An ad airing in the New Hampshire Senate race tells viewers that Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas is “out for himself,” using cherry-picked figures to falsely claim that his net worth has skyrocketed while in office.
The ad also suggests that he voted for certain bills to benefit his husband, a former Amazon lobbyist who now works for Uber. But the ad misrepresents Pappas’ position on one of those measures, and omits key context on the others.
Pappas, who has served in the House since 2019, is running against Republican John E. Sununu, a former U.S. senator from one of the state’s most prominent political families. The Cook Political Report rates the race as leaning Democratic; it was a toss-up as early as last month.
The ad comes from the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC affiliated with Senate Majority Leader John Thune. The group has spent more than $700,000 on the ad since it began airing on broadcast and streaming platforms Oct. 24, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact.
“What has Chris Pappas done for himself?” the ad’s narrator intones. “Married an Amazon lobbyist after backing bills Amazon lobbied on. His spouse got a fancy job at a big tech company that Pappas voted to make harder to sue. Now Pappas’s net worth is up by upwards of 1,000%.”
The ad concludes by saying, “Chris Pappas: out for himself, not you.”
Pappas began dating Vann Bentley in spring 2019, his campaign told PolitiFact, and they married in 2023. Bentley was a registered lobbyist for Amazon before leaving the company later in 2019. He now works on privacy and cybersecurity policy for Uber and is no longer registered as a lobbyist.
Nothing in the House’s ethics rules prohibits a lawmaker from dating or marrying a lobbyist, or requires a lawmaker to formally disclose such a relationship. However, if a lawmaker’s spouse works as a lobbyist, the spouse is prohibited from lobbying the lawmaker or the lawmaker’s staff.
Pappas’ relationship with Bentley has been the subject of multiple Republican attack ads this cycle accusing him of conflicts of interest. Many of them, including the recent Senate Leadership Fund ad, display a headline from a conservative news outlet claiming Pappas “lied” about the relationship during a debate six years ago.
PolitiFact looked into that claim and rated it “mostly false,” writing that the exchange at issue was “not a clear case of Pappas denying the relationship.” The Pappas campaign confirmed the relationship to the New Hampshire Union Leader the day after the debate.
We’ll examine several other claims the ad makes about Pappas’ voting record and wealth:
- The ad falsely claims Pappas’ net worth shot up by 1,000% while in office, a figure we could only replicate with misleading math. Financial disclosure forms show the increase in his net worth was much more modest, and mostly due to listing his husband’s assets on more recent disclosure forms.
- The ad misleadingly claims that Pappas “voted to make [it] harder to sue” his husband’s company, a reference to a provision that would limit liability for ride-hailing companies like Uber when passengers are assaulted or otherwise harmed by drivers. Pappas voted to advance a major transportation bill that included that provision — but he voted against the provision itself, and has called for it to be removed from the final bill.
- The ad cites seven bills that Pappas voted for in 2019 and that Amazon also lobbied on. This is missing important context. Four of the bills were must-pass spending or authorization bills, and the other three aligned with Pappas’ previously stated positions on issues.
We reached out to the Senate Leadership Fund with several questions about the ad, but haven’t heard back.
Misleading Math
The Senate Leadership Fund ad claims Pappas got rich while in office, his net worth surging “by upwards of 1,000%.” On screen, it says his net worth went from “as low as” negative $669,974 in 2018 to over $6 million in 2025.
But the ad is distorting the numbers to create a false impression of Pappas’ finances.
Members of Congress report their assets and liabilities in ranges, not exact numbers. Pappas’ 2018 financial disclosure form lists assets totaling around $1.3 million to $6 million, with liabilities of about $900,000 to $2 million. His 2025 form lists assets worth about $1.8 million to $7.1 million, with liabilities of about $1 million to $2.2 million.
In other words, a much more modest increase than the ad claims. And most of that increase reflects the fact that Pappas’ 2025 financial disclosure — unlike in 2018 — also lists his spouse’s assets, which include stock in Uber and Amazon and a 401(k). Without those, Pappas’ assets would have been worth about $1.4 million to $6.3 million in 2025, not far off from what he owned as a freshman lawmaker.
Most of Pappas’ wealth, in both years, comes from the same asset: his part ownership of The Puritan Backroom, the well-known New Hampshire restaurant his family has run for decades, which he valued at $1 million to $5 million in both 2018 and 2025. The rest is a mix of bank accounts, real estate and retirement funds.
So how does the ad manage to claim that Pappas went from nearly $700,000 in the red to a multimillionaire over the span of his time in Congress? There are no citations for the ad’s figures, but cherry-picking Pappas’ financial disclosure forms is the only way to get those numbers.
For 2018, subtracting the high-end estimate of his liabilities ($2 million) from the low-end estimate of his assets ($1,330,026) results in the ad’s figure of negative $669,974. For 2025, it’s the reverse: subtracting the low-end estimate of his liabilities ($1,015,006) from the high-end estimate of his assets ($7,095,000) is what produces the $6,079,994 figure seen in the ad.
The resulting figures are meaningless, of course. One could just as easily flip the math around and claim Pappas’ net worth fell by millions of dollars during his time in Congress.
Limiting Liability for Ride-Hailing Apps
The ad says Pappas’ “spouse got a fancy job at a big tech company that Pappas voted to make harder to sue,” referring to Uber.
That attack is echoed in a separate ad from an affiliated group, One Nation, which focuses entirely on that vote.
“Congressman Chris Pappas voted to advance legislation to strip sexual assault victims of the right to sue ride-hailing companies, and Congressman Pappas’s husband works for one of those same companies,” the One Nation ad’s narrator says. “Corrupt conflicts of interest shouldn’t influence public policy.”
But these attacks are misleading.
Uber is facing thousands of lawsuits from passengers accusing the company of negligence and seeking to hold it liable for alleged sexual assaults and sexual misconduct by drivers.
In May, during markup of a major transportation-funding bill, Republican Rep. Vince Fong proposed an amendment that would shield ride-hailing apps from liability for harm caused by their drivers unless the company was “grossly negligent” — a higher standard than ordinary negligence — or committed a crime.
The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure approved the amendment by a 35-30 vote, with nearly all Republicans voting yes and nearly all Democrats voting no. Pappas was among those voting no.
Pappas subsequently voted to advance the larger bill out of committee — as did nearly every other committee member, in a bipartisan vote of 62-2. The bill, known as the BUILD America 250 Act, contains hundreds of other provisions, including hundreds of billions of dollars for highways, bridges and other surface transportation projects over the next five years.
Pappas has continued to call for the liability-shield amendment to be stripped from the final bill. In June, he was one of more than 100 Democratic lawmakers who signed a letter to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson urging that the provision be removed from what the letter called a “critical” transportation bill.
“Survivors deserve the right to hold companies accountable when corporate failures contribute to preventable harm,” the letter states. Pappas signed on to a similar letter, which included a handful of Republicans, in July. The bill has not yet come up for a final vote in the House.
Asked about Pappas’ vote to advance the bill, his campaign told us the BUILD America 250 Act has broad bipartisan support and backing from a wide range of stakeholders.
The campaign also pointed to his vote in 2022 for the Stop Sexual Assault and Harassment in Transportation Act, which would have required ride-hailing companies and other passenger transportation carriers to develop formal policies around sexual assault and harassment, and report data on such incidents to the government.
We reached out to One Nation about its portrayal of the vote, and haven’t heard back.
Votes on Other Bills
The SLF PAC ad also accuses Pappas of “backing bills Amazon lobbied on” while his now-husband was still a lobbyist for the company. As support, it cites votes on seven bills from 2019.
It’s true that Amazon lobbied on those bills. But the ad omits the full context of those measures.
Two of the bills were the annual defense and intelligence authorization acts, sprawling pieces of legislation that set defense and intelligence policy and authorize the government’s activities in those areas every fiscal year. Another two were major appropriations acts providing funding for various government departments.
Each of those bills runs to hundreds or thousands of pages, and includes numerous provisions unrelated to the specific issues Amazon was lobbying on.
The other three votes cited in the ad aligned with Pappas’ previously stated views on the minimum wage, LGBTQ rights and immigration.
One bill would have raised the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Pappas was on record supporting a higher minimum wage during his 2018 campaign for Congress, before he and Bentley began dating.
Another, the Equality Act, would have barred discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. Pappas, who would be the first openly gay man elected to the U.S. Senate, has advocated LGBTQ rights measures since his time as a state legislator two decades ago, and his 2018 platform specifically called for passing the Equality Act.
The third bill was the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which would have removed per-country caps on employment-based visas. Those caps have led to large backlogs for immigrants from India and China. The measure had strong bipartisan backing, clearing the House on a 365-65 vote and the Senate by unanimous consent. (It never became law because the two chambers didn’t reconcile their versions in time.)
We couldn’t find any record of Pappas addressing that specific policy before his election to the House. But he spoke generally during the 2018 campaign about his support for comprehensive immigration reform, including “reforming the visa process” to bring in more seasonal workers.
We asked Senate Leadership Fund if it had any evidence that Pappas’ votes were influenced by his partner’s position and didn’t get a response. Pappas’ campaign referred us to the PolitiFact article, which quotes a legal expert who said the circumstances would not have required Pappas to recuse himself from those votes.
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