On a windy Saturday in Stratham, candidate campaign signs were blowing over across town.
But the signs for state Senate candidates Pat Abrami and Debra Altschiller were perhaps more secure than most. With years of campaigning under their belts, the two veteran lawmakers each have tried-and-true strategies.
Altschiller carries a drill around in the trunk of her car, to get into the ground when it’s hard or frozen. (“The Granite State is really the Granite State!” she joked.)
Abrami uses wooden stakes instead of the traditional wires. He also pounds extra reinforcement wood into the ground next to the stakes. (“They held up pretty well,” he said.)
Altschiller and Abrami worked together in the New Hampshire House for six years, both elected by voters in Stratham. Now Abrami, a Republican, is trying to get back to Concord after losing his House seat in 2022. Altschiller, a Democrat, is fighting to hold on to the Senate seat she won that same year.
The two are campaigning in a district that has flipped between the parties over the last two decades. Its borders shifted with redistricting in 2022, but the area as a whole has also swung left in recent years.
Campaign sign security isn’t the only issue on which they take different approaches. The pair are far apart on several issues voters are passionate about: abortion, guns, education.
Neither has climate change at the top of their policy agenda, and voters aren’t bringing it up much. But in their district, where sunny-day high tides already encroach on neighborhoods and back-to-back storms last winter wrecked roads, it’s an issue residents will increasingly need to grapple with. And their stances are poles apart.
“Keeping New Hampshire New Hampshire”
Pat Abrami fought to hold on to a list of names and addresses as gusts of wind tore through a newly-built development he was canvassing. It was a 55 and older community in a wooded area of Stratham. He dressed casually, in a pair of jeans and layered plaid shirts. Not many people were home.
When someone answered their door, he didn’t talk much about politics. Mostly, he just wanted to chat – about where people lived before coming to New Hampshire, about hiking trails, about the Patriots’ new quarterback.
Abrami was a familiar face for many. He served in the House of Representatives for 12 years, and has lived in Stratham for four decades, raising kids there and coaching sports teams. When he campaigns, he says he’s trying to make a personal connection. He wants to show people he’s friendly, helpful, and fair.
“I don't shoot from the hip. I do my research. I try to think of both sides of the issue, and I come to my conclusions,” he said.
Abrami says his background – an engineering degree and a career in healthcare consulting – made him analytical and logical as a lawmaker. He served on the House Ways and Means committee and says he focused on limiting state spending.
He, and many of his voters, know he has an uphill battle for this race. Abrami attributes that to changing politics in Seacoast towns. But even as he feels things shifting around him, he still thinks of himself as a traditional kind of politician, keeping to his principles while building relationships across the aisle. He says in the days after he lost his last election, the calls he appreciated the most were from Democrats he’d served with, saying they’d miss him in Concord.
This year, he’s hoping voters will be swayed by his promise to “keep New Hampshire New Hampshire.”
“When I talk to my fellow Republicans, they know what I'm talking about,” he said. “Keep it small. Keep it simple. Keep it straightforward. Don't get into the bad habits of some of these other states, where they're bankrupt. There's corruption. There's all sorts of other things.”
His approach to climate change falls into that pattern. He’s concerned about the cost of proposed solutions, like offshore wind. He’s a fan of gas, and curious about innovation on generating energy using nuclear power and hydrogen. He likes that lowering emissions has led to less smog and acid rain.
But he wants lawmakers to weigh the economic implications of supporting a transition to clean energy. Keeping energy costs low is on the list of priorities he’s pitching to voters.
“To play it safe, yeah, we should start taking actions,” he said. “But let's not overdo it, because the world is not ending tomorrow, is the philosophy here with me.”
Abrami says finding consensus on how to approach climate change has been difficult. There’s a particular tension when the issue comes up in State House debates.
“I'd love to find common ground, you know, if we could,” he said. “But you’ve got to let the arguments in.”
The arguments Abrami is referencing include theories that climate change isn’t caused by carbon emissions from humans. To be clear, the scientific consensus is that humans are driving climate change – heating up our atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
Abrami says he’s not convinced by that, though he’s a skier, and he does recognize New Hampshire’s winters are getting warmer. When he talks about sea level rise, he’s dismissive about the threat.
In the Northeast, sea level trends are slightly higher than the global average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Globally, sea levels have risen between 6 and 8 inches over the past 100 years.
According to a 2018 study from the Union of Concerned Scientists, more than 3,000 New Hampshire homes, worth more than a billion dollars, are at risk of becoming “chronically inundated” by the end of the century in a moderate sea level rise scenario. Those numbers increase if global carbon emissions continue to rise.
Abrami says he supports some help for New Hampshire communities after disasters, saying that’s not a climate-related policy. But for people in his district who face threats from rising water and increasingly powerful storms, he sees preparing for the future as an individual task. Essentially, “buyer beware.”
“If it was an imminent threat, people would be having different behaviors around it in terms of the people that live near the ocean or even rivers,” he said. “But people aren't changing their behaviors. We always have people that are doing this. And if they all believed in climate change, they would have thought of it before they moved to these places.”
“Status quo is no good for us”
The debate over climate change in the statehouse – whether and how to mitigate warming and plan for future effects – is particularly relevant in towns like Hampton, which sustained damage to their sea wall during back-to-back storms over the winter.
A variety of factors were at play in those storms, but the latest national climate assessment shows that in general, extreme precipitation has increased in the Northeast.
After an afternoon of campaigning, Debra Altschiller stopped by the beach. She pointed out a massive concrete block.
“It's kind of shocking to think like, the ocean picked these up and threw them that way, just like toys,” she said.
Unlike Abrami, she wants to see more action from the state government to help vulnerable towns, like making sure people can get flood insurance, or creating incentives for making homes and businesses more resilient to strong storms.
“We're just status quo, and the status quo is no good for us. You’ve got to, at some point, move the needle forward so that we can grow and stay here.”
Canvassing in Hampton Falls, Altschiller wore her Senate jacket, accessorized with sparkly glasses and bright blue glitter-studded sneakers. She has a whole closet of those – rose gold, mermaid-colored, silver, pink, red, and black, for fancy occasions.
On each porch, she started conversations with a question.
“What's going to make you go out? What is on your mind?”
In the last election cycle, Altschiller heard more about climate change. But this year, she says, people are focused on reproductive rights.
Housing is also coming up a lot. She says that’s related to climate change and she wants to address it so if people want to move to places with less risk, they can.
“Right now nobody can afford to do that. Swapping houses? First of all, where are you going to go? There’s not a house you can go to right now because our inventory is so low.”
In the legislature, Altschiller says she’s very direct about the issues she cares about.
“I am not obtuse. You know exactly where I'm coming from. I am very clear about those non-negotiables. Right? And I do not truck nonsense.”
That approach stems, in part, from her background as an advocate with a domestic and sexual violence prevention agency. She said she was often shocked by lawmakers who seemed checked out and wouldn’t pay attention at hearings she attended with survivors.
Now that she’s behind the table, she says she’s not afraid to call people out and stick to her principles. And, like Abrami, she says she also tries to work collaboratively.
But the lack of agreement among policy makers around long-established science, she says, is a barrier to the solutions she wants to see for the Seacoast and New Hampshire: diversify the state’s energy sources, build resilience, and update the state’s energy plan. She wants to see the state become less reactive, and start planning ahead for climate impacts.
“You're either trying to move us forward – because this is where energy policy is going – or you're intentionally holding us back. And it's going to cost us. It's already costing us,” she said.
Nationally, the United States is now experiencing a billion-dollar weather or climate disaster every three weeks, on average. In the 1980s, the country experienced one of those every four months. Severe storms, flooding, and winter storms make up many of those disasters.
Last year, New Hampshire requested federal help for millions of dollars of flooding and storm damage. As the atmosphere continues to warm, communities across the state will still need to rebuild, and prepare for the next disaster, no matter who is in charge
