Liz Canada 0:11

You're listening to New Hampshire has Issues, and I am your host, Liz Canada. Every day this week, there's a new mini sode with a candidate running for the first congressional district here in New Hampshire. I have a lot more detail about these conversations in the primary prep episode, in case maybe you missed it or if you need some reminders. Quick overview though. For each of these mini sodes, there are two rules. Rule number one, the candidate gets three minutes to answer each question. And I chose three minutes because that's typically how much time I get when I go to the state house and testify in a public hearing to make my entire case. So the candidates get three minutes. The second rule is that there's no negative talk about other candidates running for this seat. Again, more information in the primary prep episode. New Hampshire has issues, it does not make endorsements. Neither do I. But I do support getting the information you need to make the best decision for yourself so that you also can vote on Tuesday, September 8th in the New Hampshire state primary. In the episode description, I have information about checking your voter registration, finding your polling location, looking at a sample ballot that you will have at the primary, and finding your city or town clerk's information in case you need to contact them. If you would like to support New Hampshire Has Issues podcast, please visit patreon.com slash NH has issues, and you can become a supporter for as little as $5 a month. Thank you so much for listening. And now on to the episode with Carleigh Beriont.

Welcome to the show, Carleigh Beriont

Liz Canada 1:50

Welcome to New Hampshire Has Issues. Carleigh Beriont running for Congress in the first congressional district of New Hampshire. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Carleigh Beriont 2:01

Liz, thank you for having me on your show. I'm so excited to talk with you.

Liz Canada 2:06

And, you know, I'm having all the candidates on to the best of my ability and getting to know everybody and allowing the listener to figure out like who are they going to vote for if they live in CD1 on the primary day, Tuesday, September 8th. So we're going to get right into it. You know the rules. Three minutes, just like I have at the state house. No negative talk about other candidates.

Carleigh brought a tagline!

Liz Canada 2:30

Carleigh Beriont 2:30

Wonderful. I was hoping I'll get to do a tagline.

Liz Canada 2:33

Oh, do you want to do a tagline? Oh, you want to do that.

Carleigh Beriont 2:34

Oh, that's how you start your episode.

Liz Canada 2:36

Please, please give me a tagline. I'm ready. You did do your homework. Wow. Okay.

Carleigh Beriont 2:41

Ah, yes. Um, welcome to New Hampshire Has Issues, the podcast that dares to ask will more of the same fix this. And the too long, don't read conclusion is no, it will not, but we can together.

Liz Canada 2:54

I am so thrilled. Of course, that you're on the on the episode, but also that you came prepared for this podcast specifically. So well done. Carleigh.

Carleigh Beriont 3:02

Let's do

Best pitch: why should someone vote for you in the primary?

Carleigh Beriont 3:03

it.

Liz Canada 3:03

You are running for Congress and you want to represent the people of the first congressional district of New Hampshire. So give me your best pitch as to why someone should vote for you in the primary on Tuesday, September 8th.

Carleigh Beriont 3:19

Awesome. Well, I'm dying to represent us. It's going to be wonderful. Um, so the question we have this next few days to answer is who do we want to represent us in Washington? Who do we want to sit around the table where the decisions that affect all of us are made? And I really want to be that person. I am a mom. I have two little kids, someone who's entering kindergarten and a third grader. And that means that I have spent the last eight years paying for daycare in New Hampshire. And I know just how unaffordable and inaccessible it is for way too many families. And I want to help fix that. And I know one of the reasons we haven't fixed that as a country is because there are only 39 moms of young kids in Congress. And it shows. And I am somebody who has fixed this in some places. I helped organize a union. So we started a union, we negotiated our first contract, we went on strike, and I helped craft the child care policies that made it possible for 4,500 of my colleagues to do their work and be parents at the same time. And I'm really optimistic that this is something I can do in Congress. And I'm also the chair of the select board in Hampton, which is a super purple community. We have about 17,000 residents in the winter and 150,000 in the summer. And I want to just take you with me to a Hampton Select Board meeting for a minute, Monday night, 7 p.m. Basement of an old bank. No windows, walls are gray, the rug is old. And a couple months ago on the agenda was one of my neighbors, a woman in her 80s. She's awesome. She worked her whole life, paid off her home, is on a fixed income, and can't afford her property taxes. And so she was on the agenda for a tax lien, which is the last step that a town can take before they take your home for back taxes. And she went to work at Marshall's in her 80s to afford her taxes, but she still can't keep up with her bills. Um my daughter's second grade teacher works three jobs so that she can raise her two kids in the same town where she works. I met someone in Moose Mountain at the Moose Mountain Dems meeting from Wakefield a few weeks ago who said that they had a sister who had a stent put in. And 30 days later, when that stent was supposed to come out, her insurance would no longer cover it. And so the stent stayed in for weeks and weeks longer than it was supposed to. And I hear stories like this and I see problems like this, and I think to myself, what are we doing in this country? And it feels like, you know, after volunteering on campaigns, writing postcards, making phone calls, knocking doors, we're at this point where we're doing the same things over and over again, and it's not leading to the outcomes that we want. And so I decided to run for Congress because I believe very firmly that more of the same will not fix this, but that together we can.

Liz Canada 6:13

So I heard you say a few things. I heard you talk about daycare in New Hampshire and the cost of child care. Tell me more about your experience with, you know, the childcare system in New Hampshire and, you know, how that shapes what it would look like for you if you're going to DC to represent New Hampshire. Like how how can you fix those things from Congress?

Carleigh Beriont 6:37

Yeah. So one of the awesome things in getting to run for Congress is that I have gotten to go all over the district and listen to people. I go um every day out and about. I've now put 27,000 miles on my car. I've been in every single town and it's nuts. I don't know if my car is gonna make it to the end of this campaign, but I will. And um what I've done is I've pulled together groups of people from across the political spectrum and all of these communities, and I've said, what are the things that are keeping you up at night? What do you wish that Washington understood better about your experiences? And a lot of people have very similar stories, which is both horrifying and incredibly galvanizing because there's actually a lot that it seems unites us across the political spectrum. Um, our frustrations with how many hours we're spending on the phone with our insurance companies, um, you know, taking care of our kids' kids or our grandkids. Um, and for a lot of people, it's daycare. Even if they don't have kids in daycare, they are saying, hey, I was at work and I had to cover for my colleague because they were out for 48 to 72 hours because their kid had a fever. Or, you know, I drop my kids off at daycare and I notice there's a food pantry. And I say, you know, is this food pantry for the staff or for the kids? And then I learned that there are actually a number of kids, a larger number than most people would even imagine, of kids in New Hampshire in our daycares who are homeless. And I think that is absolutely outrageous. Um, and I hear about the workers who are making $16.25 an hour and can't even afford to put their own kids in daycare. And I realize, wow, a lot of these issues that we're experiencing in this state and in this country are really connected to one another. And so what I want to do is go to Washington and serve on the education and labor committee. Right now it's called education and the workforce because the Republicans are in charge. But when I go down there and the Democrats are in charge, it will be called education and labor. And I want to sit on that committee and I want to argue for child care that is supported by our federal government in partnership with our states and our communities and our families. So no family is paying more than 7% of their income, just like our military families. And I want to argue that we should fully fund our public schools because I sit on the budget committee in Hampton and I look at those school budgets and I look at those municipal budgets and I look at our property taxes and I say, these are really high. And you know, Liz, that this is because our state is last in the country when it comes to state support for public education, K through college. And I want to say we need to finally fully fund IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It's an amazing piece of legislation passed in the 1970s, said every kid should have an appropriate and free public education. And Congress should be paying 40% of that. And they never pay more than like 12%. I think last year they paid seven. And in a state like ours, that means we pay the rest. And this is something that is such a good investment, but we can't pay for it alone and also pay to replace, you know, our water lines and our sewer mains. We need help from the federal government for infrastructure and for things like public education. And so I want to go down to Washington and bring that money back here to New Hampshire to lower our property taxes and support our kids.

Liz Canada 9:51

I heard a little bit of this answer, maybe, but I'm gonna ask you the question anyway.

What is THE issue you want to tackle if you’re elected?

Liz Canada 9:55

This podcast is called New Hampshire Has Issues.

Carleigh Beriont 9:58

It does. But we're not alone. We're not alone. The whole world has issues. Yeah.

Liz Canada 10:02

You know what? I can't do one for every other state. I can't do it for other country. I just do it for us. But if you're elected to Congress, what is the issue you are most prepared to tackle, or the issue you feel is the most important to tackle when you get there?

Carleigh Beriont 10:20

Yeah. I mean, again, like these things are all so connected. If we hadn't passed this amazing bipartisan road to housing legislation a couple of weeks ago, I might have said housing. Um, I feel really strongly about breaking up corporate health care and making sure Social Security is solvent. But for me, the number one issue is fully funding our public schools and making sure that we have universal health care. And I say that because, like, if you look at our school budgets, those are the two biggest drivers of costs right now, and they are killing our families. And like the lack of action in Washington, DC and the absolute, like deeply unserious nature of what's going on in Concord right now has made it so that those costs are all downshifted onto us and we cannot pay them anymore. We can't afford not to act.

Liz Canada 11:00

Okay, so a follow-up to that though is how are you gonna make that happen? How how? Because like people want to do this now. So, how are you, Carleigh, gonna do that?

Carleigh Beriont 11:13

Great question. So, this is why like the committee assignment is so important and why it would be really critical to be on the Education and Labor Committee, because this is where those types of conversations happen, and this is where you push to get those out to the whole House floor for a vote. So, one of the ideas, right? Um, fully funding IDEA, Title I, these types of things, this is something that we don't currently do because right now that kind of spending is called discretionary spending in Congress. We have two kinds of spending: mandatory spending, discretionary spending. Those like quote unquote entitlement programs, right? Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, that goes in one bucket. And then our public school funding, even though it's the law of the land, goes in this other bucket. And year after year after year, the amount of money that our federal government has actually sent to our states and to our communities for our schools has gone down and down and down. And so we need people who will vote to move that up to the level that is promised by our federal government and to be our partner in Washington, D.C. And I want to be that person. And there's all sorts of ways around this, right? So we can say, hey, let's fully fund our public schools not at 12%, but let's let's put it at 40%. We can say, hey, another way to get some more federal funding for our communities here in New Hampshire is direct certification for Medicaid, where kids who are enrolled in Medicaid are automatically enrolled in free and reduced school lunches. And this is the kind of moves that are not particularly glamorous, but are super exciting because of how much they will enable us to support our families and our kids here in New Hampshire.

Liz Canada 12:42

Last

What do you wish people knew about you as a person?

Liz Canada 12:43

question for you. Non-political question. What do you wish people knew about you that just doesn't fit on your campaign website? I know you're not on social media, doesn't fit on your campaign website, doesn't fit in, you know, maybe even the conversations you have when you go meet with people. What do you wish people knew about you as a as a person? Not that these answers aren't you as a person, but yeah, like but you.

Carleigh Beriont 13:08

I think that I have a great sense of humor. Um and I think that's really important for doing this kind of work. Um, and that I'm somebody who doesn't ever believe there's only one way to do things. Um I'm somebody who loves conflict and negotiating conflict and finding solutions to problems that are deeply intractable. And these are hard things to like tweet about, you know, or post on social media. They're not just a picture, but like they demonstrate to me how much I care about all of the people that I've spoken with here in New Hampshire and how deeply devoted I am to this work. So, you know, if we don't get this done this time around, like I'm going nowhere. I have so many state rep candidates to support, and I really want to be the partner in Washington that so many of us deserve right now. Um, and I feel like sometimes I come off as kind of serious and wonky, but I think that doing improv comedy for a number of years has really helped my appearance on the campaign show.

Liz Canada 14:03

Okay, you buried that lede a little bit of the improv comedy. Love that.

Carleigh Beriont 14:06

Well, yes, and politics, right? Like people come to me with crazy ideas, like let's do a silent auction. And I'm like, okay, let's do it. You know, let's have dance lessons for volunteers. Okay, let's do it.

Liz Canada 14:15

Incredible. Carleigh, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

NH Primary Reminders

Liz Canada 14:20

Let's remind listeners that the primary, state primary, is Tuesday, September 8th. Links in this episode's show notes are available so you can check your voter registration. You can see where your polling location is. All that is available. And of course, we want everyone to vote in November as well. But right now we're talking about the primary because that is coming right up. Carleigh, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Carleigh Beriont 14:45

Liz, thank you so much for asking all these great questions and getting into the nitty-gritty of how we can actually get it done. I think that gives me, at least, and hopefully your listeners, a lot of confidence that even though things feel really hard right now, we can organize and build power and make the changes we want to see.

Liz Canada 15:00

Excellent. Carleigh, good luck out there.

Carleigh Beriont 15:03

Thank you.