A retired Navy commander who registered as a Democrat earlier this year is challenging a Republican businessman and marketing professor in a race that could determine control of the state Senate.

Political newcomer Stu Green grew up in Andover and returned to the small Merrimack County town in 2020 after a 20-year career in the Navy.

Daniel Innis, the Republican incumbent, is a professor and former dean at the University of New Hampshire who has served two Senate terms in two districts. He moved from the Seacoast to a farm in Bradford in 2022 and won the District 7 seat later that year.

The district spans parts of five counties and includes the city of Franklin as well as the towns of Boscawen, Henniker, Newbury, Salisbury, Sutton, Warner, Webster, Wilmot, Danbury, and Hill.

In 2022, Innis carried the last election by nine points, but the district – which was slightly redrawn before the last election cycle – has been held by both Democrats and Republicans over the last decade. With Republicans holding a two-seat majority in the Senate, both state parties have poured money into the race.

Green, a self-described “centrist”, said he decided to run to “repair our political fabric.”

“My mission is to remind us all that we are all Americans – that we have disagreements about policy issues, but we should probably move away from identifying first as a Democrat or as a Republican,” said Green, 49.

Innis, who describes himself as fiscally conservative, has been interested in politics since he was a kid growing up poor in small town Ohio.

“There was railroad track behind my great grandma’s house, and I was fascinated by the whole thing,” said Innis, 61. “The Penn Central Railroad was bankrupt and the government was on the verge of intervening. … And at that point, I think I realized that government can have an out-sized influence on business and industry, and my interest in all of it just took off from there.”

Green has focused on Innis’s record on abortion and his previously expressed doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election. Innis has tried to make the race about taxes, accusing Green of angling to raise existing taxes and implementing new ones like a sales and income tax – claims Green flatly denies.

Both candidates have leveled attacks that the other says are either false or misleading.

On the Issues: Taxes

Innis and Green have spent much of their campaign squabbling over whether Green wants to raise taxes. Big yellow signs dot roads from Newbury to Boscawen proclaiming in big block letters: “Stu Green HIGHER TAXES.”

Green said that message misrepresents his view on taxes and that in fact he wants to lower taxes on those of low and medium wealth.

“I’ve never argued for higher taxes,” Green said in an interview. “All I’ve said is stop the blood loss, stop cutting taxes for people that don’t need it cut, and for God’s sake, lower the taxes for the 99 percent of us.”

Contrary to Republican Party campaign mailers, Green would not support a traditional income or sales tax, he said. He also said he is not inclined to support re-introducing a tax on investment income, which is in the process of being phased out, though he felt its wholesale repeal was “fiscally irresponsible.”

Green also does not plan to support raising the business profits tax, except potentially for mega-corporations like Apple, Walmart, and Amazon.

Innis on Sunday accused Green of supporting taxes on bottles and digital downloads, both claims that Green said are inaccurate. While he opposes implementing a traditional sales tax, Green said he remained undecided on whether to support any increase to the meals and room tax, which is currently set at 8.5%.

“I’d have to look at the issue closer because if we raise it, it could have an effect on tourism, which we depend on,” Green said. “On the other hand, the room and meals tax tends to be targeted more towards out-of-staters, so it’s easier to justify raising that.”

Education

Green said he supports a court decision currently before the state Supreme Court that would force the state to nearly double the per-pupil money it sends local school districts. Innis warned that if the state Supreme Court upholds that decision it could cripple the state budget.

“There will be major cuts made, and it will be a very difficult situation for everybody,” Innis said.

While both Green and Innis said they generally support lowering the education portion of local property taxes, Green is advocating for more standardization of tax rates, which would lead towns with higher property values to “pay their fair share,” he said.

The candidates also diverge on education freedom accounts, which allow families making below 350 percent of the federal poverty level to re-allocate a portion of their child’s education funding from their local public school to pay for private school or homeschooling.

“For me, this is about helping kids who aren’t rich to get the same private school opportunities that the rich kids have,” said Innis, who supports the accounts and described the amount of money they divert from public schools as a “rounding error.”

In contrast, Green expressed interest in reining in the spending directed away from public schools. The cost of the program has increased from $8.1 million in 2021, the year it was launched, to $22.1 million last year, which he expects will continue to rise. It remains a small fraction of the $1 billion the state spends from its Education Trust Fund.

“If people think their property taxes are bad now, wait until the next couple of years, unless of course, we are able to stop some of this stuff,” Green said.

On another school funding topic, Innis offered an out-of-box proposal. He recommended the Franklin School District, which routinely struggles to fund its schools, merge its high school with Winnisquam Regional High School, and turn Franklin High into a trade school.

Abortion

Innis voted during the previous term against a constitutional amendment that would have granted New Hampshire residents the “right to personal reproductive autonomy” and against a bill that would have repealed criminal penalties for healthcare providers who perform abortions after 24 weeks.

Innis said he is “fine with our current law,” which neither protects nor prohibits abortions up to 24 weeks.

In contrast, Green supports passing a legal protection for abortion, such as via a constitutional amendment like the one Innis opposes.

State budget

Facing a potential budget shortfall due to the end of pandemic relief funding, neither candidate had a plan for what spending they would eliminate first in the event cuts were warranted.

Green said he hopes to generate additional revenue via a tax on marijuana, which both candidates support legalizing.

“If you’re looking at legalizing marijuana simply as a source of revenue, you’re doing it for the wrong reason,” Innis said.

Innis didn’t provide any revenue-generating plans but he touted his ability to navigate a $1 million budget cut while dean of UNH’s Peter T. Paul College of Business.

“No one felt it, because I’m a good manager,” he said.

The 2020 Election

The Democratic party has accused Innis of being “a threat to democracy,” pointing to his doubts about the results of the 2020 election.

In December 2020, Innis posted on Twitter: “I do NOT accept the presidential election result anymore. It is an attempt at a coup.”

However, Innis acknowledged in an interview last week that “Biden won” that election.

Transgender girls in sports

Innis, along with the rest of the senators in his party, supported a bill signed into law this summer that bans transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams starting in fifth grade.

One of the handful of transgender girls whom that law impacts is in Senate District 7, though her school district, Kearsarge Regional, has allowed her to continue playing, citing a potential conflict with the federal Title IX law.

“That’s not the school’s job to discuss that,” said Innis, who is gay. “I mean come on. The school can say what they want. We passed a law and it’s the law of the land in the state of New Hampshire.”

Green questioned why Republicans prioritized the issue when there are so few transgender girls in the state.

“I don’t care what you believe. These are laws that are targeting an extreme minority of kids and people,” he said.

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.