support from Republican lawmakers.[24] She concluded her campaign with a gun shoot at a fish and game club.[25] Leavitt won the Republican primary in September.[26] She was defeated by Democratic incumbent Chris Pappas.[27]

In 2022, Leavitt faced a Federal Election Commission complaint from End Citizens United alleging that her campaign and treasurer had illegally accepted campaign donations over the legal limit and had never repaid her donors. In January 2025, Leavitt disclosed in 17 amended campaign filings $326,370 in unpaid campaign debts she had failed to disclose for several years. Roughly $200,000 of the debt had been composed of illicit campaign donations made in excess of campaign finance limits she had never paid back, in violation of campaign finance laws.[28]

Post-election work (2023–2025)