Meet Carleigh
Carleigh lives on the New Hampshire Seacoast with her husband Eric, a proud public middle school English teacher, and their two kids. She teaches about history, religion, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a former union organizer who helped found UAW Local 5118, organizing Harvard’s graduate student workers and winning higher wages, childcare subsidies, and anti-retaliation protections for thousands of workers.
She is the Chair of the Hampton Select Board, a very purple community and the second largest polling place in the district, where she sees up close how decisions made in Concord and Washington land in local budgets, schools, and families. She has served on the budget committee and pored over every line looking for ways to save property taxpayers money.
She is the only candidate for federal office in the United States running without social media. She quit Facebook years ago after watching people who would have gotten along in person tear each other apart online. She knows the more conflict these platforms create, the more money they make, and she’s not going to play that game. Not a penny raised by this campaign goes to Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Every dollar goes to organizing in the district and listening to people across the political spectrum.
She has recruited over 350 volunteers across NH-1. Her campaign is powered by dance parties, spaghetti dinners, postcard writing, button-making, a social media-free February, and a simple conviction: that politics at its best is about listening, organizing, building power, and enacting change.
Carleigh’s Record
Carleigh graduated from Mount Holyoke College in three years, then taught at a public school in the Marshall Islands, a community still living with the legacy of U.S. nuclear testing and on the front lines of climate change. That experience sharpened a lesson she carries with her: it is not enough to name what is broken. You have to build something better.
She earned her Master’s from Harvard Divinity School and her PhD from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She has spent her career studying the consequences of U.S. military action, teaching about international conflict and diplomacy, and living in communities scarred by the choices leaders make from far away.
Delivering Results for Hampton Families
Carleigh defeated two Republican incumbents to win a seat on the Hampton Select Board and has used that position to take on difficult issues and deliver real results for her community.
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Carleigh led the effort to withdraw Hampton from a coalition of wealthy towns that was lobbying the state to make education funding less equitable. Hampton was the coalition’s third-largest funder. When she first brought the proposal forward, it was voted down 4–1. She kept organizing and making the case, ultimately securing a unanimous 5–0 vote to withdraw. The decision helped shut down the coalition’s influence and aligned Hampton with a more equitable approach to public education funding.
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Carleigh worked with her fellow board members to reach a unanimous 5–0 decision to support keeping ICE out of Hampton, reinforcing the town’s commitment to safety, trust, and community cohesion.
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Carleigh is the co-founder of the Hampton Alliance for Thriving Children, connecting parents of young kids with the resources they need to ensure their children are safe, healthy, and set up to succeed.
Why She’s Running
About a year before she launched her campaign, Carleigh’s daughter became close friends with the girl next door. The girl had moved in after her mom was hit by a car, spent months in the hospital, and lost her job, her health insurance, and their home. Carleigh spent the better part of a year trying to help them find a place to live. They ended up moving to a city 45 minutes away. That experience taught her firsthand how broken our housing system is, and how the barriers to helping people are created or made worse by broken policies and politicians who seem to want to help themselves and nobody else.
Since launching her campaign, Carleigh has put over 15,000 miles on her car (double the distance of a flight from here to Tokyo) holding conversations in living rooms, union halls, church basements, driveways, libraries, and coffee shops across NH-1. She doesn’t do quick campaign appearances where a candidate drops in, delivers a few rehearsed lines, and disappears. She shows up. She stays. She answers questions, a lot of them. And she asks one question everywhere she goes: what do you wish politicians understood better about your life?
The answers are consistent. People are exhausted. They are fighting insurance companies for coverage they already paid for. They are watching housing costs spiral out of reach. They are trying to budget for groceries, heat, and childcare, and there is nothing left at the end of the month. They are furious about the dismantling of public education. They are worried about neighbors being snatched from their homes by ICE. They hate the sense of dread that seems to follow everyone everywhere.
And here is the thing Carleigh keeps telling people: it isn’t only Democrats saying this. In NH-1, 40% of voters are independent, a number that keeps climbing, and she hears the same frustration from Democrats, independents, and Republicans alike. The divide isn’t between regular people. It’s between regular people and a political system that too often ignores them.
The country we want to live in is right in front of us. In Carleigh’s neighborhood, people look out for each other. They pick your kids up from the school bus when you’re running late from work. They bring over homemade BBQ and talk to you over the back fence. They run for local office and serve with integrity. Why, when the majority of Americans agree that they want to live in a country where everyone has healthcare, earns a living wage, has a good school to send their kids, and can care for their aging relatives, do we still live in a country where millions are holding on by their fingernails?
Maybe it’s because most congressional candidates spend most of their time looking for people with $7,000 checks and an agenda. Maybe it’s because of all 435 congressional seats, NH-01 is one of the only races where the outcome isn’t decided before the race is run. Maybe it’s because politicians spend more time trying to go viral on social media than actually listening to the people in their district.
More of the same won’t fix this. Better politics are possible if we support candidates willing to do politics differently.
NH-1 doesn’t need just someone who will fight against what we don’t want. It needs someone who will fight for something better. Carleigh is running because this seat is open, it’s competitive, it’s critical for flipping the House, and because what happens in this race will shape everything from reproductive freedom to voting rights to labor rights to whether working families get actual relief or more of the same.