The race to succeed state Sen. Dan Feltes in District 15 is fully underway, and the conditions to do it are familiar. Just as when Feltes ran to succeed Sylvia Larsen, who retired in 2014, several candidates are vying for the seat that’s traditionally been held by a Democratic. And just as then, the contest to fill it is wide open.
Each of the three candidates in the Democratic primary say they have the experience necessary. The winner will go up against Republican Linda Rae Banfill in the general election. Here’s who they are.
To Candace Bouchard, the coming economic crisis for New Hampshire isn’t about whether state programs need to be cut, but how.
If Bouchard’s opponents believe in thinking big about how New Hampshire should build up its programs in the aftermath of the coronavirus, Bouchard is more of a realist on that front.
“I don’t know of anything at this point in time, unless we get another big infusion from federal funds,” she said. “But at this time we’re expecting a $500 million revenue shortfall, and it’s only expected to grow. I think what we’re going to need do now is just put our goal into keeping the ship afloat.”
The real game for Democrats next year, she says, is deciding what to fight to preserve.
Bouchard has experience in this realm, with a 16-year background in the New Hampshire House. She moved to Concord with her husband over 30 years ago, buying a home in Concord Heights; she still lives there. Her kids attended Concord schools, giving what she says is a grounding in the community.
She volunteered heavily with NARAL New Hampshire, working for women’s health care and abortion rights. She helped make Loudon Road safer for pedestrians through Concord Safe Communities. She also helped on the committee to set up the revamped Capital Center for the Arts in the 1990s.
“I’ve just always been in the community, helping when I can,” she said.
In many ways, Bouchard’s career has followed in the footsteps of Katherine Rogers, a long-time state representative.
When Rogers stepped down for a period in 1998, Bouchard considered her first go in state politics. Bouchard, an engineer, won the seat and was asked to be on Pubic Works and Highways Committee, diving into the state’s biennial “10 year highway plan.” It was especially important to Concord, given the amount of state property in the committee. Eventually, Bouchard would chair that committee – twice, and later became chairwoman of the House Transportation Committee.
When Rogers stepped down from the Concord City Council in 2008, Bouchard jumped into that role too.
Throughout her political career, Bouchard has held other leadership roles. As a state representative, she also served on the Merrimack County delegation, responsible for approving budgets for the county nursing home and county jail. Soon enough, Bouchard was chairing that delegation.
In that role, Bouchard faced a choice: refurbishing the old Merrimack County nursing home or building a new one. The delegation opted to build a new one in 2009, with an energy-saving geothermal heating system.
Now, Bouchard is looking to get re-involved, using her legislative experience as her strongest asset. With that comes a willingness to work with both parties, Bouchard says – a quality that’s going to be especially important during the budget process next year.
For Bouchard, COVID-19 was actually a motivator to re-enter politics, she said. The unique challenges that the pandemic was going to pose to the state beckoned her back, she said. Solving those challenges dovetails with some of Bouchard’s longtime priorities like establishing a state minimum wage and affordable housing initiatives.
“I believe that my experience working on both the municipal side and the General Court side would make me a very effective state senator,” she said. “Especially in this time, during COVID, where the budget is going to be important.”
There was a time when Paul Hodes had his head squarely in the national political arena. As a Congressman for New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District from 2007 to 2011, the Concord resident was rooted in Washington at a time of upheaval.
These days, his concerns are far more locally based.
After mounting an unsuccessful bid for Senate in 2010 against then-Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, Hodes left Congress and hung up his political ambitions for a spell. He’s back now for a simple reason, he says: He can’t stay away. “Public service is in my blood,” Hodes said.
Hodes re-entered politics in 2019, when he chaired Marianne Williamson’s Democratic presidential bid. That meant crisscrossing the state and listening to voters’ concerns. Not all of those concerns fit into the realm of presidential politics. Many of them tied in to state problems.
Topping the list: The state’s school funding system, health care costs for residents, and worries about business development and an aging workforce.
Other voters talked about climate change. New Hampshire residents are beginning to see the physical impacts for themselves, Hodes says. The feedback emboldened his desire to run.
“I just thought, ‘I think I can make a real contribution,’” he said.
Meanwhile, the problems in Washington have changed the ex-Congressman’s perspective. As a Democrat under President George W. Bush, Hodes pioneered “Michelle’s Law,” a bipartisan effort that allowed children in college to stay on their parents’ health care policies. It was the precursor to a key provision of the Affordable Care Act that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until they reach 26.
Now, that bipartisanship has all but evaporated. That new reality has given a new urgency to state legislative elections, Hodes says.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the country, Hodes’s main priority centered on climate change. “The way we produce, distribute and use energy is obviously closely tied into how we combat climate change,” he said. That’s what drives his desire for a transition from fossil fuels “as quickly as possible,” expanding net metering and boosting solar power development.
Hodes is also concerned with health care. The state should explore an expansion of community mental health centers and an increase in provider pay. And it should refocus its efforts on the opioid crisis.
Hodes has been critical of Gov. Chris Sununu’s “hub and spoke” opioid treatment system, arguing that it has been a patchwork system in practice and needs to be supplemented with better services.
Hodes says that a tax overhaul should be on the table. That includes a broad-based tax, he says.
Hodes has a more unconventional suggestion to drum up revenue: a state bank. New Hampshire should adopt an approach similar to North Dakota, whose state-run financial institution collects revenue off of investments and loans and passes around $60 million revenue back to the state. That state’s bank, established in 1919, helped keep it afloat during the 2009 recession and bounce back faster than any other state, Hodes argues.
That approach could get more bipartisan support than an income tax, he says. “It could certainly provide a stable source of revenue that the state could have available,” he said.
Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the whole picture. “It’s going to be a very challenging time to set priorities,” he said. “In my view it starts with values and then goes to priorities.”
Becky Whitley knows how to craft policy. But she also knows how to fight for it, she says.
As a staff lawyer at the Disability Rights Center, the Hopkinton attorney dealt firsthand with the state’s low-income assistance programs. Later on, she would work to change them.
From Whitley’s vantage, she’s running to represent working families.
“I’m a working mother myself and I think we have unique needs,” she said. The state needs to do a better job recruiting more young families in a state that is rapidly aging, she said.
After moving to Concord after law school, Whitley dove into representing Granite Staters in need. The cases she took on were systemic, relating to access to Medicaid and social services. She was representing clients individually, taking on cases in the shadow of the 2009 recession.
The work also involved taking up policy on behalf of the DRC. That brought her into contact with the State House. One bill Whitley worked on addressed the use of child restraint in schools. And she worked in advocacy, helping launch a project Environmental Defense Fund called Moms Clean Air Force, dedicated to talking to parents about climate change and mobilizing them.
As her son entered school, Whitley returned to the policy arena, heading up the Children’s Behavioral Health Collaborative at New Futures. The new topic: reforms to the children’s mental health system.
In total, it’s a background that Whitley argues has grounded her in the realities of what it takes to pass laws, and the frugal realities of the state.
New Hampshire has been rebuilding its child protection, mental health and community health care systems in recent years, aided by a swell in tax revenues heading into state coffers.
Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has put that under threat. A dip in tourism and a near-total shutdown for many businesses through the spring and summer is expected to take a deep toll on the state’s revenues, necessitating a leaner budget, according to Republican Gov. Chris Sununu.
Even so, Whitley argues now is still the time to keep supporting the programs that have been rebuilt, and to think bigger about how to fund areas in the state. Not doing so could be more costly for the state down the line, she says.
To do that, the state needs to start talking about different taxation models, she says. Whitley is exploring an idea espoused by more and more Democrats: the idea of a broad-based tax that could replace the property-tax reliant system for school funding.
It’s clear that the tax revenue will go down as a result of the crisis, Whitley says, which will drastically impact the budget. But the answer is in changing the structure of taxation, so that that impact will be spread more fairly, she says.
“Typically in New Hampshire we only have two options: you cut critical services or raise additional revenues,” she said. “So we are in a place where we have to have that conversation about raising additional revenues, and in a more equitable way.”
That includes re-examining the business tax rate, which has been lowered over the past four years from 8.5% for the business profits tax to 7.7% now, and using federal emergency COVID-19 funds to complement the state budget.
That’s an explosive concept, but Whitley says that voters she talks to are not necessarily scared off by it. For those hammered by property taxes, a broad-based tax, even an income tax, could be accepted by them, Whitley argues.
Whitley supports finding funding mechanisms to overhaul, continuing funding for reproductive health organizations like Planned Parenthood, a state-mandated paid family and medical leave program and boosting programs for early childhood.
It’s an ambitious slate of action items for a non-pandemic year. It’s even bolder in a pandemic year. But Whitley is confident that it’s a set of priorities the state can rise to. And with her background, she says she’s the one to fight for them.