Former New Hampshire Senate majority leader Dan Feltes announced in a Facebook post on Monday that he and his family are moving away from Concord to Iowa.
Feltes, a Democrat who ran for governor in 2020, wrote that his wife Erin had accepted a job as the deputy counsel at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Both were born and raised in Iowa, but the couple met in New Hampshire, where they have spent the last fifteen years and had two children.
“We love it here, and we always will,” he wrote on Facebook. “But like all two-career working families, we must make decisions that are best for our entire family.”
When asked what he would be doing professionally in Iowa and what he would miss about New Hampshire, Feltes directed the Monitor back to his statement posted on Facebook.
“Erin and I will be forever grateful for meeting each other and starting our family in New Hampshire, for all the folks in New Hampshire who provided us opportunities and who believed in us, for all of our colleagues, neighbors, friends, and supporters, and for all the positive change that we were honored to be part of,” he wrote. He also said that he was looking forward to raising his two young daughters Iris and Josie near their extended family.
Feltes and his family live in the South End of Concord. In the 2020 gubernatorial race, Feltes lost to Gov. Chris Sununu by 1,100 votes in the capital city, which traditionally chooses Democrats. Until last year’s election, a Democratic candidate had won more votes in Concord in every governor’s race since 2006.
Feltes worked as an attorney at New Hampshire Legal Assistance for close to a decade, first as a staff attorney and then as director of the Housing Justice Project. The three-term state senator became the youngest majority leader ever in the state Senate in 2018.
In his statement on Facebook, Feltes said the work he and Erin did in New Hampshire was never about a single campaign or title, but about uplifting marginalized people and creating a more positive future for all children in the state.
“In our democracy, it is an ongoing responsibility that, together, we all share, for in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: ‘The most important political office is that of private citizen.’ Stay active, stay engaged, stay involved,” he said on Facebook.