The $4-a-Gallon Senate Race

Every candidate for New Hampshire’s open Senate seat wants to talk about child care. Nobody wants to talk about why a parent in Laconia now spends more filling the tank than dropping off the toddler.

On April 3, Chris Pappas toured a Concord child care center and told the New Hampshire Bulletin that child care affordability is a “linchpin of how we create a more affordable economy.” Five days later, Jeanne Shaheen held a roundtable on child care in Keene, passing the torch on an issue she’d championed for years. John Sununu’s campaign released a statement saying he’d made affordability “the top focus” since day one. Scott Brown remembered his own struggles finding child care and called the situation “unsustainable.”

All four are correct. Child care in New Hampshire is unaffordable, unavailable, and hemorrhaging workers. The state lost 8 percent of its child care workforce between 2023 and 2024. An average of 17,300 parents a month are out of the labor force because they can’t find or afford care. Licensed care capacity for children under five dropped nearly 13 percent between 2017 and 2023, and the annual average shortage runs around 9,100 slots statewide. A married couple spends nearly 12 percent of household income on child care; a single parent, over 37 percent. Classrooms sit empty across the state because centers can’t hire staff at wages that compete with Target or Amazon, which start at $18 to $20 an hour. The NH Fiscal Policy Institute estimates the state loses $9 million to $14.1 million a year in potential tax revenue just from parents who can’t work because of missing child care slots.

The problem has been building for years and it cuts across party lines. The political class in Concord is, for once, trying to address it. HB 1433, the business child care tax credit bill, sailed through the Senate Ways and Means Committee unanimously this month. Ayotte endorsed it in her State of the State address. The child care workforce grant program, though tangled in a fight over whether federal TANF dollars can legally fund it, has bipartisan support. Nobody in New Hampshire politics is arguing that the child care crisis doesn’t exist.

Which makes it the perfect thing for Senate candidates to talk about. It’s real, it’s sympathetic, and it doesn’t require anyone to say anything uncomfortable about the war.

None of this is new. What’s new is that the ground shifted on February 28 — and none of these candidates have found their footing.

Gas hit $4.14 a gallon nationally on April 7. It’s been climbing since February 28, when Operation Epic Fury launched and Iran responded by effectively shutting the Strait of Hormuz. New Hampshire’s pump prices have tracked the national surge, adding more than a dollar per gallon in six weeks. J.P. Morgan analysts warned that $5 is coming if the strait doesn’t reopen by mid-April. The ceasefire announced on April 8 has not, as of today, changed conditions on the water. The strait remains functionally closed, with Iran charging transit tolls exceeding a million dollars per vessel.

For a New Hampshire family already spending $15,000 a year on infant care and $172 a month on electricity, the gas spike isn’t an isolated line item. It’s the thing that breaks the budget.

The Debate They’re Having

Watch the Senate race through the child care lens and you’ll see four candidates doing their homework on a real issue — and making sure you see them do it.

Pappas toured one of Merrimack Valley Day Care’s facilities in Concord on April 3 and sat down with Executive Director Marianne Barter and Democratic Rep. Mary Jane Wallner to talk about what child care workers need from Washington. He’s good at this. He talks about child care with the fluency of someone who’s spent actual time in the rooms where the crisis lives — not just the briefing rooms where staffers hand you a fact sheet. He used the word “linchpin.” He talked about growing “the economic pie.” He rolled out a “blueprint.” His approach is interventionist: more federal investment, workforce grants, subsidies to bring down costs for families.

But here’s what Pappas didn’t say at that Concord day care: anything about why the parent dropping off the kid that morning had just spent $60 filling the minivan. He has not, in any public statement that Granite State Report could find, connected the Iran war to gas prices, to grocery inflation, or to the cost-of-living crisis he’s running on. A candidate who calls child care the “linchpin” of affordability while ignoring the gas price that determines whether a parent can afford the drive is handing his opponent a weapon.

Sununu’s campaign has countered with the Republican affordability frame — lower costs across the board, don’t raise taxes, don’t create new federal programs. His spokesperson attacked Pappas for supporting policies that “increased the cost of living for all New Hampshire families.” The Sununu position is that child care is a symptom of a broader cost problem, and the solution is economy-wide rather than sector-specific.

Brown, running third in the Republican primary at 19 percent to Sununu’s 48, attacked Pappas for failing to support tax breaks for working families — doing double duty as a jab at Sununu’s more careful tone.

Fine. All of it fine. But the child care conversation is happening in a sealed room. Nobody in the room wants to open the window and let in the noise from the gas station across the street.

The Debate They Should Be Having

Here is the math that no Senate candidate has put on a whiteboard.

The child care number — that $1,250 a month for an infant — is the one with the most policy levers attached to it. Subsidies, tax credits, workforce grants, Ayotte’s HB 1433 — these can move the needle, and the legislature is trying. But it’s also the number that has changed the least since the war started. Child care costs are sticky. They were brutal before February 28, and they’re brutal now, at roughly the same level.

The number that moved is gas. A two-car household in the Lakes Region that was spending roughly $300 a month on fuel before the war is now spending north of $400. That’s nearly $1,400 a year in new costs that arrived in six weeks, with no policy response, no subsidy, and no Senate candidate’s blueprint to offset it. The grocery bill is following, pulled upward by fertilizer costs (up 50 percent since the war, driven by the Hormuz closure) and diesel-dependent transportation. Heating oil futures for next winter are already pricing in a war premium that hasn’t been negotiated away by anything happening in Islamabad.

A child care tax credit worth $5 million statewide — the cap in HB 1433 — cannot absorb a gas shock that J.P. Morgan estimates will cost American consumers $100 billion in purchasing power if it persists through the year. The scale mismatch is staggering.

This is not an argument against child care policy. It’s an argument that child care policy, discussed in isolation from the energy crisis that is reshaping every family budget in the state, is theater. It’s the conversation politicians have when they want to look serious without saying anything that costs them.

One Point Separates Them

The most recent Emerson College poll, from late March, showed Pappas and Sununu in a dead heat: 45 percent to 44 percent, within the margin of error. Women broke for Pappas by nine points. Men went for Sununu by six. Voters under 40 favored Pappas by 23 points; voters in their fifties and sixties favored Sununu by 12.

That one-point margin is going to be decided by something. Child care, on its own, probably isn’t it — only 2 percent of New Hampshire voters named it as their top issue in an NHJournal/Praecones Analytica survey published in January. The cost of groceries and basics led at 30 percent. Housing was second at 25 percent. Property taxes were third at 18.

Those top-three issues are all being intensified by the Iran war’s energy shock. Groceries cost more because fertilizer and diesel cost more. Housing costs more because construction materials and commuting costs are rising. Property taxes face upward pressure because municipal budgets are absorbing higher fuel and utility costs. The war didn’t create these problems. But it accelerated every single one of them, and it did so in the six weeks since the last poll was taken.

The candidate who figures out how to talk about energy costs — not in the abstract language of “affordability” that both campaigns default to, but with the specificity that connects $4 gas to $1,100 grocery bills to the $15,000 child care tab — will have an advantage that no amount of photo ops at day care centers can replicate.

Sununu’s Trap

Sununu’s affordability message is simpler and, in normal times, harder to attack: lower costs, lower taxes, less government. He recently received Trump’s endorsement, which locks up the primary against Brown but opens a general-election wound. Trump launched the war. The war raised gas prices. Gas prices are the single fastest-moving cost driver in New Hampshire right now.

Sununu hasn’t distanced himself from the war, and he hasn’t embraced it. His campaign keeps saying “lowering costs for New Hampshire families” without ever specifying which costs, or acknowledging that the single biggest cost increase of the year was caused by the president who just put his name on a Sununu endorsement.

That’s the box the 2026 Republican Senate candidate in New Hampshire has to live in. The state voted for Harris by three points in 2024. Trump’s approval among independents — the voters who decide statewide races here — sits at 39 percent in the most recent Emerson poll, with 59 percent disapproving. Carrying a Trump endorsement while gas hits $4 in a state where independents already can’t stand him is a bet that gets more expensive every week. But dropping Trump in a Republican primary where Brown is running as the full-MAGA alternative isn’t an option either.

Child care is safe terrain for Sununu. Gas prices are not.

Brown has it worse. He ran as the MAGA candidate, aligned himself with Trump and the war, and then watched Trump endorse Sununu. Now he’s carrying the political cost of the president’s gas-price war without the endorsement to show for it. At $3 gas, that was awkward. At $4, it’s a drag. At $5, it could end his campaign. Brown talked about his own family’s child care struggles — used the word “unsustainable,” got personal, showed authenticity. None of it matters when the family listening to him just added $1,400 a year to their fuel bill because of the president Brown has been stumping for since June. Voters do the math even when candidates won’t.

The Lakes Region Test

Nowhere in New Hampshire does the gap between the child care debate and the energy crisis register more sharply than in the Lakes Region. Belknap County — Laconia, Meredith, Gilford, the tourist corridor around Winnipesaukee — runs on two economic engines: tourism and the service-sector workforce that supports it. Both depend on affordable gasoline. The servers, housekeepers, and retail workers who staff the region’s summer economy commute from surrounding towns along routes where there is no public transit and no alternative to a car. When gas was $3, the commute was a cost. At $4, it’s a calculation. At $5, some of those workers don’t show up.

The child care crisis hits the Lakes Region hard, too — Belknap County is classified as a child care desert in multiple analyses. But the immediate pressure that families are feeling right now, this week, is not the day care waitlist. It’s the Shell station on Route 3.

The tourists will feel it, too. When a family from Boston weighs whether to drive three hours north for a weekend on the lake, the cost of filling the tank is part of the decision. Every dollar added to a gallon of gas is a dollar that doesn’t get spent at a Weirs Beach ice cream stand or a Wolfeboro bookshop. The Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce hasn’t publicly quantified the war’s potential impact on summer tourism. Someone should ask.

What the Voters Actually Care About

Drive Route 3 from Laconia to Plymouth on a Friday afternoon and count the handwritten signs outside gas stations. The prices change faster than the candidates’ talking points. The people filling their tanks are not thinking about HB 1433 or the child care workforce grant program. They are thinking about whether they can afford to drive to work on Monday.

The child care crisis is real and it matters. Every empty classroom in every understaffed day care center represents a parent who can’t work, an employer who can’t hire, and a child who isn’t getting the early education that decades of research says makes a difference. The candidates are right to talk about it. The legislature is right to act on it.

But the Senate candidates are having the wrong argument at the wrong scale. They’re debating a $5 million state tax credit while a $100 billion national energy shock rolls through their constituents’ bank accounts. They’re touring child care centers while the ceasefire collapses in Islamabad and the Strait of Hormuz stays shut and the gas price ticks up another dime.

The voters who will decide this race — the independents, the swing suburbanites in Hillsborough and Rockingham counties, the working-class families in the Lakes Region — are not experiencing an affordability crisis. They are experiencing an affordability emergency. The emergency has a cause: a war that no New Hampshire voter asked for, launched by a president whom one of the candidates just embraced and the other refuses to confront directly. Until somebody in this race is willing to say that out loud, the child care conversation is a sideshow dressed up as the main event.

The ceasefire expires April 21. If the Islamabad talks collapse and the Strait of Hormuz stays shut, J.P. Morgan’s $5-a-gallon forecast arrives during the same window that the next round of polls will be conducted. One point separates Pappas and Sununu right now. The question is whether either of them will have figured out something to say about gas prices before the voters answer it for them.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of The Atomic Privilege.