The year 2024 had many firsts and a bit of deja vu. We saw a spirited presidential election — first between former and now President-elect Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden, and later between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. As we bid goodbye to 2024, let’s take a look back at some of the major stories and issues that dominated headline — and look ahead to what 2025 holds — with three veteran journalists: Keene Sentinel managing editor for audience development Jack Rooney, Manchester Ink Link editor and publisher Carol Robidoux and Laconia Daily Sun reporter Gabriel Perry.
By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
Melanie Plenda:
Let’s start with the presidential election. What were some of the highlights of 2024 election coverage?
Jack Rooney:
Thinking back to January and the presidential primary, it's almost easy to forget that Joe Biden wasn't even on the ballot in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire and ended up winning as a write-in candidate. I also think New Hampshire did still keep its first-in-the nation primary status, bucking the [Democratic National Committee’s] wishes.
It was a different time. Nikki Haley was still challenging Trump for the Republican nomination, and there was maybe a little bit of uncertainty going into the New Hampshire primary that Haley could mount a sustained challenge to President-elect Trump. But the New Hampshire primary seemed to be a bit of a turning point for Haley and for Trump, and it seemed inevitable that he was going to win the nomination for a third straight time.
Then, here in Keene, in the Monadnock Region, which tends to be a pretty liberal, progressive corner of the state ended up being, you know, having signs of a bit of a red wave. Vice President Harris did win Cheshire County, and obviously won the state of New Hampshire as well, but she ran several points behind Joe Biden in Keene and Cheshire County compared to the 2020 election. So even though Vice President Harris won New Hampshire's electoral votes and the federal delegation remained Democratic, at the State House level and statewide, New Hampshire was part of that kind of red wave as well.
Gabriel Perry:
We really experienced a lot of audience engagement about the election. the whole time. Our letters section was extremely lively all the way up to the day. Something I found particularly interesting this time around was that there seemed to be quite a link or an influence on local and state races. It seemed like all roads led to the presidential election, and people referred to either candidate pretty consistently throughout all of their campaigns as well. So it was pretty fascinating to see the influence that had.
Melanie Plenda:
What about your top statewide stories of the year? As you look back, what were some of the biggest stories at the state level?
Jack Rooney:
For us at the Sentinel, a lot of the statewide stories that we followed continued to be really how state-level policies and politics played out at the local level. For instance, the school funding debate in New Hampshire — the constitutional challenge is back before the Supreme Court, led by the ConVal school district based in Peterborough, which is within our coverage area. And while that's a big statewide issue and a big statewide story, we see the effects of it at the local level all the time.
Gabriel Perry:
Something we spent a lot of time covering, that maps on to pretty much every region in the state is the development of housing and everything that goes along with that. As we see people increasingly interested in coming to New Hampshire to live their lives and start families here, we also see at the same time that not every area necessarily has the infrastructure or the housing stock to support it, so stuff like that really kind of took the forefront throughout much of the state this year.
Carol Robidoux:
I'm going to roll back to the total eclipse, which was kind of like an eclipse-chasing moment for all of New Hampshire. We were so close to places where you could really go to get that full view, and it created an odd sense of community in a way where people were jumping on buses and going to Vermont or up north to find a place where they could hang out and be with other people when the skies went black for a minute, and it was pretty neat. So that was fun.
As far as politics, I would say, the biggest impact here in Manchester in particular was the gubernatorial race and some of the negative campaigning by Kelly Ayotte, who eventually won. But she was running against the former mayor of Manchester, Joyce Craig, and she went very negative with her advertising, portraying Manchester as a place that even the rats probably wouldn't want to live. It really struck a chord with the business community that there was some backlash on that. I think if she comes to Manchester in 2025 she's going to need to go on a goodwill tour to build back the good feelings.
Melanie Plenda:
What about the local level? What were some of the biggest stories in your respective regions?
Gabriel Perry:
Something that more recently became a prime issue, but has been in the news for quite a while is the sale and development of the State School property located in Laconia. That's sort of a state and a local story. It's been fascinating to follow. There's a whole lot of contingencies around it that people have their skepticisms about and their anxieties. Also, people, especially business owners in the area, seem to be looking forward to that potential. It's sort of a symbol of the revitalization of the area.
The state school is a large property owned by the state and located in Laconia. It was formerly the site of a prison and a mental health center at different points, and there's been sort of this like long, winding saga over the past number of years in terms of selling it to a real estate developer and turning it into something productive for the future. A major deal fell through earlier in the year, and that deal included a very high sales price. In more recent months, a different developer, the Pillsbury Realty Group, actually won the contract to purchase the land and develop the property. So that's well underway in terms of the planning phase right now, and people feel somewhat burned by the original deal, which didn't end up coming to fruition.
Carol Robidoux:
Housing is really in the forefront of everything that the media is covering here in New Hampshire. The New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness recently issued a report based on the last point-in-time count from earlier in the year, citing New Hampshire as having the highest increase in homelessness of of all 50 states, where the national average was like a 12% increase — we had like a 52% increase
That statistic hopefully will generate some interest in Concord to look at the state as a whole and see that the major cities like Laconia, Manchester, Concord, Nashua — we are all bearing the brunt of this increase in homelessness, and it's not something we're doing wrong. It's something that the state has to wrap its arms around as well and help find immediate solutions to this, which is rapid rehousing, which is transitional housing for people to get out of shelters or out of homelessness. It's a very complex issue, but that really is probably one of the bigger issues.
Melanie Plenda:
Beyond these stories, it seemed like there were recurring themes that hit headlines. You mentioned affordable housing and workforce development. Immigration also seemed to be a big concern throughout the year and will likely be in 2025. What stories did we see in New Hampshire? What ways might we view that topic in the news going forward?
Carol Robidoux:
Manchester has had various groups come in as part of resettlement projects. Most recently, we had some Afghani refugees come, and interestingly one of them is a journalist, and he came with the idea that he wanted to tell some of those stories of getting grounded here in Manchester. So through working with him a little bit, we've had conversations with the International Institute of New England, and trying to really understand the relationship between the federal allocation of money and how it disappears pretty quickly, and then what that means going forward in terms of making sure that of the success for the people that are here.
And of course, we hear incidentally, especially from some [board of mayor and aldermen] members here in in Manchester, that they're part of that national narrative around immigration and refugees and sort of not wanting to be welcoming cities — the fear that we're going to become something different than we've been all along. It's kind of correcting the thinking around what it means to be a refugee or an immigrant in 2025 in New Hampshire.
And, to be honest, there is still a lot of uncertainty, really, across the board, as far as what the national narrative is going to be. We're waiting to see what happens when President Trump enters office, and if there's continued talk about mass deportation or if that was more campaign rhetoric — we don't know, but it could really have a lot of fallout here in New Hampshire, as well as everywhere. We have a lot of families that are right now on edge.
Gabriel Perry:
We ended up following a really quite interesting story here earlier this year, back in September. Of course, one of the main drivers of the economy here is the seasonal tourism business, and we had a prominent local business owner who was interested and sought to develop some workforce housing, essentially in a neighboring town, with the idea that he would bring in some of these visa workers who generally work for him every summer.
The town where this development was initially planned really showed a lot of opposition to the idea, and the idea eventually died. It was kind of an interesting cross-section of the discussion on immigration, sort of outside of the political context of the election and some of these other things like infrastructure and development problems that we are seeing and trying to work through here in the Lakes Region.
Melanie Plenda:
What about inflation? That also seemed to dominate headlines and the election. What sorts of things did you cover in that realm and what do you expect to look into for 2025?
Gabriel Perry:
Mostly our coverage of inflation has really kind of come in response to people describing the trouble they've had with rising costs all across the board, whether it be essentials like food and gas or, most presciently, housing. People talk a lot about the need to develop more housing because of rising rent costs, but it's not quite so simple in order for developers to have the incentives to make housing that can be priced affordably. Things along those lines have been pretty prominent in our coverage throughout the whole year, and I expect that will continue.
Carol Robidoux:
I think we're seeing a little adjustment in the housing market with the median price of a house in November was, I think, lower than it had been since about March, and sales were up a little bit. I think the rising cost of getting by is kind of what people are focused on in terms of hitting the panic button. The price of eggs is almost like a meme, but it's kind of true and we kind of see the rising cost of staples in the supermarket like that. And I feel like we need to track that for the sake of the consumer, to see what the reality is.
You have the threat of possible tariffs on things. So will the cost of doing business for builders and for construction, any industry that requires goods, imported steel — is that going to price us out of something, and is it going to have a trickle-down effect on the average citizen?
There's a lot of uncertainty, and we don't know the answers to these things. If we had a crystal ball, it'd probably look really blurry right now, because there's just too many open-ended things. But I do think that it's a common theme you hear in casual conversation with anybody, that the cost of living has become an issue for the average person, and with tax bills reflecting the inflated price of the value of a home, it’s a good news/bad news kind of thing.
Melanie Plenda:
As you look ahead to 2025, what stories do you think will dominate New Hampshire headlines?
Carol Robidoux:
Probably it's going to be all about all the housing that is going to be coming online. I think the last year, year and a half, two years, municipalities in the larger cities and towns have known that the housing issue is something that needed to be addressed. There was a lot of ARPA money floating around, and there's been this infusion of money to build things. Well now we’re going to see what happens with a lot of these units coming online. Are they going to have stabilized pricing? They've been advertising apartments anywhere between $2,500 and $3,500 a month. Is that going to be sustainable, or are they going to have to reduce pricing, and is the market going to sort of level out a little bit?
So I think just housing is really going to be everybody's big story, again. Not to be a broken record, but I think that until we fix that we're gonna be talking about it.
Gabriel Perry:
I totally concur that housing will likely remain one of the, if not the, top story next year.
Two other things I'm looking at pretty closely are, as we roll out of winter, depending on environmental and weather conditions, is how badly lakes and rivers are affected by blooms of cyanobacteria. That is something that goes sometimes somewhat unnoticed in general, but really makes a big impact on the health and well- being and the wealth of our state. So I think that will continue to make waves as an issue.
The other thing I'm looking at is the rising cost of health care and availability of primary care physicians in multiple regions throughout the state in the context of several large hospital mergers that have occurred over the last five or six years, and even continue to occur this year. So I think those things are something that people might want to keep on their radar, absolutely.
Jack Rooney:
Locally, here in Keene and the Monadnock region, the downtown infrastructure project in Keene is going to be the big story in 2025, whether it starts on schedule or is pushed off to kind of allay some concerns of local businesses. What is the construction going to look like, and how will people be able to access downtown Keene throughout? I think those are going to be big, big questions, not just for the city of Keene, but since Keene is kind of the hub of the Monadnock Region, how is that going to have broader effects?
Then on the on the statewide level, I think certainly the things we'll be watching very closely are the start of the Ayotte administration, as we get a new governor in New Hampshire, and kind of hand-in-hand with that is that we are heading into a budget year at the State House, and so, particularly as we discussed earlier, as a lot of the federal pandemic era spending has stopped, and especially as a second Trump administration is pledging to cut costs at the federal level, what sort of belt tightening is going to need to happen here in New Hampshire, and how much of that is going to get passed down from the state to municipalities to work that into their own local budgets?
Melanie Plenda:
Interesting predictions! Keene Sentinel managing editor for audience development Jack Rooney, Manchester Ink Link editor and publisher Carol Robidoux, and Laconia Daily Sun reporter Gabriel Perry — thank you for looking back with us.
“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.