WEST LEBANON — The lack of affordable housing and the question of reproductive rights are some of the pressing issues confronting the two Democrats and two Republicans vying to win their party’s primary on Sept. 10 for the New Hampshire Executive Council’s District 2 seat.

Democrats Karen Liot Hill, of Lebanon, and Mike Liberty, of New London; and Republicans Kim Strathdee, of Carroll, N.H., and Mary Rose Deak, of Concord, are running to replace Cinde Warmington, who is the sole Democrat on the council. Warmington, who was first elected to the District 2 seat in 2020, is running for governor. Her successor will be elected in the general election on Nov. 5.

District 2 was gerrymandered in 2022 — after the 2020 census — to increase from 49 to 81 towns and to isolate historically Democratic towns in one district. District 2 includes the 19 New Hampshire towns in the Upper Valley; and is one of five statewide districts, each represented by a seat on the Council. The other four seats on the Council are held by Republicans. There are approximately 263,000 people in each district, and seats come up for election every two years.

New Hampshire’s council, which meets with the governor twice monthly, has broad discretionary powers. It oversees the state’s 10-year highway plan; sanctions state and agency expenditures and contracts that are $10,000 and greater; issues pardons and commutations; and approves gubernatorial and judicial appointments, including those named to the state Supreme Court.

“A lot of what I do on the campaign trail is talk about what the Executive Council is, and does,” said Liot Hill, 46, who graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in government and has been heavily involved in local politics. She is a former Lebanon mayor and current city councilor, and owned and operated the Lebanon Diner. In 2016, she was elected to the first of four terms as treasurer of Grafton County, a position she still holds though she is not running for reelection.

Liot Hill said that as the Supreme Court has unraveled the federal government’s role in protecting abortion, environmental regulations and voting rights, “the front lines for the battle to protect our constitutional rights and civil liberties are going to be at the state level.”

The Executive Council, she added, has attracted its share of criticism by “interjecting partisanship into certain issues.”

Since 2020, the Council has voted five times, 4-1, to withhold state funding from Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, Equality Health Center, and Lovering Health Center, all of which provide lower-cost health care, including abortion, to women, according to the New Hampshire Bulletin. State audits have shown that the three organizations do not use state or federal funds to pay for abortions. The Council has approved funding to four other organizations which offer reproductive and general health care but do not offer abortion, the Bulletin reported.

“These are critical health care services: contraception, STD screenings and cancer screenings,” said Liberty, 43, who grew up in southern New Hampshire but went away for college and graduate school at, respectively, the University of Chicago and Stanford University. “What we’re seeing is that the Executive Council is operating like a shadow legislature. In this case, they are using their power over contracts to deny funding for a program that the Legislature has approved; one that’s existed for decades: the New Hampshire family planning program.”

Strathdee, 64, who is making her fourth attempt to win a seat on the Executive Council, said she would not have had access to basic reproductive health care were it not for Planned Parenthood. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the federal law guaranteeing a right to abortion, was “a horrendous regression in our history,” she added.

However, she draws the line at state funds going to pay for abortion. “As long as our funds don’t fund an actual abortion, which I think it has been proven they do not, I do not have a problem funding Planned Parenthood,” said Strathdee, who has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from New England College in Henniker, N.H., and currently lives in an RV in Carroll.

Both the Dobbs decision and the move by the Executive Council to strip some New Hampshire organizations of funding because they perform abortions disturb Deak, 70. “I’m pro-choice so it is a concern to me. I would try my best to make sure that women’s rights are upheld and that any judge that I confirm would also have a fair attitude towards women’s rights,” she said.

The two Democrats do not have substantially different views on the issues that they say are important to them and the public — such as reproductive rights, affordable housing, the importance of adequate funding of public school education and climate change adaptation. They differ in their experience. This is Liberty’s first run for elected office.

Liberty worked at PayPal before co-founding the company Signifyd, which specializes in e-commerce fraud prevention for small businesses. He left the company in 2023 to run for office, and feels that his experience in implementation and execution makes him well suited to the work of the Executive Council where, he wrote in an email, “key decisions are made that require careful attention to how policies are implemented and how services are delivered.”

When he moved back to New Hampshire in 2015 with his family, they settled in New London. Since then, the cost of housing in New Hampshire has skyrocketed while availability has decreased drastically.

The Executive Council could use its influence over the financing of transportation infrastructure to “invest that in an intelligent way that gives local communities incentives to allow more housing to be built,” Liberty said.

An issue that Liot Hill encounters frequently while campaigning is equitable funding of public education, a conundrum that goes back to the state Supreme Court’s 1993 Claremont decision, which held that the state had a duty to both provide a constitutionally adequate public education and to fund it sufficiently.

“The Department of Education is really hostile to public education right now,” she said.

Under the direction of Frank Edelblut, the commissioner of education appointed by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu in January 2017, Liot Hill said that the department has watered down the standards for a minimum adequate education while simultaneously starving funding and giving out Education Freedom vouchers to families to help pay for school choice, which have cost the state millions of dollars.

Because the Executive Council has the power of refusal over gubernatorial appointments, it can influence who the next commissioner of education might be when Edelblut’s term ends in January, Liot Hill said.

Strathdee, now employed part-time as a cook, said she regards the Claremont decisions as unfunded mandates that have not really addressed how to fund public education. “I don’t know, how do we fund it? I definitely don’t claim to know all the answers,” she said.

Strathdee and her primary opponent differ in their areas of priority.

Other issues that concern Strathdee include: improving public infrastructure and broadband access across the state; the legalization of cannabis; and civics education in schools to encourage citizens to become more involved in public service — or at a minimum, to vote. She views the job as one in which the councilor makes decisions based on what is best for the state’s citizens, not on personal opinion.

Deak, who graduated with a bachelor’s in biology from Webster College in Missouri and lives in her car in Concord, said she was motivated to run by recent Supreme Court decisions, including City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, which held that municipalities could ban people from sleeping or camping in public places.

“I want to make sure no one goes to prison for being poor,” she said. “I was a middle-class person and eventually I became impoverished so I understand what it’s like.”

Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.