New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting (Part IV): documents, documents, and more documents

This is Part IV in my look at New Hampshire's history of attempting to disenfranchise college student voters. For Part I, which provides essential background information, please click here. You may read Part II here. You may read Part III here. 

"A resident or inhabitant or both of this state and of any city, town, or other political subdivision of this state shall be a person who is domiciled or has a place of abode or both in this state and in any city, town, or other political subdivision of this state, and who has, through all of his or her actions, demonstrated a current intent to designate that place of abode as his or her principal place of physical presence [for the indefinite future] to the exclusion of all others."

                                                                                                - New Hampshire House Bill 1264

In July 2018, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu signed a bill into law that amended the state's definition of "resident" for the purposes of voting. Despite a federal court clarifying that students could vote in the state and compromises being reached to make that happen, there were still some who felt that students were simply not welcome at the ballot box. On this day, those interests won. 

Prior to this change, an intent to remain in the state "indefinitely" was sufficient to be considered a resident for voting purposes. In practice, this shift in definition would effectively force out of state college students to get New Hampshire driver's licenses and register their vehicles in the state. Since these things cost money, these new requirements essentially amounted to a poll tax. Just as they had in 1971 and 1972, the New Hampshire chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union came out against the legislation and filed a lawsuit to stop it from going into effect. 

Widespread Opposition 

The bill had passed despite widespread opposition and warnings that it would disenfranchise college students. In fact, the original venue for the bill's July hearing before the Senate Election Law and Internal Affairs Committee was insufficient to hold the people who had turned up to oppose the bill. College students, facing disenfranchisement, showed up to show their opposition.

Many opponents zoomed in on the removal of intent to remain "indefinitely" from the state's election laws. While a federal court later ruled it was unnecessary, even the most ardent opponents of student voting in 1972 agreed that a statement of intent to remain indefinitely was sufficient. This legislation upended a status quo that had essentially persisted for the last 45 years.

SB 3 and the Turn Toward Enforcement

As a voter suppression effort, HB 1264 did not stand alone. It built directly on Senate Bill 3 signed into law the previous year. SB 3 altered the mechanics of voter registration by requiring voters who registered without documentation to complete detailed affidavits and submit proof of residency either at the polls or through post-election follow-up. Those who failed to provide documentation in a timely manner faced civil penalties and the possibility of criminal prosecution.

SB 3 did not explicitly target college students, but its effects fell most heavily on them. Students, who are more likely to register close to Election Day and less likely to have New Hampshire-specific documentation on hand were transformed from presumed eligible voters into legal risks. Civil rights groups warned that SB 3 converted routine voter registration into an act that could trigger investigation by the Secretary of State or referral to the Attorney General.

The New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union, along with other voting-rights advocates, sued to block SB 3’s enforcement. In October 2018, just weeks before the midterm election, a state court issued a preliminary injunction preventing the law’s new registration forms and enforcement provisions from being used. The court concluded that SB 3 imposed unreasonable burdens on the right to vote and risked confusion and disenfranchisement at polling places.

That injunction foreshadowed SB 3’s eventual demise. In 2021, the New Hampshire Supreme Court struck the law down in its entirety, holding that it violated the state constitution by placing disproportionate burdens on eligible voters without evidence of a meaningful fraud problem.

HB 1264, by contrast, survived judicial scrutiny. Because it altered definitions rather than election-day procedures, it was treated by courts as a permissible legislative clarification rather than an immediate burden on voting. The result was an uneven legal landscape: SB 3, which enforced residency claims at the polls, was enjoined and invalidated; HB 1264, which raised the cost and risk of making those claims in the first place, endured. 

After the New Hampshire Supreme Court issued a favorable advisory opinion regarding HB 1264, the lawsuits that sought to overturn it were withdrawn. It still stands to this day. The residency requirements imposed by HB 1264 survived, but the documentation requirements imposed by SB 3 did not. A college student registering to vote today may prove their identity and residency using documents provided by their college, satisfying the requirements of HB 1264.

Both laws were passed under the familiar banner of “preventing fraud.” In reality, they reflected a sustained effort to narrow the electorate by making student participation more expensive, more confusing, and more legally fraught.

The Broader Effort

Taken together, these measures represented the culmination of a long-running partisan effort to suppress the political power of those who live in New Hampshire but are not considered permanent enough to be trusted with a ballot. College students are undeniably present in the state for most of the year, and many will never return to their so-called “home” communities after graduation. Forcing them to vote in those communities compels them to participate in elections where the consequences of public policy may never touch them, while silencing them where those consequences most certainly will.

Part V, which will come next year, will examine the most recent updates.

Maine Law Review Call for Papers. Rural Perspectives in Law: Challenges and Opportunities

The Maine Law Review is seeking article proposals for our topical issue: Rural Perspectives in Law: Challenges and Opportunities.  This issue will be published in spring 2026 as Volume 78.2 of our legal journal.

Abstracts of 300-500 words will be reviewed on a rolling basis and should be submitted no later than October 1, 2025, at 5:00 PM.  All submission should be sent to mlreditor@maine.edu.

Rural communities across the United States face unique legal challenges that often differ from those in urban and suburban settings.  Issues such as access to justice, scarcity of adequate legal counsel, limitations due to aging infrastructure, and the impact of shifting industries and demographics shape the practice of law in rural America.  Maine is the second most rural state in the country with 62% of its population living in rural areas. However, most of the legal providers are located in the more urban, southern portion of the state.  Rural communities outside of Maine face similar challenges.  

This volume is meant to speak about the challenges and potential opportunities rural communities across the nation face, and contribute to a broader conversation about how the law and policy can better serve rural America. 

Articles published in this upcoming volume of the Maine Law Review have the opportunity to contribute to an evolving area of law and to provide practical guidance and commentary on a pressing issue many rural communities across the nation are facing. Potential article topics could include but are not limited to: 

• Access to legal services in remote communities.
• The rise of virtual court hearings and tele-lawyering, and their impact on legal services.
• Infrastructure challenges in rural communities including broadband, utilities, etc., and legal solutions to them/the role of attorneys in rural economic development. 
• Unique issues to rural communities in areas of interest like family law, criminal law, property law, or impacts to rural economies or heritage industries.
• Property issues including zoning ordinances, land use regulation (farming, fishing, forestry, cannabis, etc.), or the impact of pollution/climate change on economic revitalization.
• The impact of federal funding priorities and the potential disproportionate impact on health or public services. 
• Recruitment, retention, burnout, and retirement of attorneys in rural communities.  

 The editors encourage creative and diverse viewpoints, and encourage interested authors to submit proposals on legal topics of interest that impact rural communities. 

New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting (Part III): The "problem" of student voting

This is Part III in my look at New Hampshire's history of attempting to disenfranchise college student voters. For Part I, which provides essential background information, please click here. You may read Part II here.

"Student Voting Rights Present Challenge for College Communities" 

This headline from the February 23, 2001, edition of The Valley News might appear preposterous at first glance. Imagine if this headline were written about any other community. Most people would be up in arms or at the very least confused. After all, the ability to influence the politics of your local community is a bedrock element of American democracy. Why are students any different? That question has driven years of policymaking and dialogue in New Hampshire. 

If there is one meta narrative of conservative New Hampshire politics over the last half-century, it's the feverish pursuit to figure out how students are different. The courts settling the question of student eligibility to vote did not stop people from trying to impede access to the ballot and it did not stop some people from perceiving students as "outsiders" who are trying to change the culture of their college towns. As an April 17, 2002, article in The Valley News noted, Republicans said that students should not be allowed to vote because their "votes can affect local elections."  Again, is that not the point of democracy? 

The narrative was clear, despite students spending money in local communities, they were not a part of that community. Again, a preposterous claim. How can you live somewhere for four years and not be a member of that community? 

The $10 Residency Tax: A Financial Barrier to the Ballot

In the early 1990s, several towns, including Hanover, home to Dartmouth College, had a $10 “residency tax.” In my research, I couldn't find it when it actually began. Though technically framed as a general municipal tax, it functioned as a de facto poll tax, falling heavily on college students who attempted to vote in local elections.

The issue came to a head during the 1992 election, when Dartmouth students were among those threatened with being denied the right to vote unless they paid the $10 fee.

Legal advocates, students, and civil liberties groups pointed out the obvious: this was a modern poll tax, applied in a way that discouraged transient, often younger voters who might lean progressive.

Public pressure mounted and by 1993, the Hanover Selectboard voted to abolish the $10 tax. But the damage had been done. The episode reinforced the idea that students, even when legally eligible to vote, were second-class citizens in the eyes of some local officials.

Students as “Outsiders”

The cultural narrative didn’t end with the repeal. It evolved. As an April 17, 2002 article in The Valley News recounted, some Republican leaders continued to argue that college students shouldn’t be allowed to vote because their “votes can affect local elections.”

Again, isn’t that the point?

This recurring claim that students shouldn’t vote because they might change outcomes underscores the deeper issue: students were (and often still are) seen as outsiders, regardless of how long they live, work, or participate in local life. Even students who spend four years in a community, longer than many military deployments or job assignments, are treated as though their presence is fleeting and their political preferences invalid.

It’s a paradox that continues to shape policy: students contribute economically, socially, and even civically, but they are often excluded from the political sphere because of who they are, not where they live.

From Cultural Resistance to Policy Pushback

The battles of the early 2000s reflected this tension. In towns like Durham and Keene, officials raised concerns about “student blocs” skewing town meetings or dominating turnout in close elections. In Hanover, Dartmouth students increasingly participated in local races, even running for office, prompting new calls to review voter rolls or tighten eligibility standards.

These efforts rarely resulted in legislation at the time, but they shaped the political discourse. They planted seeds for later laws that would impose document-heavy voter ID requirements, burdensome domicile definitions, and financial consequences for registering to vote in one’s college town. 

The rhetorical groundwork was already laid, if students are different, and if their votes “threaten” the balance of local politics, then the state has a vested interest in managing their access to the ballot.

The Voter ID Fight: 2011 and the “Feelings” Comment

By the early 2010s, efforts to discourage student voting had become more formalized. In 2012, the Republican-led legislature passed a voter ID law, overcoming Governor John Lynch's veto, requiring voters to present photo identification at the polls. Though framed as a measure to prevent fraud, the real intent behind the law became clear when House Speaker William O’Brien infamously said in a public forum that college students “just vote their feelings,” and that they "don't have life experience and they just vote their feelings and they’re taking away the townspeople’s vote.” That statement, widely reported at the time, was more than a gaffe, it revealed the underlying sentiment that student voters were not just inconvenient, but illegitimate.

I was a college student in New Hampshire when this debate was on-going. It started after the New Hampshire Republicans took control of the state legislature in the 2010 elections. Governor Lynch was the lone Democrat with any kind of real power in New Hampshire, and he was left to fight a tidal wave of bad Republican ideas.

For me, this was personal. 

I was interning for Governor Lynch on the day of the 2010 midterm elections. It was a somber feeling in the office, and we knew that change was on the horizon. I did not however expect to be told by New Hampshire Republican state leaders, many of whom I had met throughout the course of my internship, that people like me were not welcome to participate in New Hampshire's political discourse.

Despite interning in state government and participating in multiple political campaigns, my level of civic participation was not deemed, by some, to be enough to be allowed to participate in New Hampshire's state governance. 

Overcoming Governor Lynch's veto did require a student-friendly compromise: College IDs issued by college and universities in New Hampshire would be accepted. This concession kept the bill alive, but it didn’t undo the chilling effect the law had already created. These efforts sent a clear message: you are not welcome at the ballot box.

The Slow Burn of Suppression

Even without new laws on the books, the cultural resistance to student voting has a chilling effect. When voters are repeatedly told they don’t belong when they face extra questions at the polls, or hear that their ballots might be challenged, or are warned that they could owe fees or taxes — some will walk away.

That’s the real power of these policies. They do not need to block all student voters to be effective. They just need to discourage enough of them.

Look Ahead! 

• In Part IV, we’ll see how these cultural attitudes were codified into law during the Sununu administration.

• In Part V, we’ll examine how these policies continue to evolve, including 2025 legislation targeting student ID usage, and how young people are organizing to protect and expand their rights. 

New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting (Part II): Voting rights prevail...for now

This is Part II in my look at New Hampshire's history of attempting to disenfranchise college student voters. For Part I, which provides essential background information, please click here.

1972 was a pivotal year in American history:  Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden sought political office for the first time, the Watergate break-ins began the unraveling of a presidency, and George McGovern's landslide defeat arguably nudged the Democratic Party to the right for decades. It was also a year of landmark legislation, including the Clean Water Act and Title IX, setting in motion changes that still shape American life today.

But even as the country grappled with sweeping national changes, some of the most immediate battles over democracy and civil rights were playing out at the local level, including in New Hampshire, where a fundamental question about who could vote loomed over the state's critical First in the Nation primary.

On January 26th, New Hampshire Attorney General Warren Rudman and the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union announced an imperfect compromise that did not fully address the residency problem but also did not actively disenfranchise college students. In essence, the state would allow college students to vote, as long as they claim to intend to remain in New Hampshire indefinitely. No further inquiry would be made, and it would be assumed that the student was answering the question in good faith. If a student said that they were planning to move away at any time, they would be denied the right to vote. Judge Hugh Bownes of the United States District Court for New Hampshire signed the compromise.  

That day's edition of the Valley News asked a very obvious question, does this apply to non-college student New Hampshire residents who declare an intent to leave at a certain time? If a person moves to New Hampshire to work for a limited duration, which could be years, and plans to return to the place from which they moved, they (in theory) would be unable to vote in any location. This question would remain unanswered.

Not surprisingly, this did not end the saga, and another lawsuit was filed just a month later by a Dartmouth College student who was denied the right to vote because of his stated intent to move back to Hawaii after graduation. Within a week of the lawsuit being filed, Bownes issued a temporary injunction that would allow the student to register to vote in the New Hampshire Presidential primary. 

The final resolution in this case would come in June when the District Court decided Newburgh v. Peterson where the judges found that the indefinite residency question was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

In their opinion, the judges reckoned with the question that the Valley News had asked which dealt with this compromise's application to non-college students. 

On the one hand, New Hampshire excludes from the franchise a student candid enough to say that he intends to move on after graduation, a newly-arrived executive with a firm intention to retire to his Florida cottage at age 65, a hospital intern or resident with a career plan that gives him two or three years in New Hampshire, a construction worker on a long but time-limited job, an industrial or government trainee working up a precise career ladder, a research contractor on a project with a deadline, a city manager hired for a term, a military person on a term of duty, a hospital patient with a hoped-for goal of discharge. On the other hand, those persons who are less precise in their planning or less confident that their plans will be realized at a time certain are allowed to vote.

* * *  

In this day of widespread planning for change of scene and occupation we cannot see that a requirement of permanent or indefinite intention to stay in one place is relevant to responsible citizenship. Or, to state it legally, the state has not shown that the indefinite intention requirement is necessary to serve a compelling interest.

The judges believed that the compromise had disenfranchised a wider swath of the population than just college students and that it represented an outdated way of thinking about residency. The Fourteenth Amendment prevailed, and this compromise (and the 19th century New Hampshire residency law) fell.

The immediate fire was out, and students could now vote in New Hampshire.

However, as we would learn in the coming decades, while the fire was out, its embers remained. Join me for Part III, in which we look at the contemporary struggles and the re-emergence of this issue in the 21st century. 

---

Look Ahead!

Part III will cover more contemporary battles, including the rise of voter ID and its usage as a vehicle to suppress the student vote.

Part IV will cover the Chris Sununu era and the battle over college student voting in the late 2010s.

Part V will wrap it all up and talk about the current struggle.  

New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting (Part I): The 26th Amendment and its immediate aftermath

Let me start this piece off with a very basic question:

If you live somewhere for four years, should you be able to vote and have a say in the affairs of the state and local government?

Most people would say yes. If you live in a community, if you study there, work there, rent an apartment, buy groceries, use public services, you have a stake in what happens there. The laws passed by state and local governments directly affect your daily life. In any functioning democracy, you should have the right to elect the people who make those laws.

What am I asking this question? Because New Hampshire politicians are once again proposing a law that would disenfranchise college students and exclude them from having a say in their local government. In January, Republican State Senator Victoria Sullivan introduced Senate Bill 223, which would amend New Hampshire's existing voter ID law to remove the ability to use college IDs to satisfy the requirement. This is particularly egregious for New Hampshire, which prides itself on having a citizen legislature (with 424 members, its legislature is the third largest in the English-speaking world). 

This bill is disguised as a proverbial trojan horse. After all, State Sen. Sullivan and her co-sponsors are simply asking that students gets a New Hampshire ID in order to vote in New Hampshire elections. However, this ignores the context in which this law exists and the decades long battle against student voting that has been waged by Republicans in the state. It also ignores the fundamental problem of every voter ID law, they exist to disenfranchise voters who cannot (for various reasons) get an ID. It's an additional barrier to exercising a fundamental right. 

But this is not an isolated occurrence, it's the latest in a decades long battle to curtail student voting rights in New Hampshire. Over the next few weeks, we'll explore this history and how it impacts the current battle.  

Twenty-Sixth Amendment and the Student Vote

The fight against student voting in New Hampshire dates back to 1971, when then-Attorney General (and future U.S. Senator) Warren Rudman took a hardline stance against allowing college students to register to vote in the state. The issue came to a head following that year's ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. In July of that year, Rudman issued a directive requiring college students to register in their hometowns rather than where they attended school. The New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union swiftly pledged to fight Rudman's directive, though they did not file their lawsuit immediately. 

Rudman reasoned that a college student's domicile remained in their parent's households, a rationale that is not applied to any other New Hampshire adult that moves out on their own at the age of 18. He also claimed that college students pay no taxes (presumably property tax since NH doesn't have an income or sales tax), a rationale that is not applied to any other New Hampshire renter. Rudman also said that he opposed letting people who are not in a community "permanently" to vote there, again a standard that is not applied to any other New Hampshire adult. 

There were other bizarre standards at play - opponents of student voting reasoned that college students were more informed about the issues where their parents are living than their college town. Even if this were true, knowledge of local affairs does not determine an individual's right to vote. In fact, I have met many adults who could not even name their state legislator. There were also tall tales (debunked by local officials) of Dartmouth College students flooding Hanover, NH town meetings and voting for absurd items like a subway system. Opponents seized on the idea of "temporary residents" radically changing the political affairs of small college towns. 

In the context of the time, it must have scared New Hampshire Republicans to have thousands of liberal college students added to the voter rolls. The country was in the midst of the Vietnam War and college students were both politically engaged and incredibly motivated to exercise their newly acquired right to vote. These political calculations undoubtedly led Rudman to advocate for disenfranching entire swaths of his state's population. 

Rudman's commitment to disenfranching college students even led him to threaten to criminally prosecute town officials who registered college students to vote and take the issue to the United States Supreme Court. He also accused the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union of having political motives for advocating for student voters. He was seemingly oblivious to the irony in his statement. 

Rudman even opposed compromise measures, such as HB 1029, which would have excluded college students from voting in local and municipal elections. 

By October 1971, Rudman was increasingly finding himself as a man on an island. Courts around the country (including in California, whose Attorney General took a similar stance to Rudman) had rejected the kinds of arguments that Rudman had advanced. According to the October 25th edition of the Concord Monitor, in New England, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut explicitly allowed college students to register to vote while a federal court case was pending and would soon be decided in Maine on the matter. Vermont had no explicit policy, but the state had given tacit approval to move forward with registering students to vote. Despite these setbacks, Rudman said that he did not plan to change his guidance. 

In December, the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union finally filed their lawsuit. 

--

Here's what to expect in future parts:

Part II of this series will cover the outcomes of the legal actions against Rudman and the State of New Hampshire and their impacts on voting rights in New Hampshire. 

Part III will cover more contemporary battles, including the rise of voter ID and its usage as a vehicle to suppress the student vote. 

Part IV will cover the Chris Sununu era and the battle over college student voting in the late 2010s.  

Part V will wrap it all up and talk about the current struggle

Location, Location, Location Revisited: More Needs to be Done

For this post, I am going to revisit a post I made seven years ago in which I discussed the role that law schools can play in alleviating the rural lawyer shortage. While academia has made some progress, namely in the establishment of rural legal clinics, it has not tackled the problem in a way that could lead to meaningful change. 

Many of the underlying statistics from seven years ago are still true. Data from the Occupational Employment Statistics within the Bureau of Labor Statistics still bears out that the rural lawyer shortage is practically universal around the country. As it was in 2017, Southwestern Montana is an exception. There is one additional exception, the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. As with last time, I am measuring the shortage by location quotient, which provides a good approximation of an area's employment in a given sector compared to the national average. The Location Quotient controls for population so you can do a direct comparison between rural and urban employment. 

While the media has spoken a lot about people migrating to rural communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, this migration has not been even. An analysis from The Daily Yonder suggests that rural communities whose economies depend on recreation saw the greatest increase from this migration. While rural America continues to grow after the pandemic, a further analysis from The Daily Yonder shows that between 2023-2024, population growth was concentrated in rural counties that border metropolitan areas. Neither of these developments are particularly helpful to the vast majority of rural counties. 

One huge difference that I have seen in the last decade that I have been writing about this issue is an increase in general awareness. Some states are actually offering incentives to practice in rural spaces and law schools are increasingly offering rural practice clinics or similar such opportunities. A report to the Maine Legislature in January 2024 quantified the impact of the University of Maine's Rural Practice Clinic in Fort Kent, in the remote northern part of the state. These opportunities are important and do help tremendously. However, the students are only there for a portion of their law school experience, often as little as a semester. The jury is still out as to whether or not these types of programs actually increase the number of lawyers who opt to live and work in rural spaces. 

I have long advocated for the establishment of law schools in rural communities so students can spend three years immersed in a rural space, learn what it means to be part of a rural community, and have more time to extern in the small practices and/or local governments that dot the rural landscape. 

The Current Landscape

In the past seven years, there has not been a single rural law school established. However, there also hasn't been a rural law school closure. So, we have kind of been stuck with the status quo over the past few years. By my count, there are 11 ABA Accredited law schools located outside of metropolitan areas, though some of these are in larger college towns: 

• Appalachian School of Law (Grundy, VA)
• Ohio Northern University (Ada, OH)
• Pennsylvania State University (University Park, PA)
• Penn State Dickinson Law (Carlisle, PA)
• University of Idaho (Moscow, ID)
• University of Mississippi (Oxford, MS) 
• University of New Hampshire (Concord, NH)
• University of South Dakota (Vermillion, SD)
• University of Wyoming (Laramie, WY)
• Vermont Law and Graduate School (South Royalton, VT)
• Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA)

There are 198 fully accredited ABA law schools so roughly 5% are located outside of metropolitan areas. There are some law schools in areas that might be considered more remote - Cornell University in Ithaca, New York is a good example. Students at those schools would have more opportunities to be exposed to small town practice than a student in a major metropolitan area. However, these areas are still metropolitan areas and job centers in their own right. 

Exposure, Exposure, Exposure

I still believe many of my original points from 2017 - there is no better way to expose students to the issues facing rural communities than prolonged exposure. Becoming immersed in a community for multiple years is the best way to understand its problems. As I said then, even if a student does not remain in the rural community after law school, they still leave with a greater understanding of the challenges that the legal profession faces in those spaces. They can become advocates for actually addressing the problem. 

Law Schools Are Needed in Rural Spaces

If you've been online long enough, you have read the line that we have too many law schools. I'm not sure I agree, and my reasons are the same that they were seven years ago. We have too many law schools in metropolitan areas and too few law schools in small towns and rural communities. We need more law schools in small towns and rural communities. 

What should this look like? A scan of the schools listed above shows a potential solution. Only two of the schools, Vermont and Appalachian, are private standalone schools without a parent university. And both have experienced financial issues within the last decade. In response, Vermont Law decided to reinvent itself by offering master's degrees in areas such as public policy and becoming a "law and graduate school." As I did seven years ago, I believe that schools like Appalachian and Vermont play a key role in the solving the rural lawyer shortage. 

But there is stability in the backing of a major university system, and I believe that the path forward is for state university systems to leverage their resources and state backing to put law schools on their rural campuses. This would provide a financial shelter that a standalone school would not have, and it would provide stability for the students who opt to attend these schools.

I'll use my home state of North Carolina as an example of how this could look. North Carolina has one of the most expansive university systems in the country with every public university being considered a part of the University of North Carolina system. In total, there are 17 campuses with four located outside of metropolitan area: 

• Appalachian State University (in Boone)
• Elizabeth City State University 
• University of North Carolina at Pembroke
• Western Carolina University (in Cullowhee)

The idea of establishing a new graduate school on one (or more) of these campuses would not be without recent precedent. Just this year, UNC Pembroke established a Doctor of Optometry program in order to alleviate the rural medical provider shortage.

A law school on any of these campuses would address the access to justice issue in a historically impoverished portion of the state. Appalachian and Western Carolina serve Appalachia while Elizabeth City State and UNC Pembroke serve Eastern North Carolina. A law school on a small rural campus also allows for specialization in rural lawyering. Unlike a law school on a flagship state university campus, it won't necessarily attract students who are looking for urban opportunities. A smaller, most focused school should yield the best results for both the students and local community. 

The Raging Current 

But it would be naive to assume that establishing a new rural institution isn't swimming against an already roaring current. 

There is an epidemic of closures and mergers of small rural institutions over the last several years. In 2023, the Hechinger Report estimates that at least a dozen rural, non-profit institutions had closed or announced plans to close since 2020.  In Vermont (a majority rural state with one small metro area), there have been five non-profit college closures since 2019. Keeping a small rural school afloat is becoming a gargantuan task. 

But the closures and mergers aren't just limited to private schools. Public universities are also closing and merging. You can look at Vermont to see a spate of mergers that ultimately involved four public colleges becoming one. In 2018, publicly funded Lyndon State University merged with Johnson State University to form Northern Vermont University. In 2023, two more rural colleges, Castleton State University and Vermont Technical College merged with Northern Vermont University to form Vermont State University.

Even the schools that are staying open are cutting majors and ultimately opportunities. Dr. Pruitt posted about this issue a couple of weeks ago. Her post linked to a story that discussed the struggles of a student at Delta State University, a public university in rural Mississippi, who saw her planned major cut. The story discussed majors being cut at rural public universities in places as far flung as New York, Minnesota, North Carolina, Alaska, and Arkansas.

Rural education is in trouble and convincing lawmakers to invest further is going to be a challenge. I did provide an example above of a rural public university investing in graduate education so it's not impossible.

Conclusion

To successfully solve the rural lawyer shortage, it is essential that lawmakers realize the value of investing in a public rural law school. These schools not making money should not be seen as detriment but rather a key investment. 

A public rural law school would ensure that students are exposed to rural issues for all three years of their education, and a small public rural law school provides an opportunity to further specialize in small town practice and attract students who are interested in (or at least open to) the idea of small-town practice. 

Jared Golden is second rural-ish Democrat to hold on to a congressional seat amidst red wave

 Here's the New York Times coverage written by Maya C. Miller.   Salient excerpts follow:  

Mr. Golden’s narrow victory in his largely white, rural and working-class district — one of five Democratic-held districts that Donald J. Trump won in 2020 — was a bright spot for Democrats and will help ensure that the Republicans’ House majority in the next Congress remains exceedingly narrow.

Mr. Golden toiled throughout the campaign to distance himself from other Democrats, declining to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris or even say whether he would vote for her. Instead, with the hope of defying political gravity and overcoming party polarization, the congressman emphasized a hyperlocal and nonpartisan message aimed at working-class people of all political stripes. He campaigned as a potential governing partner with Mr. Trump, saying he could work with whomever won the White House.

For House Republicans, Mr. Theriault’s loss underlined Mr. Golden’s status as one of the Democrats’ most battle-tested members. A native of Fort Kent, a town on the northernmost border of the state, Mr. Theriault, 30, portrayed himself as a “true Mainer” — his typical outfit includes jeans, a baseball cap and a puffer vest over a button-down shirt — and small-business owner who was approachable.

* * * 

After a mass shooting last year in his hometown of Lewiston, Mr. Golden — one of the few Democrats in Congress who has routinely broken with his party to oppose gun control measures — changed course and endorsed an assault weapons ban. He lost the backing of the National Rifle Association, and Mr. Theriault argued that Mr. Golden’s change of heart on guns showed that he was out of step with his district.

How and why Democrats are failing to attract rural voters: Is it the economy, stupid?

A couple of recent items in the New York Times showcase--wisely in my opinion--how the Democrats, in spite of an entertaining convention, are failing to attract rural voters.  Both of these pieces touch on a range of issues, e.g., climate change, civil rights, etc., but seem to come back to the focus of these voters on pocket book issues and the related belief of many that Trump is better on and for the economy.  I'm glad to see these stories because I've been saying for weeks, 

The first story is a huge feature out of Wilson, North Carolina, population 50,000, 40 miles east of Raleigh It is part of the Rocky Mount-Wilson-Roanoke Rapids Metro Area, but characterized as rural by the New York Times, with the headline, "Meet the Rural Voters Who Could Swing North Carolina's Election."  The lede and a few other excerpts follow:  

The most rural of the battleground states this year is North Carolina. About 3.4 million people, or roughly a third of the state’s population, reside in a rural area, more than in any other state besides Texas.

Democrats have seen their support slip in rural areas, ceding ground to Republicans. As such, rural voters in North Carolina could determine which way the state goes on Election Day, as Democrats hope to curb their losses in these communities and Republicans seek to solidify their grip.

But in interviews with more than 30 people in Wilson County, about 50 miles east of Raleigh, where backcountry roads weave in and out of tobacco fields, many residents told us that they felt both parties often overlooked their concerns, about high prices, underfunded schools and rapid growth from the state capital that is stretching into town.

* * *

Voters in Wilson described feeling alienated and worn down by the emphasis on race and identity in politics. 

And that comment reminds me of this very urban NYT story a few weeks ago in which low-income Black voters were quoted as saying they wanted less identity politics and more on what Harris would do to to help them.  

Folks in Wilson are also concerned about the social and economic consequences of rural gentrification.

Downtown Wilson was a sleepy scene decades ago. Now, it has a park decorated with oversize whirligigs, full bars on weekends and, by 2026, a new $63 million stadium that will be the home of the Carolina Mudcats, a Minor League Baseball team.

All of that development, though, has increased concerns over inflation and rising housing costs. Residents bemoaned the prices of fertilizer, electricity bills and chitlins, or sizzled pork intestines. For many people in Wilson, the math just doesn’t add up.

* * * 

Despite their differing opinions, many Wilson residents said they valued getting along with their neighbors, in part because there was no political bubble to hide in.

The story's closing quote, from a 46-year-old white woman, also echoes that theme: 

I just want my community to be OK.

And that reminded me of key finding of Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea's 2023 book, The Rural Voter:  that rural folks have a strong sense of linked fate with and to others in their community. 

The second NYT item is an essay titled, The Politics of a Hard Day's Work for Lobstermen in a Changing Climate.  Scott Elsworth, a historian, writes from Stonington, Maine, population 1056, where he spent time this summer with lobstermen.  

For young workers like Mr. Amaro and Mr. Leach and millions of other Americans like them who are busting their humps week in and week out trying to get ahead, the price of gas, groceries and housing is perhaps the most important factor in determining their vote. Not abortion, not Gaza, not the war in Ukraine. As long as the perception that Mr. Trump will do a better job with the economy remains unchallenged, the Democrats will pay a price at the polls, perhaps a dear one.

“I care a lot about nature,” Mr. Amaro said, “but also I think about my future and how I can take care of my family, and what would benefit me, in the long term, financially. And it kind of sucks to think like that.”

Though he has regularly voted Republican, Mr. Black is far from MAGA. Like many Maine Republicans, at least historically, he is fiscally conservative and no fan of big government. He believes in climate change, isn’t worried about immigration and considers the former president to be something you won’t hear Jessica Fletcher say in reruns of “Murder, She Wrote.” But it is likely, at this point, that he’ll cast his vote for Mr. Trump. “I like Trump’s decisions on stuff that he did,” Mr. Black told me. His two sternmen are, at this point, inclined to do the same, citing the rise in gas prices and the high cost of housing.

Finally, In These Times just posted this item from Joseph Bullington, "Republicans Will Weaponize Rural Suffering as Long as Democrats Ignore It."  Here's a key excerpt: 

But let us not confuse this giddiness [of the DNC] with evidence of a winning politics. What terrified me about the Republican National Convention terrifies me still: The Republicans are effectively wielding rural suffering as a political weapon, telling a potent story that — in classic fascist style — deflects the blame onto immigrants and other out-groups. Democrats could demolish these racist lies with a compelling story of their own — one that defuses the Right’s fascist messaging and shows how rural whites and immigrants (many of them in rural areas, of course) are actually being robbed and exploited by the very same profiteers, the same rigged economic system. Is this what the Democrats are doing? Of course not — that’s what makes it a bad dream.

In human form, this nightmare of mine has a name, and its JD Vance.

* * *

In his RNC speech, Vance spoke to the pain of small towns and rural areas ​“cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class,” places where ​“jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war.” 

And that brings me to my own essay, "Mustering the political will to help left-behind places in a polarized USA."   

Postscript:  This opinion piece by Patrick Healy for the New York Times makes some of the same points made above and also echoes my concern that the Democrats seemed a little too self-congratulatory at their Convention--a little too inward looking, even tone deaf at times.  The audio version of this piece, available today on the NYTAudio app, is even better.  

On spatial inequality in Maine's juvenile justice system

The New York Times today published a second story in a series on Maine's juvenile justice system, this one expressly calling attention to differences in rural and urban:   "For Young Offenders in Maine, Justice Varies by Geography."  Journalist Callie Ferguson reports as part of a year-long investigation into the system, as part of the Times Local Investigations Fellowship.  Here's an excerpt leading with the nature of Aroostook County, the legendary county in the state's far north:   

Aroostook County, in Maine’s far north, is the largest county east of the Mississippi, a sparsely populated region of fields and forests with just two small cities and about 50 smaller towns. Police chiefs describe their jurisdictions as sleepy, with little serious crime.

Even so, the county has sent a disproportionate number of adolescents in recent years to the state’s only youth prison.

The data show that Aroostook sent 20 youth to that juvenile prison between 2017 and 2023, and that's twice the number sent by York County, in the Southern part of the state, which has three times as many residents.  Ferguson describes York County as including "wealthy coastal communities and former mill towns that help make up Maine's largest metropolitan areas."  There, harsh sentences like the ones doled out by Aroostook County are rarely imposed.  Indeed, the story notes that Maine has, in recent years, emphasized rehabilitation in its approach to juvenile offenders, consistent with national trends. And that's where differences show up between rural and urban.

Aroostook was also an outlier for using short prison terms, known as “shock” sentences, to punish young offenders, handing them down at some of the highest rates statewide before the practice began to wane.

But the differences between Aroostook and York Counties show that the effort has played out unevenly, resulting in justice by geography. The disparity appears to stem from philosophical differences over the appropriate response to teenagers who get in trouble, the varying availability of services across the state and the unequal distribution of lawyers and caseloads, according to interviews with defense attorneys, law enforcement officials and former corrections officials.

York stood out even beyond its low commitment rate. Adolescents there were far less likely to end up with a felony record than anywhere except for neighboring Cumberland County, according to a data analysis by The New York Times and The Bangor Daily News. Between 2017 and 2022, those counties reduced 93 percent of felony cases that resulted in a guilty plea to misdemeanors. At the low end, two central Maine counties reduced them only about half the time; in Aroostook, that rate was 64 percent.

Ferguson quotes Sarah Branch, a former juvenile prosecutor who knows directs the Youth Justice Clinic at the University of Maine School of Law:  

Justice should not be defined by where in the state a child lives. What we have right now are barriers for some children that don’t exist for others. 

* * * 

Justice by geography isn’t unique to Maine. Across the United States, the idiosyncrasies of local courts affect case outcomes, and variation is especially likely in the juvenile system with its emphasis on individualized treatment. Last year, a nonprofit advocacy group in Massachusetts identified wide-ranging differences depending on which police department, district attorney and court handled a case. Similarly, a 2005 study of Missouri’s juvenile system found that teenagers’ odds of confinement changed with where they lived.

One issue is the lack of staffing, expertise, and resources in rural counties, which may see only a dozen juvenile cases a year.   One aspect of that shortage is so-called legal deserts:  too few attorneys. 

And while there are not nearly enough lawyers to represent poor defendants in Maine, the problem is acute in rural areas. Last year, the state created a special team of public defenders to combat the shortage in Aroostook, Penobscot and Washington Counties.

An earlier installment in this Maine juvenile justice series is here.  You can read more about Aroostook County and York County, Maine in these prior posts on a wide range of topics, including the rural lawyer shortage in that state and Senator Susan Collins, who hails from Aroostook County.  Here are some photos of a jail in Wiscasset, Maine (also coastal, towards the south of the state), in a post discussing the rural incarceration boom.  And here are some other photos of southern Maine.  Aroostook County features in Elizabeth Strout's novel Oh William!, as summarized here.  

Colleges reach out to serve rural communities, aiming to counter negative perceptions of higher education

Liam Elder-Conners of Vermont Public Radio reports for NPR.  Here's the summarizing blurb:

University of Vermont students are providing hands-on help to rural towns in the state. It's part of a trend to help build bridges between higher education and rural communities.

And here's an excerpt, with the lead in by A Martinez:   

Towns in rural Vermont faced lots of challenges - housing shortages, struggling downtowns and too little disaster preparedness. College students are stepping up to help, though. From The Hechinger Report and Vermont Public, here's Liam Elder-Connors.

LIAM ELDER-CONNORS, BYLINE: KTP mobile home park in Bristol, Vt., is nestled in a convenient place - right next to the high school and about a mile from the small downtown. And it's affordable. The monthly lot rent is $375. But a recent windstorm hit the park hard. KTP property manager Chris Ouelette pointed to a home in the park with plywood nailed around the bottom.

CHRIS OUELETTE: It looks like they just had to replace some skirting. We have a roof that was ripped off a house over there. We have a couple sheds that have been lost.

ELDER-CONNORS: Ouelette, who's in charge of rent collection and some park maintenance, tries to keep the budgets manageable for the 96 mostly low-income residents. But with more extreme weather, Ouelette says mobile home parks need help.

OUELETTE: It's very challenging because we don't have the people. The funding also is not there to be able to have - you know, have more staff on board to be able to tackle these bigger projects.

ELDER-CONNORS: The University of Vermont is stepping in. UVM senior lecturer Kelly Hamshaw, along with her students, are helping KTP and other parks tackle overdue projects, like assessing flood risk and developing emergency plans for when natural disasters strike.

KELLY HAMSHAW: So when you're knocking on people's doors and saying, hi, I'm a student from the University of Vermont, people would be like - they'd look at you a little perplexed at first. And then, you know, what do you want to know?

ELDER-CONNORS: UVM isn't the only college doing this. Auburn University in Alabama and the University of Wisconsin received money from the same federal program that funds UVM's work. Glenda Gillaspy at the University of Wisconsin says they're setting up weather stations to help cranberry farmers time their harvests, which involves flooding their fields.

Racism in rural Vermont: 1890s

Vermont Public published a great story a couple of weeks ago regarding the 1890 disappearance of a Black preacher, John Harrison, in Norwich, Vermont and the failure to charge the man who confessed to his murder. It also details a place name with racist origins that may have derived from his presence in the community. You can read (or listen) to the story here. It serves a nice follow up to my previous piece on racism in North Carolina during the same period and a good reminder that racism wasn't the exclusive province of the South. 

This piece touches on a few interesting artifacts of history:

1. The outmigration of people from rural New England in the 19th century. I've touched on this in previous writings but this article does a great job of illustrating the opportunities created by the holes that are left when people leave. In this story, Mr. Harrison ends up in Norwich to serve as a preacher, a job which had become less coveted because of the declining population. It is unfortunate that racial prejudice prevented him from fully taking advantage of the opportunity. 
2. The racism that people of color faced outside of the rural South. The heart of the Abolitionist movement was in New England, but that doesn't mean that Black people were welcome in those communities. People wanted them to be free, but free elsewhere. 
3. The erasure of records, which is a national problem for people of color and historically lower-income people. 

As a student at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire, I spent four years living across the Connecticut River from Norwich. The Upper Valley (as the area is known locally) is a beautiful community with an interesting history. I'm happy to see my former Sociology of Law professor, Deborah King, quoted in this piece and I am excited to see her research into Dartmouth's role in the transatlantic slave trade. 

This NYT story about the youth criminal justice system in Maine screams "rural"

Callie Ferguson's story in the New York Times, "'Shame on Us':  How Maine Struggles to Handle Troubled Youth" uses the word "rural" only once, but the facts and circumstances are signaling rural, in particular the struggle to deliver services in rural places.  Clearly implicated in the problems are rural deficits in the services necessary to support and rehabilitate youth.  Here's a key quote:  

In Maine’s rural northernmost county, for example, certain intensive services that help steer adolescents from entering the justice system are not offered. The wait-list for another behavioral health program can reach 200 days. Getting in to see a therapist can take a year.

And here's a big picture comment: 

“The heartbreak of Maine,” said Lindsay Rosenthal, a criminal justice policy expert, “is that they have done so much on juvenile legal system reform to keep kids out of the system. Yet there just hasn’t been any action on building out the community-based continuum of care recently, or not enough action.”

This entire story is worth a read, especially for those who care deeply about young people.

The Relevance of the New Hampshire Primary

On Tuesday, voters across New Hampshire will head to the polls to cast their ballot in the first official primary of the 2024 election season. 

New Hampshire Democrats are holding their primary in defiance of the Democratic National Committee's decision to move the first primary to South Carolina. For all intents and purposes, the New Hampshire primary will not count for the Democrats, and incumbent President Joe Biden isn't even on the ballot. For reasons we'll discuss later, this isn't entirely the fault of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. 

The Republicans are holding a contested primary, with former President Donald Trump seeking to become the first candidate since Grover Cleveland to receive a major party nomination in three consecutive elections and the first President since Cleveland to serve two non-consecutive terms. Trump's most notable challenger is former South Carolina governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who finished third in the Iowa Caucuses behind Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis (who quit the race mere minutes before I started writing this piece). Trump is the odds-on favorite - but Haley is mounting a strong campaign in New Hampshire. A Haley win in New Hampshire is plausible, even if unlikely. 

....But does any of this matter in 2024? 

The "First in the Nation" New Hampshire primary has long been a staple of the nominating process. For decades, candidates, their campaigns, and the media have decamped to New Hampshire for months on end, campaigning for the hearts and minds of voters across the Granite State. New Hampshire is a small state, both in population and geography. Candidates have historically taken advantage of this by holding smaller events, even going to people's homes to personally appeal to voters and their neighbors. It is not uncommon to see candidates marching in small-town parades.

And voters have historically rewarded this personal outreach. New Hampshire has revived previously thought-dead campaigns and placed candidates on the path to their party's nomination. Any follower of New Hampshire primary lore is familiar with Jimmy Carter's 1976 primary victory, which was powered by Carter (and his campaign volunteers from Georgia), who vigorously went to every corner of the state. There's also John McCain's victory in 2008 and Bill Clinton's stronger-than-expected performance in the 1992 primary (who earned Clinton the moniker "The Comeback Kid"). There are other examples of candidates over-performing in New Hampshire against establishment candidates, even if they failed to win the nomination (McCain and Bill Bradley in 2000 and Pat Buchanan in 1992 are two examples that come to mind immediately). 

The First in the Nation primary is so embedded within New Hampshire's political culture that its very existence is codified in state law. New Hampshire state law provides that, "[t]he presidential primary election shall be held on the second Tuesday in March or on a date selected by the secretary of state which is 7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election, whichever is earlier, of each year when a president of the United States is to be elected or the year previous." Given the existing state law, New Hampshire Democrats had no choice but to defy the DNC and hold their primary as scheduled. 

For those of us who care about rural issues, the New Hampshire primary holds a special significance. New Hampshire has a higher-than-average percentage of its population living in rural areas and is bordered by two of the four states with a majority rural population (Vermont and Maine). These facts have positioned the New Hampshire primary as a suitable venue for candidates to learn more about issues that uniquely impact rural spaces, which is important for candidates who may represent or govern predominantly urban constituencies. 

The Emergence of Trump 

However, the emergence of Donald Trump has challenged many of our assumptions about the New Hampshire primary. He won the 2016 primary despite engaging in a negligible amount of retail politics. He held large rallies, not house parties. He didn't march in small-town parades, and he did not go to people's homes. He didn't hold town halls, didn't take questions from voters, or open himself up to the traditional vetting process that New Hampshire has long prided itself on having. 

While John Kasich's strong second place (by far his best performance in 2016) indicated that some voters still rewarded personal outreach and engagement, Trump's victory challenged many conventional assumptions about how to be successful in New Hampshire.

The emergence of social media and the increased access to voters that it provided played a huge role in Trump's victory and the upending of the New Hampshire primary's "norms." Through social media, Trump and his surrogates could reach voters like never before. With social media, you do not have to be physically present in someone's home. You could visit them "digitally" by sending a tweet, and your surrogates could use Facebook groups and pages to speak to voters directly. Trump did not have to march in a small town parade because he commanded the attention of those in the virtual town square. Through social media, Trump could reach out to voters from New Hampshire to California with the click of a button. 

Trump also benefited from the nationalization of politics. One of the advantages of the New Hampshire primary has long been the fact that it isn't dominated by one media market. New Hampshire's communities are divided into the media markets in Burlington, Vermont, Portland, Maine, and Boston, Massachusetts. With only television news outlet historically serving the state (WMUR-TV in Manchester), there were few opportunities to utilize media in any kind of macro way. This placed an onus on candidates to do personal outreach and utilize local print media. However, print media circulation in New Hampshire has been declining and people are increasingly turning to national news sources, a process that social media has facilitated. This fact has created a de-emphasis on local issues and an increased importance on national issues, which benefits a candidate like Trump. 

Donald Trump proved that you could win a New Hampshire primary without doing anything that it was thought you needed to do to win. That is a seismic shift. 

If candidates can win in New Hampshire without engaging on local issues, is it still relevant for teaching candidates about rural issues? 

The New Hampshire Primary's Influence

The other side is whether or not the New Hampshire primary is even still influential for voters in other states. Now-President Joe Biden finished 5th and garnered only 8.4% of the vote in 2020. That kind of performance would have killed a campaign in previous cycles. But yet, Biden managed to win the Democratic nomination. The New Hampshire primary also failed to lift the campaign of second place finisher Pete Buttigieg or expand the base of winner Bernie Sanders. After Biden's win in South Carolina, it was almost as if the New Hampshire primary never even happened. 

Even in 2016, you could argue that John Kasich should have gotten a bigger boost from his second place finish. In 1992, Pat Buchanan parlayed his strong showing in New Hampshire into strong showings in other states. John McCain followed up his second place showing in 2000 with a strong second place in South Carolina and wins in other states. Kasich failed to receive any boost from his performance in New Hampshire. 

The question for Tuesday is whether or not a strong showing for Nikki Haley will even matter. Recent history indicates that it may not. 

So....does it matter?

The New Hampshire primary is certainly less relevant than it has been in decades past. Candidates can now bypass the traditional means of reaching voters and rely on nationalized outlets such as social media to "personally" reach out to voters. The impact of this is two-fold. Candidates no longer rely on the increased media coverage from a strong showing in New Hampshire to carry them forward in other states, and candidates can win in New Hampshire without pursuing traditional retail politics. They can also win in New Hampshire without engaging on local issues, missing an opportunity to learn more about issues that rural voters face. These facts have fundamentally reshaped the New Hampshire primary and I would argue that the primary's relevance has significantly declined as a result. 

All of that said, there is still a place for New Hampshire as the First in the Nation primary. Just last year, I wrote a piece in The Daily Yonder in which I called for the pairing of New Hampshire and South Carolina at the top of the calendar. The two states represent stark contrasts in the rural experience. South Carolina has more racial diversity and its agricultural past has been dominated by large scale agriculture. They also have deeper and more persistent poverty; thirteen of South Carolina's forty six counties are persistent poverty counties. New Hampshire has no persistent poverty counties and small-scale, subsistence farming dominate its agricultural past. Both states have similar population densities, though New Hampshire has a larger share of its population living in rural spaces. 

Candidates can still benefit from the exposure to rural concerns, even if the electoral importance of the First in the Nation primary has declined.

The politics of guns in Maine, before and after a mass murder

New York Times screenshot from Oct. 27, 2023

Maine has been very much in the headlines for nearly a week, prompted by the nation's worst mass murder of 2023.  It began at about 7 pm Eastern time on Wednesday night, October 25, when Robert Card, 40, entered a bowling alley in Lewiston (population 37,000) with a semi-automatic weapon and began shooting.  Less than half an hour later, Card entered a bar and grill and used his weapon to kill and wound many others.   

Lewiston, with a population of 37,000, is the state's second largest city (after Portland), and it sits across the river from Auburn, population 24,000, and the county seat of Androscoggin County.  Based on the size of the population cluster, the area hardly sounds rural, but rural is a descriptor that's often been used in coverage of these events.  More often still, I have heard the word "forested" used, which is perhaps more salient with regard to the hunting theme, which I'll unpack below. 

I didn't know much about Maine's gun laws when this disaster began to unfold in the media, but we were soon to learn more.  In short, Maine's gun laws are quite lax, in part because of the state's culture, which values self-reliance and enjoys hunting, two things that happen to be related, to at least some degree.  

In the days since the mass murder, hunting has been very much a part of the story of how officials have responded to this tragedy.   For example, even after the shelter-in-place order was lifted on Friday, hunting was prohibited in the towns of Lewiston, Lisbon, Bowdoin, and Monmouth.  As the New York Times reported (see screenshot above), deer-hunting firearms season had been scheduled to begin on Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023, but it was initially postponed after Wednesday night's events--at least in the Lewiston-Auburn area. 

New York Times Screenshot, Oct. 27, 2023
following the discovery of gunman Robert Card's body 

We've also seen plenty of mentions of the state's "gun culture" in coverage of Wednesday night's events.  One New York Times headline was "After Shooting, Maine Senators in Spotlight on Guns," which included this tidbit.   

The carnage in Lewiston came as a shock to Maine, which the F.B.I., in a statistical update on crime Monday, called the safest state in the country. It also has one of the largest percentages of gun ownership.

The story quotes U.S. Senator Angus King (I-Maine):  

Our state has a long history of responsible gun ownership.

But the most momentous political statement about guns came from Maine's congressman for the state's second district, Jared Golden.  That district is massive, stretching from Lewiston all the way to the Canadian border.  (The state's only other district, the 1st,  includes Portland, just 40 miles south of Lewiston, and points south to Massachusetts). Some would say that Golden, a former Marine, is barely a Democrat.  Certainly, he is a centrist who has straddled a fine line between the two parties--and between rural and urban interests--with his constituents.  That is reflected in these August comments about student loan forgiveness, which he vigorously opposed as in the interests of elites and not in the interests of working-class Mainers who choose not to go to college.  

Well, less than 24 hours after the shooting, Golden, who grew up in Lewiston and attended Bates College there, grabbed the headlines by doing an about-face on his previous position on assault weapons.  As the New York Times reported it, Golden "stunned constituents in his traditionally pro-gun district by "declaring that it was time for him “to take responsibility” for his “failure” to back a ban on assault weapons, “like the one used by the sick perpetrator of this mass killing.”  The full comments, as reported in the (Portland) Press-Herald follow: 

I have opposed efforts to ban deadly weapons of war, like the assault rifle used to carry out this crime. The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure, which is why I now call on the U.S. Congress to ban assault rifles, like the one used by the sick perpetrator of this mass killing in my hometown of Lewiston, Maine.

For the good of my community. I will work with any colleague to get this done in the time that I have left in Congress.

Interestingly, Senator King  acknowledged Congressman Golden's "courage" in shifting his position on assault weapons, but neither he nor Maine's other U.S. Senator, Susan Collins, changed theirs.  In this NPR story, Collins is quoted as suggesting that the state's "yellow flag" law should have caused the shooter's guns to be seized.  We've since learned more about the failure of officials to act adequately on multiple reports that Card was having mental health challenges.

Back to hunting:  It's interesting that a significant aspect of the local news once Card's body was found Friday night was that hunting could resume.  It merited this "public security alert."

Screenshot from New York Times breaking news stream
at 7:55 PM Pacific, Oct. 27, 2023

Cellphones across Lewiston area just dinged with a public safety alert:  "The search is over for Mr. Card.  The caution is over.  Hunting may resume."

Postscript:  On Oct. 31, the New York Times reported under the headline, "After Mass Shooting in Maine, No Clarity on Whether Gun Laws will Change."  Here's a salient excerpt: 

Maine has a strong hunting tradition and high rates of gun ownership. It has also long had one of the lowest murder rates in the country. There were 19 firearm homicides in the state last year — just one more than the number of people who were shot to death in Lewiston in a single day. (Guns were also used in 159 suicides last year, out of 183 total gun deaths in the state.)