New Hampshire’s largest city is looming large in state politics these days. There’s the Manchester mayoral race that pits Democrat Kevin Cavanaugh against Republican Jay Ruais, with voters heading to the polls next Tuesday. And there’s the effort by outgoing Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig to become the first Queen City mayor in a century to get elected governor. All of that is putting the city’s challenges — real and perceived — at center stage now, something that’s likely to continue through 2024.
You’d expect a rare open seat race to lead Manchester to be hard fought. And this year’s election has clear contrasts. Cavanaugh, a longtime alderman and former Democratic state senator with strong union ties, is stressing continuity if he’s elected mayor next week.
“I have relationships that I’ve built and I’m going to use those,” Cavanaugh said at a recent candidate forum. “I have so many contacts in my phone. It’s not, ‘Let me introduce myself.’ It’s, ‘Let’s get together and fix this.’ ”
Ruais — a former Republican congressional staffer who serves in the National Guard — for his part, is calling for change.
“I will make sure that everything that we are doing is fiscally responsible, that we are always going to have accountability, and data is going to drive our decision making,” Ruais said.
But while the candidates have ideological differences, they do agree on the biggest issues in the race: homelessness, public safety, and drug addiction.
The rivals also agree on the tone Manchester’s next leader should strike — and they both promised to play the same role if elected: “cheerleader” for the city.
Hearing a politician cheer on Manchester isn’t typical these days. In fact, denigrating the city has become almost compulsive for top New Hampshire Republicans.
Former state Senate president Chuck Morse, who’s running to be the Republican nominee for governor next year, recently vowed: “I will not let our state become Manchester, New Hampshire, where homelessness and drugs and crime are all on the rise.”
Former U.S. senator Kelly Ayotte, who is also running for governor, recently described the city as a “revolving door” for criminals. Those remarks were targeting a state bail law, but in the early days of her campaign, Ayotte frequently invokes Manchester as a sort of smaller version of Massachusetts, frequently conflating the two as places riddled with dysfunction and danger.
While spurred by Craig’s run for governor, the argument Republicans are making — that New Hampshire’s biggest city is out of control in ways the rest of the state is not — is broader. It may fly in the face of statistics showing serious crime has dropped in recent years, statewide and in Manchester.
But politically, statistics about the quality of life in Manchester may be immaterial, says Chris Galdieri, a political scientist at St. Anslem College.
“Separating Manchester from the rest of New Hampshire is a deliberate rhetorical strategy,” Galdieri said.
He described that strategy as saying: “So all of the things that you find appealing about Manchester, they are not the real New Hampshire. Real New Hampshire is all of our little rural towns and smaller cities and tourist areas and that sort of thing. And then we have this one place called Manchester where we put all the bad stuff.”
The fact that New Hampshire’s two major media outlets — WMUR and the Union Leader — are in Manchester means bad news in the city doesn’t always stay there. And while there is no doubt the city faces significant challenges when it comes to homelessness and drugs, some who live and work there feel their home city is being unduly maligned.
Martin Delgadillo, who has owned Consuelo’s Taqueria on Amherst street for 17 years, says there are more homeless people, people in mental health crises and people using drugs on the streets of Manchester than there used to be. But he believes the same could be said about any New Hampshire community.
Delgadillo says he sees racism in some of the rhetoric about Manchester. But says mostly he sees it as Republicans looking for votes in a state where most people are white and live outside of urban areas.
“I think politically they have to talk about that because they are looking to the majority,” said Delgadillo, who was born in Mexico. “So they are speaking to them.”
The dynamics driving this discussion — the challenges of homelessness drugs, and crime, as well as the changing demographics of New Hampshire — will test whomever becomes Manchester’s next mayor. In the meantime, there is little to indicate Republicans will turn down their charged talk implicating Manchester — or as state Republican Party Chairman Chris Ager said recently, while speaking about undocumented immigration: “We don’t want to turn the state into what we call now ‘Manch-ghanistan.’ ”
In fact, such rhetoric will likely only intensify should Craig make it out of the Democratic primary in next year’s race for governor.
