by Claire Sullivan, New Hampshire Bulletin
October 28, 2024

Both candidates for New Hampshire Senate District 1 – a massive chunk of land in the northern third of the state – say the region is often forgotten in Concord. At the crux of their campaigns, then, is this question: Who will make the North Country heard?

Republican Rep. David Rochefort of Littleton and Democratic newcomer Rusty Talbot of Sugar Hill each said they’ve knocked on roughly a thousand doors to make their pitch to voters. They talk about many of the same issues, such as housing, education, child care, and the influx of out-of-state trash.

A thousand doors is no small feat in a sparsely populated region that is more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Just under 56,000 people live in the roughly 2,300-square-mile district. It makes up most of Coos County – the poorest area of the state – and a chunk of Grafton County. 

Whoever wins the election on Nov. 5 will replace Sen. Carrie Gendreau, a Littleton Republican who did not seek reelection after her two-year term. As a Littleton selectwoman, she ignited criticism over her opposition to LGBTQ art in town and told the Boston Globe that “homosexuality is an abomination.” In the Senate, she signed onto a failed bill that would ban abortion, except in medical emergencies, after 15 days and another that would give parents access to their children’s library records. All six bills she was the prime sponsor of – on topics including metal detecting, lumber, and studying automobile insurance – failed to pass. 

The last Democrat to win the seat was then-incumbent Sen. Jeff Woodburn in 2016. In interviews with the Bulletin, Talbot and Rochefort deemphasized party, framing themselves as solutions-focused and willing to work across the aisle. 

Flipping the seat blue is “not part of the discussion at all” with voters, Talbot said, calling political party a “tertiary consideration” and adding he is just as comfortable talking to voters backing Donald Trump as Kamala Harris. And, in Rochefort’s words, “a North Country Republican looks different than a Salem Republican.” He pointed to expanded Medicaid as an issue often thought of along partisan lines but that has a “huge benefit to the North Country.”

Though they differ on policy and their backgrounds, they have their similarities. Both cited the late Ray Burton, a Republican executive councilor who was long a force for the North Country, when talking about being focused on the needs of the district. Neither wants a new landfill in the district nor a state sales or income tax.

They also agreed how vital strong representation is for the district they both call home.  Democrat Rusty Talbot is a political newcomer from Sugar Hill. (Claire Sullivan | New Hampshire Bulletin)

Rusty Talbot (D)

Talbot has been frustrated by the focus in Concord on divisive, ideological issues. 

Education, housing, reproductive rights, and child care access are some of the central issues of his campaign. He chose to run for the Senate because it has been, in his view, largely a “monolithic block to an awful lot of good legislation happening.” Plus, it’s easier to be heard in a 24-member body as opposed to the gargantuan 400-person House.

Talbot – who grew up outside Washington, D.C., in McLean, Virginia – first lived in New Hampshire as a Dartmouth College student. 

“That’s just when I really sort of just fell in love with New Hampshire,” said Talbot, who owns a climbing gym in Lisbon. He spent time in the mountains, hiking, climbing, and bike-riding. He moved to the region about a dozen years ago and ultimately settled in Sugar Hill with his wife. Before that, he lived in D.C. and helped start a technology and strategy consulting firm that built the website “recovery.gov” following the 2008 financial crisis.

Talbot is a volunteer firefighter for the Sugar Hill Fire Department and also serves as a search-and-rescue volunteer.

Talbot stressed his goal was not “to push one ideology or concept of how things should work, but instead, be pragmatic and work for the people.” 

He said he often hears about education from voters as he goes door to door. He favors reforming the statewide education property tax, also known as SWEPT, so that it is fair across the state and layer in a homestead exemption to provide relief to those who own lower-value properties. In his understanding of the state constitution, he said, a state tax “can’t have variable rates just based off of where you live.” 

“The responsibility for covering the costs of public schools has been pushed down to the local level,” Talbot said, “so that folks in the communities that can least afford it are taxed to their eyeballs, and at the same time that they’re being overtaxed with their property taxes, they’re having their schools struggling, whether it’s to, you know, have the resources that they need, or to be able to compete for teachers … or for other resources.”

He also pointed to the fact that the state’s contribution to public education per student has been deemed unconstitutionally low. On his campaign website, he said he is also in favor of “rolling back” the Education Freedom Accounts program, which provides families at or below 350 percent of the federal poverty level with state grants to put toward private and home schooling. 

Housing is another focus of his campaign. “There’s not enough of it, and it’s way too expensive, and rents have gone through the roof,” Talbot said. He added that though he’s not against short-term rentals, those have also taken housing off the market for residents. 

He said one approach to addressing the issue is to incentivize builders to construct starter homes and affordable housing, as opposed to vacation homes. “My thinking is to listen to the smartest people who have been thinking about this and then trying things, try to make it work,” Talbot said. “And if something doesn’t work, OK, move on, shift to the next one.”

He wants to see family child care centers thrive by making sure zoning regulations don’t prevent home child care centers, and striking the right balance of ensuring oversight to protect children, “but not put so many hurdles on the owners and the care providers that it’s not worth doing it.”

Talbot wants to codify abortion access before 24 weeks, remove criminal and civil penalties in the law for doctors, and clarify the language around exceptions after 24 weeks. He pointed out that third-trimester abortions are exceptionally rare, and he views the current wording of exceptions as a “vague description of certain situations where it might be OK.”

“They are having abortions during the third trimester because of serious, complicated, tragic situations,” he said, “and those are not the sorts of things that it’s easy to actually just have a one sentence description” that encompasses all situations. 

Looming large over the district is the proposal for a landfill in Dalton, a town of 900, by Casella Waste Systems. The state doesn’t need a new landfill nor does the North Country want one, Talbot said. He would support legislation to curb out-of-state trash and put a moratorium on landfill development. 

Talbot said his opponent’s work on the issue in the Legislature was “admirable” – but that, as a political newcomer, he would be more effective at making the case for the legislation and getting it through the Senate, which has shot down numerous trash-related bills.

“I know that some folks have tried to make the argument that he’s built political capital, that he’d be able to sway some of his colleagues on his side of the aisle,” Talbot said. “And, you know, the very easy and obvious rebuttal to that is, well, clearly he didn’t have political capital, because in the Senate, they completely blocked everything that tried to come across.”

He said he would make his case in the Senate with data and pragmatism.

“We really should be able to work with folks across the aisle, and we should be able to get things done that are just good for our constituents,” Talbot said. Rep. David Rochefort, a Littleton Republican, focused on landfill issues in the House. (Courtesy of David Rochefort)

David Rochefort (R)

On a drive to Concord in mid-October, Rochefort counted about 20 trash trucks headed north.

Rochefort has worked on bipartisan legislation that would curtail outside garbage and put a pause on new landfill development. He cites getting two of those bills passed unanimously in the House as his biggest accomplishment in the Legislature. Those bills died in the Senate, but Rochefort feels certain he could get them through by working from inside the upper chamber.

“I’ll be the loudest, loudest voice in the Senate, Republican or Democrat, about trash and out-of-state trash,” Rochefort said, citing his ability to convince colleagues on the issue in the House to pass two bills unanimously. 

On his opponent’s claim that he lacked the political capital to get it done, Rochefort said it was “a pretty bold statement” from someone who had never passed anything.

If elected, Rochefort said he wants to bring back the trash bills, address health care access, and work to incentivize child care among employers. On education, he supports Education Freedom Accounts. 

He also pledged to support the recreational ATV industry, get more mental health providers up north, and maintain access to state-owned land for traditional logging uses.

A North Country native, Rochefort was born and raised in Lancaster, where his family had a drug store on Main Street for decades. He went away to pharmacy school and “came back as soon as I could” to work alongside his dad. In 2005, the family sold the business, and in 2006, Rochefort started a specialty pharmacy in Littleton. He sold that two years ago and works for the company that bought his business on the compliance side, a change that gave him the time to run to be a state representative. 

He has served on the local zoning board for six years and is on the Littleton Industrial Development Corporation. 

When Rochefort got to the State House in 2022, he said people told him to take a term to learn the ropes.

“And I was like, ‘My people elected me, my community elected me to do something, not just, you know, sit on the sidelines,’” Rochefort said. “And the more I did, the more active I got, the more results I started seeing, the more, you know, representation we could bring to the people.”

One place where he wants to get results in another term is the “massive shortage of primary care providers in medicine up north.” He said his wife has experienced this firsthand; in 18 months, she saw three primary care providers because “they would come and go, come and go.” Some hospitals, he said, have lost longtime doctors and are struggling to replace them.

Last session, he was a prime sponsor of House Bill 1222, signed by the governor, which aims to improve access by making it easier for physician assistants to practice independently. 

The access problem is layered across sectors of care.

“The hospital I was born in doesn’t deliver babies anymore,” Rochefort said. “Colebrook Hospital, the most northern hospital, doesn’t deliver babies anymore.” He said he met a border patrol agent who said his baby was born in an ambulance because they couldn’t make it to a hospital in time.

He points to Medicaid cutting its reimbursement rates for baby deliveries as a reason for those services being shut down. That’s had a particular impact on the North Country, he said, because of a disproportionately high number of Medicaid recipients.

He also wants to work to address staffing at nursing homes, he said, which is a particular challenge in the rural district. 

On housing, he supports InvestNH, which provides grants to encourage the development of affordable housing. He also said there’s an opportunity to improve the state permitting process for contractors, which he described as lengthy and lacking transparency. 

To improve child care access, he wants to pursue a bill, which he worked on previously, that would give a tax credit to employers that pay or subsidize their employees’ child care. 

Unlike his opponent, Rochefort supports the Education Freedom Accounts program. He said he talked with a police officer who used the program to send his daughter, who was being bullied and not getting resources she needed, to a specialty school where she is doing much better.

“It’s not for the rich people. It’s not for the ultra-religious people,” Rochefort said. “I mean, this was a guy who just wanted what’s best for his daughter.”

Rochefort supports the state’s abortion law as it stands. In his first session, Rochefort voted in favor of a bill that would ban abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat. He wouldn’t vote for it today, he said. 

He heard feedback from his constituents – even more conservative ones – that they overwhelmingly supported the current law, and he said he would vote down any future attempts to further restrict it. 

Rochefort said it makes a “huge difference” that he was born and raised in the North Country. He has seen the economic ups and downs up close. 

“People throw out the cliche that the North Country is different, the North Country is different,” Rochefort said. “… To have somebody who lives it, knows it, you know, breathes it, you got to have it. You got to have an accurate representation of that.” (New Hampshire Secretary of State)

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