The job asked for eight years leading youth treatment or rehabilitation programs. Joshua Nye’s résumé showed one, led for eighteen months. Lori Weaver, Governor Ayotte’s health commissioner, vouched to the Council for “over 25 years of experience in clinical settings, in both direct care and executive leadership roles” — an answer to a different question than the posting asked. The Council confirmed him anyway, without a dissenting vote, to run the state’s locked unit for children: the Sununu Youth Services Center. Against it and its predecessor, more than 2,200 abuse claims have been filed; demands on the settlement fund top $2 billion. Of three finalists, one withdrew, one fell out over a background-check issue. Nobody called Vinfen, the employer behind the only qualifying line on his résumé. That failure is the administration’s first. The Council exists to catch it.

Within months the Child Advocate, her office cut from nine staff to four in the budget Ayotte signed the year before, went public with what youth and staff were telling her: movement restricted for weeks, schooling cut back, a child’s bone broken in a restraint. A Republican-led legislative subcommittee put its verdict in one sentence: “There is an extreme failure of leadership in the facility that falls squarely on the bureau chief.” Nye resigned the next day.

On July 7 the attorney general released a five-month, forty-interview investigation — none of the interviews with children at the facility. In places it cut against the Child Advocate’s alarm, finding the facility within legal boundaries and tracing the March 17 injury to the youth punching a window, not to staff. It did not cut against the hire. On that, it reads like the reference call no one made: Nye “likely lacked the sophistication and experience” for the job, inside a dysfunction that predated and outlasted him. It priced the job: a new youth counselor starts at $19.96 an hour to supervise youth held for offenses up to and including murder; a new prison corrections officer starts at $29.50. Everyone got a scapegoat; the confirmation that installed him got a pass. So did the cover letter.

That was one confirmation. The same Council ran off a commissioner the business community fought to keep, and elevated the deputy of the agency that argues utility cases to the chair who rules on them.

Only Massachusetts still elects anything comparable, and its council signs the treasury’s warrants without reading the contracts behind them — approval voters stripped from it in 1964. New Hampshire’s, seated since 1784, reads them one by one. The power is not the scandal; the standard attached to it is. Watch where the scrutiny lands: on a videographer’s invoice and a line in a childcare contract, not on the electric bill or the childcare slot, the things residents carry. A theatrical no runs into the millions — federal money forfeited, providers paying out of pocket, a locked unit left short — and costs the councilor nothing. A reference call costs nothing at all. Only one of them gets filmed.

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The Reason Was a Photo Contract

Last summer three Republicans — John Stephen, David Wheeler, and Joe Kenney — refused Taylor Caswell a third term at business and economic affairs, mid-tariff war, exports to Canada down 42.6 percent in the first half of the year. Ayotte professed “full confidence” in her commissioner, withdrew the nomination rather than put it to a vote, said she was optimistic about bringing it back, and never did; by mid-October he was gone. Their joint case, in NH Journal, ran four counts: budget priorities, rural development, fiscal mismanagement, agency culture. Under fiscal mismanagement they listed the contracts by price — $4 million in tourism photography, $8 million for a consulting firm’s business portal, $1.2 million for out-of-state consultants — each one rejected. Three signatures on a document proving they read every invoice. That December they read a cover letter and stopped. Wheeler’s showcase version, from an Americans for Prosperity stage: “We had numerous photographers come to us and say, ‘Hey, we’ll do it for free.’”

The men who combed Caswell’s spending pushed him out over the objections of the Union Leader’s editorial page and the one Republican backing him, Janet Stevens. Then they waved the bureau chief through.

The diligence is real when it wants to be. Wheeler says he twice killed a $2.1 million taser lease after pricing it with one call to his Milford police chief. Stephen sank Caswell with a binder of interviews: “I’ve done my homework.” None of it reached the stranger handed a locked youth facility — not even from the councilor who, as HHS commissioner, oversaw the building of it. The only reference call in this record went to a police chief, about tasers. Vinfen’s phone never rang.

The next confirmation arrived pre-flagged.

New Hampshire’s residential electric rates are among the nation’s highest. In January Ayotte nominated a new chair for the commission that rules on them; in March the Council confirmed him. Asked about impartiality, Christopher Ellms Jr. said: “me doing my job well means that I’m not going to buck the desires of my bosses.” The one quality a quasi-judicial officer exists to embody, made conditional. Ellms had been DOE’s deputy commissioner since 2021, and DOE argues before the commission regularly: a structural conflict, nominated anyway. Stephen named the nominee’s “lack of background in engineering, law, or finance,” then voted to confirm — to preserve, he said, “the independence of an adjudicatory process.” The only no was Karen Liot Hill’s, the Democrat who pressed the conflict. Four confirmed him.

Disclosure: the author submitted written testimony to the Executive Council opposing this nomination, published separately on Granite Perspectives.

The scrutiny that missed a bureau chief’s résumé killed federal money for childcare quality training: $1,276,128, blocked by Stephen, Wheeler, and Kenney. Wheeler’s objection: DEI language in the materials of the Pyramid Model Consortium, which trains the state’s childcare teachers. DHHS Associate Commissioner Chris Santaniello explained the language meant “equal access to childcare for all children.” Wheeler would not approve “politically correct teachings.” Tabled May 6, dead May 20.

Challenged by providers, Stephen pointed to $15 million in federal TANF reserves for worker bonuses. He solicited a federal ruling; on July 27 it arrived, addressed to him: the reserves cannot legally be transferred. The current-year money that can be is already committed by the state’s own budget to childcare scholarships. Kenney and Stephen, in print the next day: “Nothing about that vote interrupted a single training session.” The state’s Bureau of Child Development had paused enrollment June 18: an estimated $2.3 million in losses across 132 programs, providers paying out of pocket for the training and compliance the contract covered. Stephen, on the federal answer he had solicited: “There’s nothing that changed my mind; it reinforced the bottom line.” An amended contract is due back before the Council within weeks.

Five Convictions, Two Men

On June 17 the allegation outran the homework: Stephen and Stevens announced on camera that a temporary counselor at the Sununu Center held five sexual-assault convictions under an alias. DHHS legal ran the names: Stephen had conflated a convicted felon who never worked for the state with an innocent employee. Flagging a suspected predator in a locked unit is the instinct the job wants; checking the name first is the other half — missing at the hire, missing again here.

The Council tabled the $1.3 million Amergis staffing contract anyway, 4–1, freezing at least eighteen temporary counselors against a 53 percent vacancy rate among full-time counselor posts — 46 on staff, many out injured. Two weeks into the freeze, the other oversight body with independent access inside the building wrote to the governor by name. In a July 1 letter to Ayotte and Weaver, the Disability Rights Center documented a child secluded roughly ten hours without a bathroom, the puddle of urine still on the floor; a child restrained roughly twelve; dried blood on the walls of rooms where children had harmed themselves; armed troopers standing routine posts — and warned of a “substantial and continuing risk of serious harm” absent immediate correction. Six days later the attorney general described a center unable to safely contain its incidents; the day after, the Council reinstated the contract unanimously. Weaver’s summary to the councilors who froze her staffing: “we’re running dangerously low right now.”

On July 17 a thirteen-year-old had his femur broken by another resident. The facility’s own clinical director had recommended the assailant be supervised by a clinical coach; one staff member was watching when it happened. The boy went to surgery. The clinical director resigned, citing ethical concerns. About a week later a staffer had her teeth kicked in. Juvenile parole officers now cover posts the counselors cannot fill.

Victoria Sullivan, the Republican whose subcommittee forced Nye out, called on the Council to remove Weaver and DCYF director Marie Noonan. “They cannot be trusted and failed as leaders.” The mechanism exists — RSA 4:1: any one councilor may petition to remove an unclassified official; removal takes three, in concurrence with the governor. None petitioned. Firing Ayotte’s commissioner required Ayotte’s concurrence, and the demand went nowhere. Eight days later Weaver and the governor announced repairs: ten hires, body cameras repurposed from Corrections. And Ayotte said where the blame went: “The staffing was delayed somewhat by — at least the staffing contract by the Executive Council.” Listen to the correction midstream. The staffing contract was the Council’s doing. The staffing — the $19.96, the vacancies her commissioner blames on eight years of budget cuts, the bureau chief her department packaged — was not.

The Council can vet a nomination when it wants to. On March 2 it gave Ayotte’s first pick for child advocate, Diana Fenton, a public hearing. The fight over her surfaced what the governor’s vetting had not: a Judicial Conduct Committee reprimand of Fenton’s husband, a judge, for trying to use his position to speed the couple’s own guardianship case. “I know Diana and her background,” the governor said afterward. “I was unaware of her husband’s background.” The sentence is the vetting. Fenton withdrew the next day. No vote was needed.

Ayotte had announced in January that she would not renominate Cassandra Sanchez; holdover law did the rest. Sanchez left July 24 after six months in holdover, the longest the state says the law allows, her office’s final report on the facility not yet drafted, still waiting on records from DCYF and the facility itself. Her deputy puts the report “certainly weeks but maybe months” away. Five days later the Council confirmed a ninety-day interim, unanimously. Stephen’s account of why: “I have known Chief Aldenberg for a long time. He has never disappointed in anything he has been asked to do.” Kim Rice, of the subcommittee that wrote “extreme failure of leadership,” had doubts two days earlier: families with prior police contact may not call a former chief. Liot Hill interviewed him first, then voted yes.

Acquaintance is Concord’s background check.

The state is running out of ways to check itself. On August 4, U.S. Rep. Maggie Goodlander asked the U.S. Department of Justice to open a Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act investigation into past and current conditions at the Sununu Center. Behind the request is the conflict Concord will not resolve: a state Justice Department investigating the facility while defending the state against its victims in court, and appealing one survivor’s $38 million jury verdict down to $475,000. The budget Ayotte signed did not resolve that conflict; it consolidated it, moving the settlement fund’s oversight out of the judicial branch and under the governor, and handing the attorney general veto power over settlements. When the state writes its own version of events, outside authority eventually gets called in.

Stephen’s Own District

The same pattern holds on the roads. In December the ten-year-plan commission — the five councilors plus the transportation commissioner — was handed a roughly $400 million hole in the Highway Fund and a governor who ruled tolls off the table. The shortage is real: 34 Highway Fund projects eliminated, $106 million worth; another $199 million delayed; the municipal bridge grants paused. The plan still went to the Legislature with no new revenue and about thirteen new projects; eleven came to about $22 million, and the other two — the I-89/93 upgrade in Concord and I-293 Exits 6 and 7 in Manchester, Stephen’s own project — were turnpike jobs only a toll increase could fund, restored anyway. “The money just wasn’t there,” said David Milz, the Derry Republican who chairs House Public Works. The councilor with the binder of homework restored his own district’s interchange into a plan that could not pay for it. The Legislature twice passed the tolls to cover him — once in a standalone bipartisan bill, once in a floor amendment writing the exits into the plan to the dollar. Ayotte vetoed both, July 2 and July 10. Stephen has tied the exits to the Sununu Center property’s sale and promised to get them “put back in”; the commission did, without money. Written into the plan twice, funded never. The override votes come Wednesday.

Budget writers counted on up to $80 million from that sale without writing it into law — no offer on record, no appraisal, proceeds the state’s own fiscal note calls “indeterminable.” The budget put $20 million into the victims’ settlement fund in year one and nothing in year two, and gave the proceeds two destinations: the General Fund in one section, the victims’ fund in another. The Legislature’s fix chose the treasury; Ayotte vetoed it, quoting the budget’s own settlement-fund provision back at its authors — the right call, one year after she signed the contradiction herself. The fund, 1,700 claimants waiting, has $4 million left to spend over the next year, and Cushman & Wakefield’s sales clock runs two. Weyler, the Republican House Finance chair: “Putting an amount into the budget from the sale of a property almost never works.” The councilor who restored the interchange tied the sale to the exits. His party’s budget already counted the money.

The “extreme failure of leadership” verdict belongs to a Republican-led subcommittee. The finding that Nye was in over his head belongs to Ayotte’s own Justice Department. The demand to remove her commissioner belongs to the Republican who ran that subcommittee. The push to keep Caswell came from a Republican councilor. The doubt about the interim child advocate came from a Republican on the same subcommittee. The verdict that the exits broke the plan comes from the Republican who chairs House Public Works. Every one carries a Republican’s name. So do four of the five seats. So does the corner office.

The verdicts are independent. The image is not. Four months before the bureau chief’s confirmation, and seventeen days after running their joint case against Caswell, NH Journal headlined Stephen and Wheeler “Fiscal Watchdogs.” Their meetings reach the public at youtube.com/@NHExecutiveCouncil — not the state’s channel but Chris Maidment’s: a consultant to Stephen and Wheeler, fiscal agent of Stephen’s campaign, filming on cameras borrowed from AFP. The state posts agendas and minutes; the only gavel-to-gavel video is his. It’s also their own press shop. The bark has an audience, and the audience owns the camera.

That’s the scrutiny that reaches a camera. What doesn’t: the reference call, the experience line no one checked, the removal demand that removed no one. The one time the conflict was pressed on the record, the vote was 4–1 to confirm.

They read the invoice line by line. They never read the résumé.

Wednesday the Council convenes, and the Legislature decides whether the governor’s vetoes hold. By afternoon they all go home. The teenager in the locked unit, the daycare director, the ratepayer, the counselor at $19.96 an hour do not. The Council exists to be the check on the governor. Between elections, almost nothing is the check on the Council. At the Sununu Center, this term, nobody was the check on anybody.

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Sources & Notes

The Executive Council unanimously approved Joshua Nye as bureau chief of the Sununu Youth Services Center at its December 17, 2025 meeting (Executive Council minutes; Union Leader, May 20, 2026; AG Report, July 7, 2026). The appointment came to the Council as a request from DHHS Commissioner Lori Weaver citing RSA 94:6, effective January 23, 2026 upon Governor and Council approval. RSA 94:6 is a compensation statute, not a nominating-authority statute: it provides that a new appointee’s entrance salary is set at the minimum of the established range unless, on the appointing authority’s recommendation, “the governor and council shall establish, after due and proper investigation as to qualifications, a different entrance salary within the established range” (RSA 94:6, gc.nh.gov, verified against the statute text). Weaver’s cover letter stated Nye had “over 25 years of experience in clinical settings, in both direct care and executive leadership roles” (DHHS request letter in the Council agenda packet, quoted in InDepthNH, April 9, 2026; document obtained and published by NHPR). Weaver, appointed under Sununu, serves under Ayotte; “Ayotte’s health commissioner” refers to current service. The job posting sought at least eight years leading youth treatment or rehabilitation programs; Nye’s résumé showed one such program led for about eighteen months (NHPR, April 20, 2026). Of three finalists, one dropped out and one was eliminated over a background-check issue (AG Report, pp.15–16). Vinfen CEO Jean Yang, whose company employed Nye on that program, said the state never contacted Vinfen about him (NHPR, April 20, 2026). More than 2,200 claims have been filed against the settlement fund tied to the Sununu Youth Services Center and its predecessor; total dollar demands exceed $2 billion; as of May 2026, 425 claims had been settled for roughly $240 million, with about 1,600 pending (Boston Globe, January 2026; InDepthNH, May 7, 2026; NHPR, June 9, 2026). “Claims” and “claimants” are distinct counts, used as such; August 2026 congressional and advocacy correspondence cites lower figures on a different basis, not used here.

The Child Advocate’s March 30, 2026 letter documented a lockdown of “approximately a month and a half,” restricted schooling, and a March 17 restraint incident involving a broken bone (Office of the Child Advocate, Cassandra Sanchez, March 30, 2026). The state budget signed by Gov. Ayotte in June 2025 cut $500,000 from the Office of the Child Advocate, reducing its staff from nine to four; Sanchez has held the role since 2022 (reported alongside Gov. Ayotte’s January 2026 announcement that Sanchez would not be reappointed, via Yahoo News/NH Bulletin). That the governor signed the budget is confirmed in her own words — her SB 481 veto message begins “The budget I signed last year stated...” (governor.nh.gov release, July 10, 2026). The Attorney General’s July 7, 2026 report, after a five-month, forty-interview investigation, found SYSC “operating within legal boundaries” and attributed the March 17 injury to the youth punching a window rather than staff conduct, while separately finding “significant operational challenges and dysfunction” and insufficient staffing. “None of the interviews with children”: Rep. Goodlander’s Aug. 4, 2026 letter states the review “did not include interviews with children at the facility” (goodlander.house.gov, Aug. 4, 2026); the characterization is hers and is undisputed in the coverage reviewed. On Nye, the report states: “Though the various problems at SYSC all existed before BC Nye’s arrival, we found that he likely lacked the sophistication and experience to adequately address them” (AG Report, July 7, 2026; quoted in Union Leader, NH Journal, and Manchester Ink Link, July 2026). The report’s finding on the facility’s legal status is contested; this piece reports it as the AG’s conclusion, not settled fact. Sanchez has publicly disputed it, saying the report placed blame “on the children almost completely” (NH Bulletin, August 3, 2026). “There is an extreme failure of leadership in the facility that falls squarely on the bureau chief” is the finding of an ad-hoc legislative subcommittee chaired by Sen. Victoria Sullivan (R-Manchester), with Reps. Kim Rice and Jodi Nelson and one non-legislator member, Lisa Wolford, executive director of the Children’s Law Center of New Hampshire, convened by Senate President Sharon Carson (R-Londonderry); the three legislators are all Republicans (NHPR, May 20, 2026; Concord Monitor, Jeremy Margolis, May 19, 2026). The department contested the panel’s report, telling the oversight commission it “was based on partial or inaccurate information and had omitted contradictory facts the department provided” (NHPR, May 29, 2026). Nye resigned May 20, 2026, the day after the panel called for his replacement (Union Leader and InDepthNH, May 20, 2026).

The state pays a new youth counselor a minimum of $19.96/hour to supervise youth held for offenses “up to and including murder”; a new state corrections officer’s minimum is $61,360 annually, or $29.50/hour (AG Report, July 7, 2026).

The Executive Council’s approval authority over gubernatorial appointments and state expenditures derives from the 1784 Constitution (NH Constitution, Part II); the current threshold of Council review for contracts of $10,000 or more is modern practice under statute, not a 1784 grant (council.nh.gov). Councilors are elected to two-year terms from five districts (council.nh.gov). Massachusetts’s Governor’s Council, the only comparable elected body, “meets weekly to record advice and consent on warrants for the state treasury, pardons and commutations,” and gubernatorial appointments (mass.gov, Governor’s Council); it does not approve contracts. Its statutory authority over “various fiscal acts and contracts made by the executive branch” was, “with a few exceptions,” “repealed by St 1964, c 740” (Massachusetts Archives, Governor’s Council record-group finding aid, sec.state.ma.us); the repeal was enacted by voter initiative — Question 5, approved November 3, 1964 (Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, statewide ballot-measure records) — the basis for “approval voters stripped from it in 1964.”

Councilors John Stephen, David Wheeler, and Joe Kenney opposed Gov. Ayotte’s nomination of Taylor Caswell to a third term as BEA commissioner. At the Council’s late-July 2025 meeting in Pittsburg, Ayotte — saying “Commissioner Caswell has my full confidence. I think he has done an excellent job” — withdrew the nomination rather than proceed to a vote; no Council vote was ever taken, and Caswell entered holdover status (Union Leader, “Business commissioner’s renomination hits GOP roadblock,” July 2025). She told reporters she was “optimistic about bringing the matter back to the council for a vote” (Union Leader, July 30, 2025); no renomination followed. He resigned Oct. 1, 2025, effective Oct. 17 (Union Leader; Boston Globe, Oct. 1, 2025). Janet Stevens was the only Republican who backed him; the Union Leader’s editorial page argued for reappointment (”Reappoint Caswell: Bid to oust him wrongheaded,” editorial, August 2025). The three councilors published a joint op-ed, “New Hampshire Needs New Leadership at the BEA” (NH Journal, Aug. 1, 2025; republished by Patch, Aug. 4, 2025), announcing “we have decided to oppose the renomination of Taylor Caswell” and calling for “fresh leadership to address critical shortcomings and seize untapped opportunities for economic growth.” Its four section headers: “Misaligned Budget Priorities,” “Neglect of Rural Development,” “Fiscal Mismanagement,” “Agency Culture and Leadership Gaps.” Under fiscal mismanagement, verbatim: “The Executive Council has repeatedly had to reject overpriced contracts brought forward by the BEA — including $4 million in proposed tourism photography contracts, an $8 million contract for a high-priced consulting firm to develop a business service portal, and most recently, a $1.2 million research contract for overpriced out-of-state consultants to tell us how to market our own state.” The op-ed contains no discussion of personnel vetting. NH Journal ran the op-ed Aug. 1 and the “Fiscal Watchdogs” headline Aug. 18 — seventeen days apart, same outlet. The business community’s support was on the record: the BIA submitted a formal letter to the Executive Council backing Caswell’s reappointment two days before the July 30, 2025 meeting, with President Michael Skelton writing, “Not a week goes by where our teams are not in touch and working collaboratively on key issues like housing, child care, workforce development and business recruitment”; Ski New Hampshire’s president also endorsed him (NHBR, Paul Briand, Aug. 22, 2025; Concord Monitor, Aug. 1, 2025). At an Americans for Prosperity–NH roundtable, Wheeler cited a $4 million contract to photograph and film the state: “We had numerous photographers come to us and say, ‘Hey, we’ll do it for free.’” (NH Journal, Aug. 18, 2025). At the same roundtable, Wheeler described twice killing a $2.1 million, ten-year lease of 195 tasers (roughly $10,000/unit against the roughly $2,000 his Milford police chief reported paying), and Stephen described his general approach to reviewing every contract: “if you don’t do your homework, they’re going to pull one over on you” (NH Journal, Aug. 18, 2025; the taser figures are Wheeler’s own account, not independently verified). Separately, on the Caswell nomination itself, Stephen described interviewing supporters and opponents into a binder of notes: “I’ve done my homework” (Union Leader, Aug. 1, 2025) — a different quote, from a different source, about a different subject than the contract-review remark above. Caswell was vice chair of the NH Canadian Trade Council and joined Ayotte’s Canada trade mission in Sept. 2025 (NHPR, Feb. 9, 2026). The export figure and its window, verbatim: “By June 2025, exports to Canada for the year were 42.6% lower than at the same point in 2024” — first-half 2025 against first-half 2024, contemporaneous with the councilors’ opposition (Ethan DeWitt, NH Bulletin, Aug. 29, 2025). Canada is NH’s largest trading partner by two-way trade; by exports alone Germany has led since 2024 (USTR NH fact sheet, 2025).

On March 4, 2026, the Council confirmed Christopher Ellms Jr. as PUC chair, 4–1; Karen Liot Hill cast the only no, citing his conflict — Ellms had been deputy commissioner of the Department of Energy, which regularly appears as a party before the PUC, since 2021 (NH Bulletin; NHBR, March 4, 2026). Ayotte nominated him in late January 2026 (NH Bulletin, Jan. 28, 2026). Asked about impartiality, Ellms said: “me doing my job well means that I’m not going to buck the desires of my bosses,” and, offered a second chance, “If I’m independent, I will be independent” (NH Bulletin; Valley News, March 4–5, 2026). Stephen named Ellms’s “lack of background in engineering, law, or finance,” then voted to confirm to preserve “the independence of an adjudicatory process” (Concord Monitor, March 3–4, 2026). New Hampshire’s residential electricity prices rank among the nation’s highest (EIA). Before DOE, Ellms ran operations on Sununu’s gubernatorial campaign and served as legislative director (NH Bulletin, Jan. 28, 2026).

On May 6, 2026, the Council tabled a fully federally funded amendment to a Pyramid Model Consortium childcare-training contract; the contract failed May 20 (NH Bulletin, Maya Mitchell, May 6, 2026; Governor and Council Quick Results, Item 68). The amendment’s exact value is $1,276,128 (NH Bulletin, May 6, 2026, story text) — the source of both roundings in circulation: the Bulletin’s own $1.2 million headline and the $1.3 million in Councilors Kenney and Stephen’s op-ed and provider Ana Byers’s op-ed. Wheeler’s concerns prompted the tabling: he objected to the consortium’s DEI language (”Without seeing the curriculum, I can’t support this item”) and said he wouldn’t approve a contract with “politically correct teachings”; DHHS Associate Commissioner Chris Santaniello said the language covered “equal access to childcare for all children” (NH Bulletin, May 6, 2026). That Stephen, Wheeler, and Kenney cast the votes against the contract — 3–2, the second time in eight months the department had brought it forward — is reported by the Bulletin and confirmed by the councilors’ own account (NH Bulletin, Maya Mitchell, Aug. 10, 2026; Kenney and Stephen, NH Journal, July 28, 2026; Byers, Union Leader, Aug. 11, 2026). Councilor Stephen publicly argued for using $15 million in federal TANF reserves for childcare worker bonuses; the $15 million was appropriated from TANF funds over two years in the June 2025 state budget for workforce grants — bonuses, health accounts, tuition discounts (NH Bulletin, Maya Mitchell, Aug. 6, 2026). The appropriation and the delivery mechanism are distinct: the ACF letter ruled on the transfer mechanics, and per the Bulletin the adopted budget already “maximized the TANF transfer” to keep scholarship families off a waitlist, leaving “no leftover funds for the workforce grant” (NH Bulletin, Aug. 6, 2026). Stephen requested a federal ruling after traveling to Washington; the Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Child Care (director Wendy Horman) responded directly to him on July 27, 2026: prior-year reserve TANF funds cannot be transferred to the Child Care and Development Fund; only current-year funds may be, and transferred funds could lawfully pay workforce bonuses. DHHS Commissioner Weaver: “While the ACF confirmed two lawful federal pathways — the use of current year TANF transferred to CCDF, and certain CCDF discretionary carryover — the Department is prohibited from utilizing these pathways under New Hampshire’s adopted budget”; redirecting them “would require reducing assistance to eligible families” (NH Bulletin, Aug. 6, 2026). The ~$11.5 million annual transfer-cap figure is Byers’s description of the letter (Ana Byers, CPA, East Side Learning Center, Union Leader, Aug. 11, 2026), not the Bulletin’s; the letter is not public. “Nothing about that vote interrupted a single training session” — John Stephen and Joe Kenney, “The $15 Million We Promised New Hampshire’s Child Care Professionals,” NH Journal, July 28, 2026, one day after the ACF letter; the op-ed also argues the training program was already funded through June 2028 and that “two of its three tracks were untouched.” “There’s nothing that changed my mind; it reinforced the bottom line” — Stephen, after the federal response; Kenney, in the same story: “We can’t be this hocus pocus in the budget process” (NH Bulletin, Aug. 10, 2026). The Bureau of Child Development paused enrollment June 18; bureau chief Jessica Carver estimated a $2.3 million collective loss across 132 programs (NH Bulletin, June 29, 2026). Byers reports new programs locked out of the state’s quality system, after-school programs without dedicated coaches, and providers paying out of pocket for training, credentialing, and compliance costs (Byers, Aug. 11, 2026). “An amended contract is due back before the Council within weeks”: “An amended version of the May 6 contract is expected to come before the council in the next few weeks” (NH Bulletin, Aug. 10, 2026). No amended contract had returned to the Council as of this writing.

On June 17, 2026, Councilors Stephen and Stevens alleged at a public meeting that a temporary Amergis counselor at the Sununu Center held five 2011 felony sexual-assault convictions and had worked under an alias; Stephen supplied the names. DHHS chief legal officer Melissa St. Cyr found they belonged to two different men — one a current employee with no record, the other a convicted man who had never worked for the state (Union Leader, June 17/19, 2026; NHPR, June 17, 2026). The department reasserted its findings in a June 17 statement (DHHS statement via spokesman Jake Leon, Union Leader, June 19, 2026), and Weaver reaffirmed them to the Council on July 8. The Council tabled a $1.3 million extension for at least eighteen Amergis counselors 4–1 — Liot Hill cast the lone vote against tabling (NHPR, June 17, 2026) — then reinstated it unanimously July 8, one day after the AG’s report (NHPR, July 8, 2026). HHS Commissioner Lori Weaver told councilors “eight years of state budget cuts have led to staff cuts” and “we’re running dangerously low right now” (NHPR, July 8, 2026). Asked the vacancy rate, Weaver said the state had 46 full-time counselors against a 53 percent vacancy rate including staff on leave, many with line-of-duty injuries: “We just don’t have enough staff. Forty six is not enough” (InDepthNH, July 8, 2026). State troopers have been posted at the center since a June 19 incident in which youth barricaded a unit and made weapons (NHPR, July 8, 2026, citing the AG report).

The Disability Rights Center of New Hampshire — the state’s federally designated protection and advocacy organization, with independent access authority inside the facility — sent a letter dated July 1, 2026 to Gov. Kelly Ayotte and Commissioner Lori Weaver, published on its own site (drcnh.org, “DRC-NH Letter To Governor Ayotte and Commissioner Weaver with Concerns about Unsafe Conditions at SYSC”; reported by NHPR, Annmarie Timmins, July 2, 2026). The letter documents a child reportedly secluded approximately 10 hours without access to a bathroom, a large puddle of urine observed in the room; another child restrained for approximately 12 hours; dried blood on walls in rooms where children had engaged in self-harm; insufficient staff training, broken door locks, and unsanitary conditions; and armed State Police present during routine staff interactions with children. Its warning: unless DHHS “takes immediate corrective action,” ensures the facility is managed appropriately, and “ceases its use of unlawful restraint and seclusion practices, children in SYSC’s care face a substantial and continuing risk of serious harm.” The letter continues an investigation DRC-NH opened with notifications in March and April 2026 and urges DCYF to retain an independent outside expert in juvenile justice and trauma-informed care. The 10- and 12-hour episodes are described by NHPR as violations of state law; the AG report’s “within legal boundaries” conclusion and the DRC’s documentation are reported here side by side, not reconciled. The seclusion and restraint durations are the DRC’s figures (”approximately”), rendered as “roughly” in the body.

At a press briefing following the Council’s July 29, 2026 meeting at Nashua Community College, Gov. Ayotte, describing the state’s response, said: “The staffing was delayed somewhat by — at least the staffing contract by the Executive Council — but we are moving as fast as we can with Health and Human Services to make sure there are trained additional contracting staff that will go in to support the facility on an interim measure” (Paula Tracy, InDepthNH, July 29, 2026). The disfluency is in the original. At the same meeting the Council was told a youth’s femur was broken on July 17 and a staff member had her teeth kicked in about a week later; Attorney General John Formella declined to discuss the incidents publicly, citing a pending investigation and criminal charges (InDepthNH, July 29, 2026). The July 17 incident was an assault by one resident on another, not a staff restraint: a 13-year-old was hospitalized and underwent surgery for a broken femur after a fight with another resident on Friday, July 17; NHPR reported one staff member was supervising when the altercation began. Formella’s office confirmed criminal charges were filed against the assailant and that the state was considering seeking to certify him as an adult (NHPR, July 20, 2026; NH Journal, July 18, 2026; Manchester Ink Link, Aug. 4, 2026; Union Leader, July 2026). The facility’s clinical director, Dr. Samantha Morin, had recommended the assailant be supervised by a “clinical coach”; a single staff member was present when the assault began; Morin subsequently resigned, citing ethical concerns (NHPR, Annmarie Timmins, July 21, 2026). Councilors were also told juvenile justice parole officers are being deployed to cover staffing gaps caused by injuries, and that the state is in negotiations with employees out on leave (InDepthNH, July 29, 2026). Separately, Ayotte and Weaver announced ten additional hires and the imminent deployment of body-worn cameras repurposed from the Department of Corrections (Union Leader and WZID, July 29–30, 2026; NHPR, July 30, 2026).

Sen. Victoria Sullivan, who led the legislative subcommittee’s investigation, called on July 21 for the Executive Council to remove Commissioner Weaver and Division for Children, Youth and Families Director Marie Noonan: “They cannot be trusted and failed as leaders.” Neither the governor’s office nor the attorney general’s office responded to NHPR’s requests for comment that day (NHPR, Annmarie Timmins, July 21, 2026). RSA 4:1 (gc.nh.gov, read against the statute text): an unclassified state official may be removed only for “malfeasance, misfeasance, inefficiency in office, incapacity or unfitness to perform assigned duties, or for the good of the department, agency, or institution”; a removal petition may be brought by the attorney general, the governor, any executive councilor, or the appointing authority; removal requires “a vote of 3 or more council members, in concurrence with the governor,” after a hearing on 45 days’ notice, with written findings, appealable to superior court. “None petitioned”: as of this writing no removal petition or proceeding has been reported, and Weaver announced the July 29 measures as commissioner.

The Office of the Child Advocate was created in 2018 after deaths of children in DCYF care; its mandate expanded in 2020 (NH Bulletin; Valley News, July 24 and 27, 2026). Gov. Ayotte announced in January 2026 that she would not renominate Cassandra Sanchez, appointed to the post in April 2022, and nominated Diana Fenton, a former assistant attorney general and Department of Education attorney. The Executive Council held a public hearing on the Fenton nomination Monday, March 2, 2026; it was contentious, and Fenton withdrew the following day, March 3, with no vote taken and no apparent majority for confirmation (Concord Monitor, March 3; InDepthNH and Patch, March 3–5; NHPR, March 3; NH Bulletin, March 4, 2026). Among the disqualifying information was a Judicial Conduct Committee reprimand of Fenton’s husband, a judge, for attempting to use his position to expedite the couple’s guardianship case; Ayotte said afterward: “I’ve known Diana since my time going back to the Attorney General’s Office... I know Diana and her background. I was unaware of her husband’s background” (NHPR and Valley News, March 4–6, 2026). Rep. Kimberly Rice (R-Hudson) testified in support of Fenton (InDepthNH and Patch, March 3–5, 2026); her later doubts about the Aldenberg nomination are a separate judgment about a different nominee. Sanchez’s final day was Friday, July 24, 2026, after six months in holdover status, which the Union Leader and the state’s human resources department describe as the maximum the statute allows without renomination; she said her office’s final report on the Sununu Center had not yet been drafted because DCYF and the facility had not produced records she had requested (Union Leader, July 2026; NH Bulletin, Aug. 3, 2026). Assistant Child Advocate Jason Taylor said the final report could take “certainly weeks but maybe months” (NH Bulletin, Aug. 3, 2026). Ayotte nominated former Manchester Police Chief Allen Aldenberg on July 24; the Executive Council confirmed him unanimously on July 29, 2026, for a term the governor’s office put at up to 90 days (NHPR, NH Bulletin, Valley News, and Union Leader, July 24–27, 2026). Liot Hill said she interviewed him and would support the nomination despite his non-child-services background, and noted the Legislature’s cuts to the office (InDepthNH, July 29, 2026). Councilor Stephen: “I have known Chief Aldenberg for a long time. He has never disappointed in anything he has been asked to do. He has the credentials, and is also one that will push back on the system if he sees any injustice” (NH Journal, July 27, 2026). Rep. Kim Rice (R-Hudson), a member of the ad-hoc subcommittee that produced the “extreme failure of leadership” finding, said of the nomination: “I’m just not sure he’s the right person for the position,” adding that families with prior police contact might not call the office (NH Journal, July 27, 2026). Aldenberg spent more than twenty years with the Manchester Police Department, retiring as chief, and is a brigadier general in the NH Army National Guard serving as assistant adjutant general.

On August 4, 2026, U.S. Rep. Maggie Goodlander (D-2nd) sent a letter to U.S. Attorney Erin Creegan asking the Justice Department to investigate past and current conditions at the Sununu Youth Services Center under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) (Damien Fisher, InDepthNH, Aug. 4, 2026; Concord Monitor, Manchester Ink Link, Union Leader, Aug. 4, 2026). Advocates and former prosecutors cited the state Department of Justice’s inherent conflict in both investigating facility abuse and defending the state against civil claims — including appealing survivor David Meehan’s $38 million verdict to cap damages at $475,000 (InDepthNH, Aug. 4, 2026). Attorney General Formella responded that his office “follows the facts, enforces the law and pursues justice without fear or favor” (InDepthNH, Aug. 4, 2026). No response from the Justice Department had been reported as of this writing. The enacted FY26–27 budget also converted the settlement fund’s administrator from “a nonpartisan administrator appointed by the judicial branch” to “a political appointee chosen by the governor,” and gave the attorney general veto power over settlements (NH Bulletin, William Skipworth, March 24, 2026; Valley News, June 11, 2026: “The state budget adopted last year gave the Attorney General veto power over settlement deals”; NHPR, June 9, 2026).

The GACIT commission — the five councilors plus the DOT commissioner — faced a roughly $400 million shortfall against expected revenue for the 2027–2036 ten-year plan (GACIT transmittal letter, Dec. 17, 2025; NH Bulletin, July 15, 2026). The fund and its causes, verbatim: “inflation-driven leaps in infrastructure costs, coupled with $20 million in annual debt payments on the 2015 Interstate 93 expansion now due have blown a $400 million hole in the Highway Fund”; and the cuts already made: “the recent revenue shortage prompted the Executive Council to eliminate 34 projects funded by the Highway Fund and valued at $106 million, and delay another $199 million worth of projects, plus pause municipal grants used to fund smaller bridge repairs and other projects” (NH Bulletin, Ethan DeWitt, Aug. 13, 2026). Tolls flow to the Turnpike Fund, not the Highway Fund; the toll fight and the Highway Fund hole are related but distinct ledgers. Ayotte opposed a toll increase; the council passed a plan without new revenue. Rep. David Milz (R-Derry), House Public Works chair, said the council added about 13 projects with no new revenue; eleven totaled about $22 million, while two — the I-89/93 Concord upgrade and I-293 Exits 6 and 7 in Manchester — required a toll increase: “The money just wasn’t there” (NH Bulletin, July 15, 2026).

GACIT’s original Dec. 17, 2025 vote restored the exits at $232 million combined with no funding source; Stephen, joining by phone while recovering from a cardiac event, said: “This project is so important to the state and my district. I appreciate GACIT supporting reinstating this vital infrastructure and safety upgrade” (Union Leader, “Manchester Exits 6-7 upgrades tucked into final 10-year highway proposal,” Dec. 19, 2025). Liot Hill cast the lone no and filed a formal minority letter to Gov. Ayotte, dated Dec. 17, 2025 and appended to the GACIT transmittal: “Restoring a major Turnpike System project without including a funding source is fiscally irresponsible” (Liot Hill minority letter, Dec. 17, 2025, dot.nh.gov — primary; reported in Union Leader, Dec. 19, 2025 and Business NH Magazine, April 2026). The House removed Exits 6 and 7 “as funds are not available,” passing the amended bill 338–13 on March 12 (NH General Court House Journal). A May Senate floor amendment (2026-1935s, Sen. Mark McConkey) restored them with line-item appropriations — $146,888,734 for Exit 6, $74,902,494 for Exit 7 — funded by a new toll schedule raising rates for drivers without a NH E-ZPass; the House concurred by voice vote May 21 (HB 2026 as passed, §§3, 6; NH General Court bill status; NH Bulletin, July 15, 2026). The line items sum to $221,791,228 — about $10 million under the December $232 million estimate; a December figure against a May appropriation, not reconciled here. Senate Bill 627, the separate bipartisan toll bill, would likewise have raised tolls only for drivers without a NH E-ZPass; Ayotte vetoed it July 2, 2026, citing affordability (Union Leader, July 2, 2026). She vetoed HB 2026 on July 10, 2026: “As I stated when I vetoed Senate Bill 627, I do not support raising the tolls” (Union Leader, July 13, 2026; NHPR, July 10, 2026; NH Bulletin, July 15, 2026). The last governor to veto a ten-year plan before Ayotte was Craig Benson, in 2004. An override requires two-thirds of both chambers. “The override votes come Wednesday”: the Legislature’s veto session convenes Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026, at 10 a.m., taking up 31 of the governor’s 33 vetoes this year (Garry Rayno, “Distant Dome: Veto Day is Coming,” InDepthNH, Aug. 8, 2026, republished by Patch Aug. 10). Veto counts vary across coverage (NH Bulletin: 29 on July 16, “more than 30” on Aug. 13); no count appears in the body. Legislators in both parties see a real chance of overriding the HB 2026 veto — Deputy House Speaker Steven Smith (R-Charlestown): “I think there’s a pretty good chance”; House Democratic Leader Alexis Simpson: “Making safety and infrastructure work political is just not right” (NH Bulletin, Ethan DeWitt, Aug. 13, 2026; NHPR, Aug. 14, 2026). Note: the Aug. 13–14 override coverage refers to “Exits 5 and 6” on I-293; the enacted line items and all prior reporting say Exits 6 and 7, and this piece follows the bill text.

Last October, at the first neighborhood meeting on the Sununu Center property sale, Manchester Mayor Jay Ruais said: “The reconfiguration of 6 and 7 have to happen or the traffic is going to be abominable.” Stephen, who convened the meeting and, as former HHS commissioner, oversaw construction of the SYSC — the basis for “oversaw the building of it” above — said: “It’s a major tragedy waiting to happen. We are going to work very hard to make sure Exits 6 and 7 are put back in” (Union Leader, “Neighbors pack meeting over future of YDC property,” Oct. 17, 2025). The $80 million was budget writers’ prediction (Union Leader, May 7, 2026); the House-floor expectation was “as much as $75 million” (Rep. Brian Seaworth, via InDepthNH, May 7, 2026); neither was specified in law. The Senate budget counted on the proceeds without specifically budgeting for or guaranteeing them (NH Fiscal Policy Institute, June 13, 2025). The SYSC has no offer on record. The Department of Administrative Services calls any proceeds “indeterminable” absent a market valuation (SB 481 fiscal note). The enacted budget funded the YDC settlement fund at $20 million in year one and nothing in year two (NHFPI; Union Leader, May 7, 2026), and its trailer bill contained two conflicting provisions on where sale proceeds would go — one directing them to the General Fund, another to the settlement fund (NHPR, June 9, 2026; Valley News, June 11, 2026; Rep. Brian Seaworth, R-Pembroke, in Union Leader, May 7, 2026). SB 481 as passed by the Senate directed proceeds to the settlement fund only if the sale closed after June 30, 2027; the House struck that condition and directed all proceeds to the General Fund regardless of sale date, passing the amended bill 186–157 on May 7 and adopting the committee of conference report 189–158 on June 4. House Republicans backed the treasury routing while Democrats sought a guarantee for the settlement fund (InDepthNH, May 7, 2026; Concord Monitor, May 7, 2026; NH Bulletin and Valley News, May 27–29, 2026). Ayotte vetoed SB 481 on July 10, 2026 — the same day she vetoed HB 2026. Her veto message quotes the budget’s own provision, “All proceeds and revenue from the sale of the SYSC shall be deposited in the youth development center claims and administration settlement fund,” and states: “Given the history of the facility, I believe it is appropriate to dedicate revenues from the sale of the (Sununu Youth Services Center) to the settlement fund. For this reason, I have vetoed Senate Bill 481” (Governor’s office release, “Governor Signs 38 Bills into Law,” governor.nh.gov; InDepthNH, July 10, 2026; NH Bulletin, July 16, 2026). “One year after she signed the contradiction herself”: the two conflicting proceeds provisions are in the budget trailer bill she signed in June 2025, as sourced above. Cushman & Wakefield was hired as broker July 8, 2026, with up to two years to sell, at a commission of 4 percent of the contract price up to $25 million plus 2 percent of any portion above that, payable from gross proceeds (InDepthNH, July 8, 2026). Kenneth Weyler, Republican House Finance chair: “Putting an amount into the budget from the sale of a property almost never works” (Union Leader, May 7, 2026).

Settlement fund administrator Gerard Boyle, a retired circuit court judge, and Attorney General Formella jointly requested $55 million to carry the fund through June 2027. The Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee approved $20 million in June 2026; the Executive Council approved the same $20 million on July 8, 2026. Boyle told the Council that after committed administrative costs and settlements, “that gives us $4 million to spend” over the next twelve months, and that he would return for the remaining $35 million; he cited 1,700 outstanding claimants, some carrying high-interest advances against expected awards, and estimated roughly $1 billion to resolve the pending claims — a projected cost, distinct from the more than $2 billion in demands filed. Ayotte said she supports the full $55 million and expects the Legislature to appropriate the balance this fall (InDepthNH and Patch, July 8, 2026; NHPR, July 8, 2026; Union Leader, June 25 and July 8, 2026; Concord Monitor, June 22, 2026).

In late March 2026, Chris Maidment — a political consultant for Stephen and Wheeler, and fiscal agent of Stephen’s campaign committee per the committee’s own materials — began live-streaming Council meetings at youtube.com/@NHExecutiveCouncil on cameras borrowed from Americans for Prosperity; the state is not involved in the production (NH Bulletin, March 27, 2026). NH Journal headlined the AFP-hosted roundtable where Stephen and Wheeler discussed their approach to Council spending “Fiscal Watchdogs” (NH Journal, Aug. 18, 2025). Agendas and minutes are posted at media.sos.nh.gov; the Bulletin’s account of Maidment’s operation describes the state as uninvolved in the production, and no state video feed of Council meetings has been identified (NH Bulletin, March 27, 2026).

“Wednesday the Council convenes”: the Executive Council’s August meeting falls on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026, per the Governor and Council meeting schedule (sos.nh.gov), the same day the Legislature convenes to take up the vetoes (sourced above).

That is the figure Judge David Ruoff calculated as the minimum annual gap between what the New Hampshire Constitution requires the state to spend educating its children and what the state actually pays. Not a slogan number. An itemization, carried out to the ninety-five cents.

The state’s response came in two parts. On July 1, 2025, the Supreme Court split three to two, twice, in the same case: base adequacy at roughly $4,182 per pupil is facially unconstitutional, and Ruoff’s floor of $7,356.01 is, in the majority’s words, “eminently reasonable” — but a second majority reversed the order to pay it now. Then, in February 2026, the Attorney General’s office filed the second part: an appeal of the second ruling in Rand, the companion education-funding case, asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Claremont decisions themselves.

The bill was itemized to the penny. The state’s litigating position is that the bill should not exist.

That is how New Hampshire keeps its accounts, and why this piece is addressed to whoever wins in November. The state maintains two sets of books. The published set balances every June. The real set is scattered across court orders, actuarial valuations, claims filings, and fiscal notes, in plain sight, and nobody in elected office opens it. The inheritance does not care who signs for it.

The Set They Publish

Start with this year’s good news. Through May, fiscal 2026 revenue ran $156.7 million ahead of plan. The state’s own monthly revenue report explains the trick: two-thirds of that cushion is a one-time tax amnesty that collected $103.8 million against a $5 million plan, and underneath it, in the report’s own words, “many traditional revenue streams are in deficit for the year to date.” Business taxes, the state’s largest tax source, are below plan. The surplus is real the way a pawned watch is income.

Go back one year and the device is cruder. The state closed fiscal 2025 by drawing $88.8 million from the Rainy Day Fund, which had stood at a record $292.5 million. Reserve draws happen. Except the last time New Hampshire tapped that fund to cover a revenue shortfall was 2009, in the teeth of the Great Recession, and the Fiscal Policy Institute appended the annotation: “Recent economic conditions have been much more favorable than in 2009.” It required one more step: the new budget changed the law governing the fund to make the transfer legal. The second set of books is kept in statute.

The rest of the published set holds together the same way. The $15.89 billion budget balances on $112.7 million in reductions no one specified — $51 million somewhere inside Health and Human Services, $32 million anywhere in the Executive Branch, with agency staff, per the Fiscal Policy Institute, “tasked with underspending.” It counts a projected $16 million transfer out of the Education Trust Fund. It raised 131 fines, fees, and charges while advertising that it raised no major taxes. And its timing is its confession: the Supreme Court’s education rulings, the second Rand decision, and the federal Medicaid cuts were all finalized after enactment. The operating budget of the State of New Hampshire accounts for none of the three largest liabilities on its own horizon.

It balances. It is designed to.

The Set They Owe

The real ledger has four sections.

The schools. The court’s floor is $7,356.01 per pupil; the state pays about $4,182. What compliance costs is now a fight unto itself: Ruoff’s own arithmetic says at least $537.6 million a year; the Josiah Bartlett Center, crediting everything the state already spends, argues the true increment is closer to $247 per pupil, call it $40 million. Meanwhile Ruoff ruled again in August 2025, after a full trial: the funding levels themselves, special education included, are unconstitutional, and the evidence is printed on the tax bills. On the fiscal 2023 rates the ruling cited, nineteen cents per thousand dollars of value covered the school obligation in New Castle; in Brookline it took $14.98. Same constitution, same obligation, a seventy-eight-fold spread. And the same budget, months before the appeal was filed, re-plumbed the Education Trust Fund itself: the fund’s share of the business taxes cut from 41 to 39 percent, the largest share of the new video-lottery money routed to the General Fund instead, $63.9 million less projected into the fund over the biennium, and a standing sweep of any surplus above $20 million into the General Fund. The state is arguing in court that the obligation does not exist, the pipes already adjusted as though it had won. The Legislature has yet to act on any of it.

The children the state already failed. By May the settlement fund’s administrators counted more than 2,200 Youth Development Center claims, 425 settled for roughly $240 million, against demands above $2 billion — up from 1,530 claims and $1.84 billion as of June 30, 2025. The fund may lawfully pay $75 million a year; the budget gave it $20 million, total, and the Fiscal Policy Institute finished the sentence: the fund “will likely run out of money this biennium, potentially raising legal questions.”

The plan was a real-estate deal the budget could not agree with itself about: one provision sent the proceeds of selling the Sununu Youth Services Center to the settlement fund, another to the General Fund. The Legislature resolved the contradiction in the treasury’s favor this spring — Senate Bill 481, 186 to 157 in the House — its floor manager, Rep. Brian Seaworth, calling it housekeeping that “does not create new revenue or direct new spending.” True, and the problem. The Governor vetoed it July 10, quoting the budget’s own promise back at its authors: sale proceeds “shall be deposited in the youth development center claims and administration settlement fund.” Credit where due: on this fight, Ayotte stands with the victims — and the override will fail this fall because House Democrats wanted the money for victims all along. The contradiction stands in statute; the fund holds twenty million against two billion either way.

As for the money, there is none yet: no offer, proceeds the Department of Administrative Services calls “indeterminable,” an “$80.0 million” discussed in negotiations and never written into law, and a broker hired July 8 with up to two years to market a campus the state cannot vacate until its replacement opens. The one precedent, the Laconia State School, shrank from a collapsed $21.5 million promise to a $10.5 million permits-contingent agreement, two years to close. Precedent says: take half, eventually, maybe. The same budget found $10 million for a single litigated case outside the fund.

The pension inside your property-tax bill. The Retirement System’s unfunded liability stood at $5.58 billion at mid-2024, 68.6 percent funded, 71.6 a year later, on an amortization schedule locked in statute through 2039. The line that connects it to every mailbox: that liability is borne solely by participating employers — towns, school districts, and counties among them — and accounts for more than 75 percent of their contribution rates. The state once paid 35 percent of the retirement cost for police, firefighters, and teachers; it phased that out after 2011. It suspended municipal revenue sharing in 2010 and never resumed. It froze the statewide education property tax at $363 million nominal in 2005 and let inflation do the cutting. And the same budget that put $20 million against a two-billion-dollar claim found $27.5 million a year through fiscal 2034 to restore pension benefits cut in 2011: a quarter-billion-dollar commitment, enacted while pleading poverty.

The architecture, in four numbers (the per-capita and school-share figures are FY2022, the latest comparable Census data): state taxes, $2,514 per resident — the least in America. Property taxes, $3,388 per person — second only to New Jersey. Sixty-three cents of every state and local tax dollar in New Hampshire is property tax. And the state’s share of public-school revenue is 29.4 percent: fiftieth of fifty. “Low-tax state” is a true claim about the one level of government that doesn’t mail you the bill.

The roads, and Washington. The ten-year transportation plan is $400 million short; the Red List stands at 324 bridges, 112 of them the state’s and 212 the towns’. Tolls have not moved since 2007, the gas tax since 2014. The Governor’s answer, this July, was two vetoes in eight days: first the toll bill, then the plan itself, the first ten-year-plan veto since Craig Benson in 2004. Over it all hangs the federal share: 39.4 percent of state spending arrives from Washington, federal Medicaid alone is the state’s single largest revenue source at $1.6 billion, and the reconciliation law’s changes may cost New Hampshire roughly $2.3 billion in federal Medicaid support over nine years. CNBC’s 2026 study ranked the state 34th overall, sixth for business friendliness — and graded its economy a D, eighth-worst, the summary in three words: spending outpaces revenues.

Stack it the way an examiner would. A revenue system whose traditional streams are already in deficit in year one of the biennium. Reserves already tapped in a year no one called a recession. The largest tax dependent on 98 filers for 41.2 percent of its take. A settlement fund going dry against 1,600 live claims. A constitutional education debt contested between $40 million and $537 million a year. A $2.3 billion federal drawdown beginning against the largest single revenue line. It is an exposure map, and every entry is sourced below.

Who Kept the Books

Concede the old parts first, because they are real. Revenue sharing died in 2010 under Democratic majorities; the retirement downshift was completed in 2011 in a budget Democratic Gov. John Lynch let become law without his signature; the first business-tax cuts moved in a September 2015 compromise Maggie Hassan signed after vetoing the budget over them. The architecture that converts state decisions into property-tax bills is decades old, and both parties’ fingerprints are on it.

The write-down of the revenue base is newer, and owned. Republicans have held the governorship and both chambers for eight of the last ten years — 2017 through 2018, then continuously since January 2021 with all four levers. In that span the majority cut the business-profits tax from 7.9 percent, where the 2015 compromise had delivered it, to 7.5, and the business-enterprise tax from 0.675 to 0.55, accelerated the interest-and-dividends repeal to 2025, cut the rooms-and-meals rate, and excluded pandemic-aid profits from taxation. The Fiscal Policy Institute prices the business-tax cuts alone at $795 million to $1.17 billion in forgone revenue since 2015, and the conclusion of its research director, Phil Sletten, was fatal without being partisan: no evidence the lower rates increased revenue. New Hampshire’s corporate-tax receipts grew 118 percent from 2015 to 2024; the national total grew 239.

Concede the era, too — the rebuttal every insider will draft first: the cuts coincided with flush years, repeated surpluses, a Rainy Day Fund at an all-time high. The surpluses were real, and inflated by federal money moving through business-tax receipts; Pew’s ranking is what remained: fourth-worst post-pandemic revenue recovery. The good years were borrowed. The shrinkage was designed.

And before anyone drafts the next one: the business community asked for those cuts; the BIA backed them. Which is why the beneficiaries’ own dashboard is the closing exhibit. Four in ten employers now expect the business climate to decline; nearly nine in ten cite housing supply, the thing the money was supposed to unleash; and by the Council on State Taxation’s count, New Hampshire businesses pay 45.2 percent of their state and local taxes as property tax against 29.1 as BPT and BET. The cuts they received are dwarfed by the tax the cuts inflate.

One more entry, because the ledger is honest or it is nothing: the restoration bill existed. House Bill 503 in 2025 would have put every rate back at once and dedicated the whole of it to the Education Trust Fund. The House killed it 345 to 27; that arithmetic does not work without most Democrats voting no. The pledge has one party’s name on it and both parties’ votes under it.

What They Already Killed

Every politically painless instrument already has an entry, a date, and a roll call. Walk them.

The toll bill. Senate Bill 627 would have raised tolls only on drivers without a New Hampshire E-ZPass, worth more than $50 million a year by its fiscal note, structured as a transaction any driver could avoid: the transponder free to anyone, resident or not. It passed the Senate on a voice vote in March, cleared the House without debate in April, and polled — framed as the out-of-state increase — 63 to 21, including 67 percent of Republicans. Vetoed July 2. Constitutional, popular, bipartisan, dead at one desk.

Cannabis. House Bill 186 passed the House 208 to 135 in January, carrying its sponsor’s estimate of $30 to $50 million a year at maturity. All but one Republican senator voted to table it — the Senate’s third consecutive kill, and the model that died in 2024 was the liquor-commission version, not this one. First revenue runs two years out from any signature.

The voucher caps. The majority removed Education Freedom Account income limits in June 2025. Enrollment nearly doubled, from 5,765 to 10,510, cost jumped from $30.3 million to $51.6 million, and the low-income share of recipients fell from 54 percent to 19. Restoring the caps recaptures the universal increment, roughly $20 million and growing with the escalator. The people who removed the limits are the people pleading there is no money.

The 2018 rates. Putting the business taxes back to 7.9 and 0.675 percent yields about $104 million a year against the audited 2025 base. Run the competitiveness argument honestly: that adds about $75 per resident to the lowest state tax collections in the nation — still fiftieth, still below Florida. Undo every business-tax cut back to 2015 and the state lands roughly level with Florida — forty-ninth, give or take the rounding. The half-point on rooms and meals is another $28 million. Nobody’s brochure is at risk.

Housing, for the record: the Senate killed a $5 million add for Housing Champions 16 to 8 in February, asking “where’s the money?” — municipalities certified under the program accounted for 45 percent of 2024’s new units. The budget then gave it zero new dollars and created a successor, Partners-in-Housing, also at zero. Housing is 0.4 percent of a $15.89 billion budget, in the state where housing is the public’s top-named problem.

Now sum it. Tolls, cannabis at maturity, the voucher caps, the 2018 rates, the meals half-point: roughly a quarter-billion dollars a year, assuming a governor who signs and a Senate that stops killing. The entire politically available menu lands between the two readings of the ConVal debt alone — before the settlement fund, before the pension, before a single bridge comes off the Red List. That is one ceiling: the arithmetic. The other is political: almost everything on the menu has already been killed once, most of it by people on this November’s ballot, some against the express wish of two-thirds of their own party’s voters.

The Only Doors Left

Comparisons first, because self-pity is its own concealment: Rhode Island cannot repeal deindustrialization, Maryland cannot un-fire the twenty-five thousand federal workers its governor counts, West Virginia cannot vote coal back. New Hampshire’s ledger is different: nearly every large entry is the product of statute, and what statute did, statute can undo — the self-inflicted wound, the kind that can be closed on purpose, with no claim to “we couldn’t have known.”

So what pays the real set? Not the tax-the-outsiders reflex. Any levy that turns on the taxpayer’s address has been dead for fifty-one years — Austin v. New Hampshire, where the Supreme Court struck this state’s Commuters Income Tax because it fell only on people who live somewhere else. The designs that survive are triggered by price and use, not residency: Rhode Island’s surcharge on non-owner-occupied homes over a million dollars. Two caveats. Scale: tens of millions — Rhode Island’s revenue office scores it at $24.5 million in year one — against a debt contested in the hundreds. Incidence: that tax is already reaching families’ generational shore cottages, which is precisely why it is lawful. “No New Hampshire resident will pay” and “constitutional” cannot both be true, and any candidate promising both is drafting the next Austin. A tiered transfer tax invites an unlitigated proportionality fight under Part II, Article 5; the proven New Hampshire shape is the one the interest-and-dividends tax wore for a century: a flat rate above a floor.

Which points at the instruments that actually reach the education line, and Concord knows their names: that same flat-over-floor design, scaled — HB 503’s 5 percent above $20,000, sparing the retiree clipping modest coupons, on a tax that was projected to raise $135 million as recently as fiscal 2023 in its old, low-floor form; the business rates beyond the 2018 waypoint; and the statewide education property tax, frozen in nominal dollars since 2005 while its real value roughly halved. All of it constitutional under existing doctrine.

A native mechanism for enacting any of them exists, and it carries both parties’ signatures: Hassan’s 2015 price was a revenue trigger, and the 2019 budget wrote reversion into law — rates snapping back if collections missed plan. The state enacted the newest one this July: House Bill 155, effective in January, cuts the business-enterprise tax another notch in any year business-tax revenue beats plan by $100 million and tops the prior year, with overall revenue at plan and the Rainy Day Fund full — ratcheting toward 0.25 percent, the 1993 rate. The mechanism’s only permitted output is that cut; property-tax relief and the 131 new fees are nowhere in it. The machinery is proven. The only choice has ever been which way to point it.

Any plan starts with the real set. The next governor’s budget is due to the Legislature by February 15, 2027, and the first honest act of the next administration, whichever party supplies it, is to open that set in the address — and then say the sentence no New Hampshire governor of either party has spoken in a decade: here is the instrument, here is the line it pays, and here is who pays it. Because after Austin, someone here always does.

The books exist. They have existed all along, in the administrators’ filings, the actuarial tables, the fiscal notes, a judge’s arithmetic carried to the ninety-five cents. New Hampshire has never lacked the numbers.

It has lacked an official willing to read them out loud.

Sources & Notes

Education litigation. The $537,550,970.95 minimum-increase figure is Judge David Ruoff’s, from his November 2023 ConVal ruling, as quoted by Reaching Higher NH. The NH Supreme Court’s July 1, 2025 decision (two 3–2 majorities, Bassett writing): affirmance that base adequacy (~$4,182/pupil) is facially unconstitutional and that the $7,356.01 floor is a “conservative” and “eminently reasonable” calculation; a separate majority reversed the immediate-payment order — Concord Monitor, InDepthNH, and Valley News, July 1–2, 2025. The Josiah Bartlett Center’s ~$247.22-per-pupil counter-reading — JBC, July 11, 2025; InDepthNH, July 12, 2025; the “$40 million” statewide figure is the author’s arithmetic from that per-pupil number. Rand: NH Supreme Court, June 10, 2025 (3–1) — SWEPT’s uniform rate satisfies Part II, Art. 5 and excess retention is a lawful spending-power exercise (only negative rates in unincorporated places struck) — NH Bulletin, June 10, 2025; Judge Ruoff’s post-trial ruling that funding levels including special-education aid are unconstitutional, with the New Castle $0.19 / Brookline $14.98 per-$1,000 FY2023 comparison, August 18–19, 2025 — NH Bulletin; NH School Funding Fairness Project. Reconsideration denied ~January 26, 2026; the state’s notice of appeal (February 24, 2026) asks the Court to overturn the Claremont rulings (Solicitor General Anthony Galdieri; 13 questions presented), and the Legislature had yet to act on the rulings as the appeal was filed — Garry Rayno, InDepthNH, January 28 and February 25, 2026; NH Bulletin, February 25, 2026. Education Trust Fund re-plumbing (business-tax share 41%→39%; the largest share of new video-lottery revenue routed to the General Fund; projected $63.9 million less to the fund over the biennium than under prior policy; automatic sweep of fund surpluses above $20 million to the General Fund; expanded legal uses) — NHFPI, The State Budget for Fiscal Years 2026 and 2027, July 28, 2025.

The published set. FY2026 revenue $156.7M (5.7%) over plan through May, eleven months; $103.8M amnesty (vs. $5M plan; $96.7M of it business taxes; one-time); business taxes $947.2M YTD, −1.3% vs. plan; “many traditional revenue streams are in deficit for the year to date” — the state’s monthly revenue reporting (DAS Monthly Revenue Focus / DRA May report), via Garry Rayno, InDepthNH, June 5, 2026; Union Leader, March 23, 2026; NHFPI, April 6, 2026. Rainy Day Fund: $292.5M record balance (end SFY2024, tied SFY2023); $88.8M draw for the SFY2025 revenue deficit; statute amended within the budget to permit the transfer; first shortfall-driven draw since SFY2009; “Recent economic conditions have been much more favorable than in 2009”; projected $228.4M at end-SFY2027 including a $16.0M Education Trust Fund transfer and a projected $24.7M surplus — NHFPI budget report, July 28, 2025. Same report: $15.89B total appropriations; $112.7M unspecified reductions ($51M DHHS, $32M any Executive agency; staff “tasked with underspending”); 131 increased fines, fees, and charges; the budget’s “no major changes in existing taxes” framing; and the observation that the education rulings and federal Medicaid/food-assistance changes were finalized after enactment.

YDC. June 30, 2025 snapshot (1,530 claims; 386 settled; $221.7M paid including interest; ~$1.84B pending) — fund administrators’ July 24, 2025 report, via NHFPI budget report. May 2026 vintage (2,200+ claims; 425 settled ~$240M; ~1,600 pending; demands >$2B) — Boston Globe, January 2026; InDepthNH, May 7, 2026; NHPR, June 9, 2026. $75M/year statutory cap (2024 law; $150M/biennium capacity); $20M total appropriation; “will likely run out of money this biennium, potentially raising legal questions”; the budget’s conflicting directions for sale proceeds; the $10M single-case appropriation; oversight moved from the Judicial Branch to the Executive (”under the purview of the Governor”) — NHFPI budget report, July 28, 2025; the dual-direction confusion also per NHPR, June 9, 2026, and Valley News, June 11, 2026. Fund “set to run out of money by the next fiscal year” — Jeremy Margolis, Concord Monitor, May 7, 2026. SB 481 — which directed sale proceeds to the General Fund regardless of timing, superseding the Senate’s conditional version — House passage 186–157 (May 7) and conference-report adoption 189–158 (June 4) — LegiScan/House record; Margolis, Concord Monitor, May 7; NH Bulletin, May 27; Valley News, May 29 and June 11, 2026. Floor manager Rep. Brian Seaworth’s “housekeeping”/”does not create new revenue or direct new spending,” and his floor expectation of proceeds as high as ~$75M — InDepthNH, May 7, 2026. Veto: July 10, 2026, the same day as the HB 2026 ten-year-plan veto; the veto message quotes the 2025 budget’s settlement-fund provision (provision text as rendered in contemporaneous reports) — InDepthNH, July 10, 2026; NH Bulletin, July 16, 2026; Union Leader, July 2026; WZID, July 2026. Override outlook (House Democrats, who favored the settlement-fund direction, expected to sustain the veto; fall veto session) — Union Leader, July 2026. Sale posture: no offer on record; DAS “indeterminable” (SB 481 fiscal note); “$80.0 million” as a budget-negotiation figure never specified in law (NHFPI budget report); Cushman & Wakefield engaged July 8, 2026, up to two years (InDepthNH, July 8, 2026); the campus cannot be vacated until the replacement facility, under construction, opens (InDepthNH, May 7, 2026). Laconia precedent: the prior buyer’s $21.5M deal collapsed in April 2024 when she failed to produce the money (NHPR, September 26, 2024); the Executive Council approved Pillsbury Realty Development’s $10.5M purchase-and-sale for the 217-acre Laconia State School September 25, 2024 (3–0, two recusals), permits-contingent, $500,000 earnest money paid January 28, 2025, with closing expected roughly two years from approval — NH Bulletin, September 25, 2024; InDepthNH and Laconia Daily Sun, September 2024; Valley News, September 3, 2024 (DAS Commissioner Arlinghaus); Union Leader, April 16, 2025; InDepthNH, February 5, 2025 (due diligence completed; two-year closing expectation restated to the Executive Council).

Pension and the downshift. NHRS: $5.58B unfunded actuarial accrued liability, 68.6% funded, at June 30, 2024; 71.6% at June 30, 2025; amortization fixed through 2039; UAAL borne solely by participating employers and >75% of employer contribution rates — NHRS publications and FY2025 ACFR. State’s 35% share of police/fire/teacher retirement costs phased out after SFY2011; municipal revenue sharing suspended since 2010; SWEPT fixed at $363M nominal since 2005 (real value roughly halved) — NHFPI presentation, July 15, 2026. The FY2012–13 budget that completed the downshift “was enacted without Lynch’s signature” — Citizens Count, “Budget 2016-2017” issue brief. The 2011 Group II benefit cuts (pension-formula changes for police, corrections officers, and firefighters) — NH Bulletin, June 19, 2025. Group II restoration at $27.5M General Funds per year through SFY2034 ($42M this biennium) — NHFPI budget report, July 28, 2025.

Property-tax and per-capita comparatives. 63% of all state and local tax revenue raised through property taxes; local governments’ 61% property-tax share of overall revenue, highest in the nation (FY2022); $3,388 per-capita property taxes (2nd after NJ’s $3,617; U.S. $1,943, FY2022) — NHFPI, Property Taxes in New Hampshire: How They Work and How They Compare, April 9, 2026. State taxes $2,514 per capita (lowest; U.S. $4,412), FY2022; state share of K-12 revenue 29.4%, 50th of 50 (Census 2022 school-finance survey) — NHFPI presentation, July 15, 2026.

The revenue write-down, the era, and its results. Rate endpoints (BPT 8.5%→7.5%, BET 0.75%→0.55%, 2016–2023) and the 2015–2025 policy catalog (I&D repeal accelerated by HB 2, Ch. 79, L.2023; M&R 9%→8.5% in 2021; COVID-aid profits excluded 2021) — NHFPI, July 15, 2026, and NH DRA (TIR 2025-001). The 2015 compromise’s steps and trigger: BPT 8.5→8.2 and BET 0.75→0.72 for 2016, with the further step to 7.9/0.675 contingent on combined General and Education Trust Fund revenue reaching $4.64 billion for the 2016–17 biennium — Business NH Magazine, February 2016; the reset-if-missed design also described in the BIA’s own retrospective (”the first two tax reductions were contingent on meeting established revenue thresholds… the rate reductions would be reset”) — BIA Business Perspective, Union Leader, February 24, 2019. Forgone revenue $795M–$1.17B since 2015 and the no-evidence finding — NHFPI issue brief (research director Phil Sletten), April 2025; NH Bulletin, April 7, 2025; Sletten’s role and conclusion also per Keene Sentinel, May 1, 2026. NH corporate-tax growth +118% vs. +239% nationwide, FY2015–24 — NHFPI, July 15, 2026. Record reserves and the surplus era — the $292.5M Rainy Day record (NHFPI budget report); pandemic-era inflation of business-tax receipts as characterized in NHFPI’s April 2025 brief. Fourth-worst post-pandemic revenue rebound — Pew Fiscal 50, via InDepthNH, April 3, 2026. BPT concentration (98 filers, 0.1% of filers, pay 41.2%) — DRA 2025 Annual Report data via NHFPI, July 15, 2026. HB 503 (2025, Rep. Schamberg) — interest-and-dividends at 5 percent above a $20,000 floor, BPT restored to 8.5, BET to 0.75, meals to 9.0, all dedicated to the Education Trust Fund — and the 345–27 Inexpedient-to-Legislate vote, March 6, 2025 — House Journal via LegiScan; DRA fiscal note.

Business community. The BIA’s backing of the business-tax reductions: BIA President Jim Roche welcomed the 2015 cuts as relief for New Hampshire businesses (Business NH Magazine, February 2016), and the association’s own column later defended the reductions against reversal (”Don’t change course on business tax relief” — BIA Business Perspective, Union Leader, February 24, 2019). Current outlook: ~4 in 10 expect climate decline; ~9 in 10 cite housing supply — Michael Skelton, BIA Business Perspective, Sunday News, March 13, 2026. Businesses’ tax mix (45.2% property vs. 29.1% BPT/BET, FY2024) — Council on State Taxation, December 2025, via NHFPI, July 15, 2026.

The menu and its roll calls. SB 627 (fiscal note “at least $53 million,” reported as high as $56 million — hence “more than $50 million”; Senate voice vote March 5; House without debate, April; free-transponder design open to any driver; vetoed July 2, 2026) — Union Leader, January–July 2026; NHPR, April 2, 2026; Keene Sentinel, July 2026; the transaction-based transponder design does not classify by residency, the Austin defect (see Constitutional gates below). Toll polling (63–21 support; R 67 / D 62 / I 52; question framed as the out-of-state increase) — UNH Granite State Poll, fielded April 17–21, 2026. HB 2026 vetoed July 10, 2026, first ten-year-plan veto since 2004 — Union Leader, July 13; NHPR, July 10; NH Bulletin, July 15, 2026; $400M plan shortfall — GACIT transmittal, December 17, 2025, via NH Bulletin. Bridges (324 red-listed: 112 state, 212 municipal, end-2024 cycle) — NHDOT 2024 Annual Bridge Report (December 2025). Tolls unchanged since 2007; gas tax last raised effective July 1, 2014 — NHFPI presentation, July 15, 2026; SB 367 (2014). HB 186 (208–135, January 7, 2026; Senate tabling with all but one Republican — the chamber’s third consecutive kill, the 2024 vehicle having been the liquor-commission model; sponsor’s $30–50M maturity estimate; first revenue roughly two years from any enactment) — Marijuana Moment, January 7, 2026; Marijuana Policy Project state page; The Dartmouth, February 2026. EFA figures (5,765→10,510; $30.3M→$51.6M; low-income share 54%→39%→19%; cap escalator to 12,500) — NH DOE data via NH Bulletin, December 3, 2025; SB 295 signed June 10, 2025; the ~$20M recapture figure is the author’s arithmetic from the DOE cost figures ($51.6M − $30.3M), growing with the escalator. SB 419’s $5 million Housing Champions add killed 16–8 with the “where’s the money?” objection; the 45%-of-2024-units figure for Champion-certified municipalities — Paula Tracy, InDepthNH, February 19, 2026. Housing at 0.4% and early care at 0.7% of the budget; Housing Champions unfunded; Partners-in-Housing created at $0 — NHFPI, July 15, 2026, and budget report. Housing as the top-named problem (22%) — UNH Granite State Poll, April 2026.

The 2018-rates menu and the sum — author’s calculations, stated as such. Against the SFY2025 audited bases (state ACFR, via NHFPI’s July 15, 2026 presentation): restoring the BPT to 7.9% adds roughly $44 million on an $834.2 million base; restoring the BET to 0.675% adds roughly $59 million on a $261.4 million base — about $104 million per year combined. The rooms-and-meals half-point adds roughly $28 million on a $481.9 million base. The per-resident figure (~$75) sets that restoration against the FY2022 per-capita comparatives above and is deliberately coarse; so is the Florida comparison — full restoration to 2015 rates is worth roughly $206 million per year, placing state collections roughly level with Florida’s, with vintages mixed by necessity. The menu sum — more than $50 million (tolls) + $30–50 million (cannabis at maturity) + roughly $20 million (caps) + $104 million (2018 rates) + $28 million (meals) — is approximately $235–260 million per year: “roughly a quarter-billion.”

Comparatives and federal exposure. CNBC, America’s Top States for Business 2026 (July 2026): New Hampshire No. 34 overall (CNBC state page, July 9); business friendliness 6th (CNBC category data via CBIA summary, July 2026); economy graded D, eighth-worst, “spending outpaces revenues,” 39.4% of state spending from federal funds (NASBO basis), pension underfunding “>$5.5 billion, among the worst pension gaps in the country” (CNBC, July 13, 2026); Maryland’s ~25,000 federal job losses per Gov. Moore’s account therein. Federal Medicaid as the state’s largest single revenue source ($1.6B SFY2025) and the ~$2.3B nine-year exposure estimate (KFF/DHHS) — NHFPI presentation, July 15, 2026.

Constitutional gates and instruments. Austin v. New Hampshire, 420 U.S. 656 (1975). Comparable price-and-use designs elsewhere: New York City’s tax on high-value non-primary residences (enacted May 2026, effective July 2026 — NYT Editorial Board, July 20, 2026) and Vermont’s non-homestead rate. Rhode Island’s Non-Owner Occupied Property Tax (>$1M assessed; $2.50 per $500 above the threshold; owner-or-tenant 183-day occupancy test; revenue to the low-income housing tax credit fund): Division of Taxation projection of ~$24.5M in year one rising past $27M by 2031; incidence reaching long-held family shore properties — WPRI, Boston Globe/NBC affiliates, and Bloomberg-syndicated coverage, June–July 2026. Part II, Article 5 proportionality doctrine as most recently applied — Rand, NH Supreme Court, June 10, 2025. The trigger pedigree: the 2015 compromise’s revenue targets (above); the 2019 reversion-to-2018-rates provision (Business NH Magazine, 2020); and HB 155 (2026), Chapter 280, signed July 10, 2026, principal provisions effective January 1, 2027 — the conference version paired a Business Enterprise Tax filing-threshold increase with a surplus-conditioned rate-reduction mechanism (NFIB, May 29, 2026; NH Journal, June 5, 2026). The mechanism’s parameters — a 0.05-point BET cut in any fiscal year in which combined business-tax revenue runs at least $100 million above plan and above the prior year’s take, with combined General and Education Trust Fund revenue at or above plan and the Rainy Day Fund at its statutory cap, ratcheting toward the original 1993 rate of 0.25 percent — per the Josiah Bartlett Center (Cline, June 2026) and NHPR (June 4, 2026); House Democratic Leader Alexis Simpson’s account of the enrolled bill (via Nancy West, InDepthNH, July 10, 2026) adds that the mechanism directs qualifying surpluses only to BET reduction, not to property-tax or fee relief. I&D’s $135M figure is the state’s FY2023 projection (≈ trailing three-year average) — NHFPI, March 2023 — cited here only as that projection, under the old $2,400/$4,800 floors.

Control timeline. Republican governorship plus both chambers 2017–2018 and January 2021–present (the latter with the full four-lever trifecta, continuously) — official election results; Ballotpedia’s New Hampshire state-government trifecta records. Budget-submission deadline of February 15 in odd years — statutory, per NHFPI’s budget-process materials. Gas tax: SB 367 (2014), a 4.2-cent increase effective July 1, 2014 — the first since 1991; NHFPI’s “(2015)” refers to state fiscal year 2015.

Jason Osborne is the most candid politician in Concord, and it is the most useful thing about him.

On a podcast this past winter, the House Majority Leader dismissed the two words Granite Staters reach for first to describe what they love. “There’s these two magic words that get thrown around: local control,” he said. “As if that’s a thing or a value that we have in New Hampshire, which we don’t.” A few weeks later, at a Free State Project gathering, he described how he works. “Sometimes you have to go on the 6 o’clock news and have to say with a straight face something that you don’t actually believe.”

Take him at his word. Both times.

So who is he, and how did a man who calls local control a fairy tale end up writing the laws of the state that reveres it? Osborne moved from Ohio in 2010 as a Free State Project recruit — the decades-long campaign to move libertarians here and shrink government from inside — and is now its most prominent elected official. “Make them call you a Free Stater,” he told the Liberty Forum this spring. “It’s not a smear anymore.”

You don’t have to take that from a Democrat. UNH political scientist Dante Scala notes the Free Staters punch far above their numbers in the Legislature. Rep. Kristine Perez, a Republican, says it plainer: “They vote Republican, they say they’re Republicans, but they’re not true Republicans.” And the brand is radioactive: this spring, St. Anselm’s poll put it at 15 percent favorable, 44 unfavorable — underwater by 29 points. Yet a quarter of voters had never heard of it. That is the whole trick: a movement most people can’t name, holding power most don’t know it has.

Before Concord, there was the family business. Osborne ran a debt-collection company, Credit Adjustments, later rebranded Mammoth Tech. In 2020 it took roughly $4 million in federal PPP money meant to keep workers on payroll. In March 2022 it shut down anyway, firing its last 20 New Hampshire employees — of about 520 nationwide — without the notice federal law requires; a class action followed. On his campaign website he had boasted of bringing “over 100 good and high-paying jobs” to his community. They are gone. He is very good at collecting public money and very hard on the people who depend on him. (This is also the Osborne who used a racial slur for Black people on a libertarian forum over a decade ago; he says he wouldn’t use the word today.)

Osborne helped write New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Accounts into the 2021 budget and forced them open to every income level; the program now costs $51.6 million a year and climbing. His wife, Sharon, directs a nonprofit homeschool center, Latitude Learning Resources, paid with EFA money — $28,750 in a single year, NHPR reported. In her own op-ed she writes that “each year, the number of EFA families has grown.” So the man steering tens of millions into vouchers heads a household the vouchers pay — and by the state’s own count, all but 3 percent of recipients were already in private or home school. He didn’t pry kids out of failing schools; he subsidized families who had already left. New Hampshire lets each legislator decide whether to recuse from a vote that touches his income. Osborne didn’t.

What does he do with his power? He subtracts — and he started with the children. The budget his House passed in 2025 spent $643 million less than his own Republican governor proposed, and it abolished the Office of the Child Advocate, the watchdog over the state’s youth-detention system — just as that system, renamed the Youth Development Center, sits at the center of one of the country’s largest child-abuse scandals. Then it kept cutting: the university system, Medicaid rates, services for Granite Staters with developmental disabilities. Ayotte and the Senate spent the session clawing some of it back. When Osborne’s caucus writes a budget, the list of who pays tells you everything.

Now you understand the podcast: the man who says local control isn’t real governs as if he means it. After Kearsarge voters rejected a local budget cap, Osborne warned the state would “step in” — and it has. He co-sponsored a statewide school-tax cap; when it died, his caucus came back with HB 1300, which cleared both chambers on June 4 and now sits on Ayotte’s desk, forcing a cap question onto the November ballot in every town in the state. He defends it by turning on town meeting itself: when neighbors gather and vote to fund a school, he said, that is not local control but “the tyranny of fringe special interests.” That is how the would-be Speaker describes you. And just as fast in reverse: this past winter, with a federal ICE detention center bound for a vacant Merrimack warehouse, he led the opposition to a bill letting the town vote first. The House refused to take it up.

None of it was an accident; he paid for it. In 2020, the year he seized the caucus, he wrote a personal $50,000 check to Make Liberty Win, a libertarian PAC that backed 76 House candidates. Fifty-three of them entered the majority he now leads. He didn’t just win his majority; he helped pay to assemble it.

And here is what the machine produces. No state leans harder on the local property tax: it supplies 61 percent of what towns live on, the highest share anywhere, and ranks 48th of 50 in what it sends back. There is no income tax — seven in ten voters want it that way — but the cost of government doesn’t vanish. It lands on your house. Your power bill is among the nation’s highest. And the man who runs the House offers no plan, only advice: it is “never going to be more affordable,” he said, “to own what we used to be able to own.”

That is the offer. Lower the bar.

Here is why it reaches your ballot this fall. Sherman Packard won’t seek the gavel again, and Osborne wants it. It’s a contested race, so a Republican House won’t guarantee Speaker Osborne — but it guarantees the faction he leads: that local control is a fairy tale, that the squeeze is permanent, and that what’s good for his household and his donors is close enough for the rest of us. He told a friendly room he will look you in the eye and say things he doesn’t believe. Believe that much. Then decide who you want holding the Speaker’s gavel when he does.

Sources & Notes

Free State Project favorability and income-tax opposition: Saint Anselm College Survey Center survey of 1,491 New Hampshire registered voters, March 16–18, 2026 (margin of error ±2.5%). Free State Project: 15% favorable, 44% unfavorable, 24% never heard of it (p. 24). Income tax: 71% oppose, including a plurality of registered Democrats. Topline at anselm.edu.

“Local control… which we don’t” and “never going to be more affordable… own what we used to be able to own”: Jason Osborne on “The Granite Discourse” podcast (winter 2025–26), quoted in Dana Wormald, “How New Hampshire’s House majority leader is leading Republicans’ backward charge,” New Hampshire Bulletin, March 11, 2026.

“6 o’clock news… something you don’t actually believe”: NHPR (Josh Rogers), March 9, 2026, from Osborne’s “Rules for Reformed Radicals” remarks at the NH Liberty Forum, March 6–8, 2026.

“Make them call you a Free Stater… It’s not a smear anymore”: Concord Monitor (Charlotte Matherly), March 9, 2026; NHPR, March 9, 2026.

Moved from Ohio in 2010 as a Free State Project recruit; “most prominent elected official”: Boston Globe, Sept. 3, 2022; Washington Monthly, “The White Mountain Boys,” Nov. 7, 2021; NHPR (Josh Rogers), March 9, 2026. Osborne was born in Defiance, Ohio, and has said he was raised and homeschooled in San Diego and northeastern Washington.

Dante Scala and Rep. Kristine Perez (R): Genevieve Morrison, “The Next Generation’s Fight Over New Hampshire’s Libertarian Project,” The Nation, June 16, 2026.

Mammoth Tech (formerly Credit Adjustments) — roughly $4 million in PPP funds (2020); March 2022 closure; the last ~20 New Hampshire employees, of about 520 nationwide, dismissed without notice; WARN Act class action; the “over 100 good and high-paying jobs” campaign-website claim: Bob Sanders, “The decline and fall of NH House majority leader’s Mammoth Tech Inc.,” NH Business Review, July 29, 2022; NHPR (Granite State News Collaborative), July 13, 2022.

Racial slur: the 2011 forum post was located and tied to Osborne by Ethan DeWitt, New Hampshire Bulletin, Sept. 1, 2022; Osborne has said he would not use the language today.

Education Freedom Accounts — folded into the 2021 budget; universal eligibility (no income cap) enacted June 10, 2025; cost $51.6 million for 2025–26, up from $30.3 million the prior year; 96.7% of 2025–26 recipients were enrolled in private or home school the prior year: SB 295; Reaching Higher NH; Children’s Scholarship Fund NH; Legislative Budget Assistant audit division via InDepthNH, Nov. 7, 2025; Ethan DeWitt, New Hampshire Bulletin, Dec. 3, 2025.

Sharon Osborne / Latitude Learning Resources: $28,750 in EFA funds in a single year, NHPR, Jan. 30, 2023; her role as director and the line “each year, the number of EFA families has grown,” Sharon Osborne, NH Journal, Oct. 27, 2024; her January 2023 testimony that Latitude was “at capacity” and “would not benefit from the expansion,” InDepthNH, Jan. 19, 2023. New Hampshire leaves recusal to the individual legislator.

2025 House budget — $643 million below Ayotte’s $15.36 billion proposal; elimination of the Office of the Child Advocate; cut to the university system; 3% Medicaid provider-rate cut ($52.5 million over two years); $31.4 million cut to developmental-disability services: New Hampshire Bulletin (Ethan DeWitt; William Skipworth), April 2025; NHPR, March 31 and April 14, 2025; NH Fiscal Policy Institute, April 14, 2025; NH Business Review, April 25, 2025. These cuts were in the House-passed budget; the Senate moved to restore the Office of the Child Advocate, the Medicaid rate, and developmental-disability funding. The Office of the Child Advocate oversees the state’s child-welfare and youth-detention systems, including the Sununu Youth Services Center.

School budget cap (HB 675); “tyranny of fringe special interests”: After Kearsarge voters rejected a local cap, Osborne warned the state would “step in” (Concord Monitor, March 24, 2025). HB 675 (prime sponsor Rep. Joe Sweeney, R-Salem; Osborne co-sponsor and floor champion) imposed an automatic cap requiring a two-thirds local override; the “tyranny of fringe special interests” quote is from Josh Rogers, NHPR, March 18, 2025. The bill passed the House 190–185 in 2025 and died in January 2026.

Statewide property-tax-cap ballot question (HB 1300): Prime sponsor Rep. Ross Berry, R-Weare. The committee-of-conference report passed the House and Senate on June 4, 2026, and went to Gov. Ayotte’s desk. It requires every city and town to place a question on the November 2026 and 2028 general-election ballots asking whether to cap local school-district property-tax growth at the prior year’s level, adjusted for inflation and new-construction value (and to cap school administrative-unit central-office spending), adoptable by a three-fifths vote; bonded capital costs are excluded. House Majority Leader Jason Osborne called it a top priority. Concord Monitor, NHPR, Union Leader, NH Journal (June 4, 2026); Valley News (May 31, 2026).

Merrimack ICE facility vote: In February 2026, House Minority Leader Alexis Simpson moved to suspend House rules to introduce a bill requiring a public hearing and a local governing-body vote before the state could permit an ICE detention facility; Osborne led the opposition, and the motion failed the required two-thirds, 162–187. Garry Rayno, InDepthNH, Feb. 5, 2026.

$50,000 to Make Liberty Win; 76 candidates backed, 53 in his majority: Josh Rogers, “Out Of Public Eye, Jason Osborne Helps Lead Historic Push By GOP In N.H. House,” NHPR, June 14, 2021. The contribution was made in the 2020 cycle.

Property-tax reliance — 61% of local government revenue (highest of any state); 48th of 50 in per-capita state aid; $3,388 per person, second-highest: NH Fiscal Policy Institute, “Property Taxes in New Hampshire: How They Work and How They Compare,” April 9, 2026.

Electricity prices among the nation’s highest: U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Speaker race: Kevin Landrigan, “State House Dome,” Union Leader, Jan. 10, 2026; Packard’s decision not to seek the speakership again, NH Journal, June 2026.

On election night 2006, I was standing in a ballroom at what is now the Fairfield Inn in Concord, watching returns with veterans of the McCain 2000 operation. Sarah Crawford and Mike Dennehy had spent the cycle working to protect Peter Spaulding, a fixture of the Executive Council who had chaired McCain's winning 2000 primary campaign here. Spaulding was so secure that the Democratic governor, John Lynch, had endorsed him. None of it mattered. He lost to John Shea, 71, who had challenged him three times since 1998 and never come within eight points. On the fourth try, in 2006, Shea spent $1,584.63 of his own money on ads in five newspapers, then left for Belgium on election night because he expected to lose. His family tracked him down at a hotel in Brussels to tell him he had taken 50.7 percent of the vote. When Spaulding asked Crawford and Dennehy what happened, the answer was simple: the mood of the electorate was furious at George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, and it was punishing anyone with an R next to their name. Spaulding said as much himself to Newsweek a few weeks later: "Voters were angry. They wanted to see some big changes, starting with Iraq."

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Same candidate. Same opponent. Three straight losses, then a win. The only variable that changed was the mood.

That was twenty years ago. This week, I am looking at June 2026 polling, and what it shows is worse than a bad mood. Kelly Ayotte holds the numbers of Craig Benson, the last New Hampshire governor denied a second term, and she holds them in weather Benson never had to survive.

Benson’s Numbers

Start with the polling, because it is not generic incumbent softness. It is specific. Ayotte’s job approval hit 47–47 in February’s UNH survey, the lowest of her tenure, and sat at 49–47 in the March Saint Anselm poll, down from 49–43 in November. In March she led Cinde Warmington 46–39 among registered voters, with 15 percent undecided. In April’s UNH poll she led 47–39 among likely voters, with 10 percent undecided. Benson did not post his 46–39 (likely voters, 14 percent undecided) until July of his re-election year. Ayotte reached Benson’s number four months ahead of Benson’s schedule. Eleven weeks after that July poll, Benson was tied. Four weeks after that, the voters fired him.

At first blush, the April poll looks like it holds some comfort for her: 97 percent of Republicans, 48 percent of independents, only 10 percent undecided, her net favorability at plus-2 and unchanged since January. It holds, until you put it next to the 47 percent of the state that does not know enough about Warmington to form an opinion. The undecided pool is small because the race is undefined, not because it is settled. Today’s ballot test measures an incumbent governor under 50 percent against a challenger who has not yet been introduced, and who already sits within single digits of her. And stability at plus-2 is not safety. Benson’s job approval rose into October while his race slipped away: 45 percent in July, 51 by early October, tied on the ballot all the while. Benson lost standing still while the challenger got defined. His last measured favorability was plus-11. He lost a month later.

Underneath the topline, Ayotte’s position is worse than Benson’s was. He carried a 14-point lead on taxes — 47 to 33 — into October and lost anyway. She leads on nothing voters rank. The state’s top three problems, per the April UNH Granite State Poll, are housing (22 percent), taxes (17 percent, the highest reading in the poll’s two-decade tracking), and the cost of living (12 percent). Saint Anselm’s differently worded concern series puts elections and democracy first at 26 percent, with affordability second at 15; her deficits hold on either list. Her issue handling: 28–44 on housing, 36–40 on taxes, 27–44 on the cost of living, 34–38 on the economy, 31–50 on education. Her only net-positive issue is crime, at 43–28, which appears in neither top three.

The why is not a mystery, because she keeps reciting it herself. On the New Hampshire Journal podcast on June 6, friendly conservative turf, she listed her record in her own words: bail reform, no sanctuary policies, expanded school choice, parental rights, a 60-day permitting process. Hold that list against the voters’ ranked problems and the finding states itself. She is delivering, on a list that appears in neither pollster’s top three.

Housing is the sharpest case, because she set the standard herself. In her inaugural address, she called housing a crisis to be tackled “head-on,” promised to overhaul agency approvals “so they take no more than 60 days from start to finish,” and pledged to make the process “as frictionless as possible.” The permitting reform happened, and she signed a slate of zoning bills in July 2025. The money went the other way. InvestNH was allowed to expire with no state-backed replacement. House budget writers folded the “Partners in Housing” initiative into their budget without its appropriation. Her own budget did not continue funding the Housing Champions program; it extended the lapse date on the $5 million appropriated in 2023. And in February her party’s House went further than she wanted, voting 185–166 to repeal Housing Champions outright over her stated objection; the Senate’s Commerce Committee voted unanimously in April to spare it. The median single-family home sold for $535,000 in 2025, and Granite Staters pay the second-highest property taxes per capita in America: $3,388 per resident in FY2022, 74 percent above the national average. She named the priority, deregulated the paperwork, and defunded the construction. The voters who rank housing first disapprove of her on it by sixteen points.

The budget tells the same story. In her second week, she imposed a hiring freeze, declaring the state was “facing a budget deficit” as business taxes ran more than $80 million short of forecast. Her budget then assumed those same taxes would rebound, with revenue projections $527 million above House Ways and Means’ figures across the biennium, and above her own agencies’ estimates. Her own party’s House cut about $643 million from her $16 billion two-year proposal on the stated grounds that her numbers were too optimistic. Revenue has since run $156.7 million ahead of the enacted plan through May, and her defenders will say so. Two-thirds of that is the one-time tax amnesty: $103.8 million that never recurs, collected against a $5 million forecast. Set the windfall aside and the rest of the revenue system is $57.9 million ahead of plan, the state’s own ex-amnesty figure, with business taxes — the state’s largest revenue source — below plan for the year to date. The surplus is real; the restoration is not. She lowballed the problem, the programs voters rank first absorbed the correction, and the windfall that followed put none of it back.

Then there is the record of who she has crossed, which runs in every direction but one. She vetoed a paint recycling bill, HB 451, supported by the paint industry itself and the New Hampshire Municipal Association, announcing the veto by writing “NO SALES TAX” on the bill in red ink and posting it to social media — after Americans for Tax Reform declared the bill a violation of the no-tax pledge she signed in 2024, with AFP-NH applauding the veto the same day as killing a “hidden paint tax.” She has vowed to block SB 627, a bill that doubles turnpike tolls on motorists without a New Hampshire E-ZPass while giving every New Hampshire resident a free transponder — a bill that makes Massachusetts drivers pay for New Hampshire roads — which the Senate passed over her declaration that the plan was “dead,” and which the House then endorsed without debate. In May she demanded action on SB 498, a bill covering intensive mental health care for roughly 160,000 children, the majority insured by Anthem; called the House Commerce Committee’s 14–4 vote to shelve it “appalling”; released a public statement urging passage — and watched her own Republican House sustain the shelving on the floor anyway, while Anthem, the insurer covering the largest share of the program’s children, called her criticisms “inaccurate and misleading.” A first-term governor demanded a vote from her own caucus and got rolled; the Senate kept a version of the bill alive late that night. Then, this month, after Republican lawmakers said she ignored their private attempts to negotiate before squashing a universal open-enrollment education bill, the Concord Monitor called the episode “the latest example of rifts between the governor and Republican lawmakers on key pieces of legislation,” with UNH political scientist Dante Scala attributing the collapse to her “go slow” approach to anything she didn’t campaign on. Serial rifts with her own party, in the Monitor’s own words, on June 3. That is Benson’s profile — the governor who, in the UNH Survey Center’s contemporaneous account, had ruffled the feathers of legislators in both parties — with worse issue numbers than Benson ever recorded.

Bush’s Weather

Now the environment. President Trump enters June at 38 percent approval and 57 percent disapproval in the Silver Bulletin’s weighted national average. Those are George W. Bush’s numbers from March 2006: Gallup had him at 38–60 in a poll fielded as February turned to March, and Bush never saw 45 percent again that year — a 31 in early May, a 44 ceiling in mid-September, 37–58 entering the campaign’s final two weeks. Trump is carrying Bush’s March number with nearly five months still on the clock and a war driving it. In New Hampshire, 58 percent of registered voters disapproved of his job performance in March, 59 percent disapproved of the U.S. military action in Iran, and the Democratic lead on the generic congressional ballot widened to 49–41, from 46–42 in November. The state’s consumer mood is following. In the BIA’s May survey of 1,198 residents, 65 percent said the economy is getting worse, up from 53 percent in February, and the share of Republicans expecting to be better off financially a year from now fell from 81 percent to 45.

The war is the engine. The Consumer Price Index released June 10 put annual inflation at 4.2 percent, a three-year high; it stood at 2.4 percent in January, the month before the war with Iran began. Asked in the Oval Office whether the number concerned him, Trump answered: “I love the inflation.” His stated theory is that inflation comes down “like a rock” when the war ends. The war is not ending. The April ceasefire ruptured this week after a U.S. Apache helicopter went down near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday evening; Trump blamed Iran, retaliatory U.S. strikes followed, and Iranian attacks on American bases in the region followed those. The same day the inflation number landed, Trump told Fox News he “may keep going” with strikes on Iranian power plants and bridges. And at her May press conference, asked about relief at the pump with New Hampshire gas running about $4.50 at the time, Ayotte said she is not willing to drop the state gas tax at this point. The President celebrates the prices. The governor declines to relieve them.

Here is why she cannot get out from under it. In October 2016, the day after the Access Hollywood tape broke, Ayotte un-endorsed Trump: “I cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women.” She said she would write in Mike Pence. She said character matters when she thinks about her children. She lost her Senate seat four weeks later, and fairly or not, the defeat became her party’s cautionary tale about the price of crossing Donald Trump. Then in April 2024, to win a contested GOP primary against Chuck Morse, she reversed it on camera, to WMUR’s Adam Sexton: “As you know, we had our differences in 2016, but I think as we look at where we are as a country right now, there’s no question he’s the right choice for the White House.” Days later, Sexton asked whether she regretted withdrawing the 2016 endorsement. She declined to answer. He asked again. She declined again.

That was twenty-five months ago, and it left her with no way out in either direction. She cannot run from Trump; she ran that experiment in 2016, and her party still tells the story. She cannot run with him; he is at 38–57, on camera, celebrating the inflation her voters rank among their top problems. In 2006, the weather was something that happened to Republicans like Peter Spaulding. Ayotte bought hers, on tape, in April 2024.

How It Closes

Here is the honest objection: New Hampshire waves stop at the corner office. True — but 2006 never tested the proposition, because the incumbent governor was a Democrat. The test came in 2018, when the wave flipped both legislative chambers and the Executive Council and Democrats held both congressional seats. Chris Sununu won anyway. But Chris Sununu enjoyed a level of popularity in 2018 that Kelly Ayotte has never remotely seen. A sitting New Hampshire governor has been denied a second term twice in the past hundred years: in 1926, and in 2004, when the voters fired Craig Benson. Benson did not need a wave. He was fired individually, on his own record. Kerry carried the state at the top of the ticket that year by 1.4 points; down the ballot, Republicans held the legislature, kept both U.S. House seats, and won the Senate race. Statewide, the voters removed exactly one Republican from office: their governor. The 2004 track shows the mechanics: 46–39 in July became 43–43 by early October, not because Benson collapsed (his approval rose from 45 to 51) but because Lynch ran what the UNH Survey Center’s director called “heavy rotations of television commercials.” Lynch’s don’t-know number fell from 67 percent to 38 among likely voters, and the race closed on definition alone. Benson’s last measured approval was 51–38 among adults. Four weeks later the voters chose Lynch. No New Hampshire incumbent has ever faced Benson’s record problem and a 2006 environment at once. Ayotte would be the first.

Definition is the variable now too. Forty-seven percent of the state does not know enough about Warmington to hold an opinion of her. Her profile sits almost exactly where Lynch’s sat in July 2004 — he stood at 17 percent favorable with 69 percent unable to rate him; she stands at 16 percent favorable with 47 percent unable to rate her — with one difference, and it runs in her favor: her unfavorable number, 22 percent, is largely the residue of a primary attack that has already aired, while Lynch’s definition was still ahead of him in both directions. And she is running at the issues where the governor is already underwater — property taxes, housing, health care costs, the cost of living — and has been since her February launch. She has also removed Republicans’ most reliable attack on New Hampshire Democrats. In March, when activists in her own party unveiled a 3 percent income tax, she rejected it flat the same week — “We will have no income tax, we will have no sales tax on my watch” — and in April her campaign put it in writing: “Cinde Warmington will veto an income tax or sales tax — end of story.” Seventy-one percent of New Hampshire voters oppose an income tax, including a 47–43 plurality of registered Democrats; the specific 3-3 plan polls at 65 percent opposed, with even Democrats split. The 2004 race ran the experiment on exactly this: both Benson and Lynch pledged to veto broad-based taxes, Benson spent the fall painting Lynch as a taxer anyway, and the attack never moved the ballot — the candidate it worked against was Paul McEachern, the primary opponent who actually backed an income tax. Lynch took the pledge. Lynch is the one who beat Benson. Point by point — the pledge, the affordability message, the unknown-challenger trajectory — Warmington is running the Lynch race, in a worse year for the incumbent’s party. The Republican counterattack, meanwhile, is Warmington’s quarter-century-old legal work for Purdue Pharma, aired exhaustively in the 2024 primary: past conduct, against a record fight.

Then came the tell, twice in one week. On June 4, filing for re-election, Ayotte’s message to supporters was about her opponent: “I know that we’re still only one election away from becoming Massachusetts,” and that Warmington “cannot be our governor, or we will go the way of Massachusetts.” On June 8, she launched the first broadcast television ad of the 2026 governor’s race. It is not a defense of her record. It is Joyce Craig’s 2024 primary attack on Warmington’s OxyContin lobbying, rebroadcast under a new voiceover announcing it as “an unedited television ad from Cinde Warmington’s previous Democratic opponent.” Even the label doesn’t survive inspection: The Downballot ran the two spots side by side and found the Ayotte version clips several pieces of Craig’s 30-second ad — the substance intact, the “unedited” claim not. A filing speech and a first ad, four days apart, both leading with the opponent — this from a governor who told reporters at that same filing that her second-term ambitions include creating more housing, the issue she is sixteen points underwater on. When a sitting governor’s opening argument for a second term is her challenger, twice, that is a statement of what her campaign believes about her record.

The arithmetic of the close is the part observers keep missing. Benson stood at 46 in July and 43 in early October and never touched 50 in either reading; the late deciders went to the challenger they had finally met. Ayotte’s ballot number is 46 and 47. An incumbent under 50 against a challenger most of the state has yet to meet is holding a ceiling, not a lead. Steve Marchand, the former Portsmouth mayor and two-time Democratic candidate for governor, projects the race closing to about 5 points by fall — and that is the path if nothing else breaks against the incumbent. What to watch between now and September: whether Ayotte’s disapproval crosses durably above her approval, and the late-August BIA consumer confidence report.

Peter Spaulding did not lose in 2006 because he was unpopular, or poorly connected, or because John Shea ran a better campaign. Shea had lost to him three times running, and in the year he won, he spent $1,584.63 and flew to Brussels. What changed was the mood. Ayotte’s problem is harder than Spaulding’s. He had a good record and bad weather. She has Benson’s record and the weather she bought. And if voters decide in September and October that they are angry enough to fire the party in power, they will go looking for an alternative standing on the issues that made them angry — housing, property taxes, the cost of living. Cinde Warmington has been standing on that ground since February. So stood the last challenger who beat a sitting governor of New Hampshire.

Sources & Notes

Spaulding/Shea, 2006 Executive Council District 2. Spaulding as chair of McCain’s 2000 N.H. primary campaign, endorsed by the Democratic governor; Spaulding quote (”Voters were angry. They wanted to see some big changes, starting with Iraq”) — Newsweek, “Politics: McCain’s Ground War,” December 2006. Shea’s three prior challenges (1998–2004, never within 8 points), 50.7% in 2006, and $1,584.63 in self-funded newspaper ads — The Keene Sentinel, “From missing to missed,” December 2020, and “Candidate Report: Executive Councilor John Shea runs an activist campaign this time around,” 2008. Election-night departure for Belgium and notification at his Brussels hotel — Boston Globe/AP, “Who is John Shea?”, November 9, 2006; Keene Sentinel obituary, 2021. Shea born 1935 (age 71 in November 2006) — Keene Sentinel obituary. The ballroom recollection and Crawford/Dennehy exchange are the author’s firsthand recollection.

2006 New Hampshire results. Democrats won both chambers of the legislature for the first time since 1874 — David S. Broder, “A Democratic Tidal Wave in New Hampshire,” The Washington Post, November 25, 2006, corroborated by multiple retrospective accounts. Lynch re-elected 74%–26% over Jim Coburn — N.H. general election returns.

Gubernatorial incumbency precedents. A N.H. governor has been denied a second term twice in the past century, 1926 and 2004 — Boston Globe (Steven Porter), April 24, 2026; independently corroborated by accounts describing Benson’s 2004 defeat as the second such denial in 78 years (2004 − 78 = 1926). Benson defeated by Lynch 51%–49%, a margin of 14,318 votes (340,299–325,981), 2004; Republicans held the N.H. legislature and won the U.S. Senate seat (Gregg) and both U.S. House races; Kerry carried the state’s presidential vote 50.2%–48.9%, a margin of roughly 1.4 points — N.H. election records and contemporaneous reporting. 2018: Democrats flipped both legislative chambers and the Executive Council and held both congressional seats; Sununu re-elected — contemporaneous reporting, November 2018.

Benson 2004 polling track. July wave: Benson–Lynch 46%–39%, 14% undecided (likely voters, n=456); Lynch favorability 17% favorable / 69% don’t know among N.H. adults (+13 net, 67% don’t know, among likely voters); Benson job approval 45% (N.H. adults); fielded July 6–20, 2004, released July 21, 2004. October wave: Benson–Lynch tied 43%–43%, 13% undecided (likely voters); Lynch favorability 36% favorable / 13% unfavorable / 38% don’t know among likely voters (net +23, from +13 in July); Benson job approval 51%–38% (N.H. adults, up from 45% in July); Benson favorability net +11 among likely voters, unchanged from July and down from +33 in April — his last measured readings; better candidate on taxes: Benson 47%–33%; UNH Survey Center director Andrew Smith on Lynch’s “heavy rotations of television commercials”; fielded September 27–October 3, 2004, 579 N.H. adults, ±4.1% (likely-voter subsample n=538, ±4.3%), released October 5, 2004 — WMUR Granite State Poll, conducted by the UNH Survey Center (Smith/Junius); October release verified in full against the UNH Scholars’ Repository PDF (scholars.unh.edu). The 2004 tax-pledge dynamic — both Benson and Lynch pledged to veto broad-based taxes; Benson ran on painting Lynch as a taxer; Lynch held — contemporaneous AP/Fox News campaign coverage, October 2004, and CBS retrospective. The July release’s split-sample income-tax experiment (Benson–Lynch unchanged with both veto positions stated; Benson–McEachern widening with McEachern’s income-tax support stated) is cited to the July 21, 2004 WMUR Granite State Poll release in the same repository; the surrounding July figures are confirmed by the October release’s trend tables. Interval arithmetic: July fielding to the tied October fielding is eleven weeks; the October 5 release to the November 2 election is four weeks. Per the releases’ stated terms, this material is cited as the WMUR Granite State Poll, sponsored by WMUR-TV and the University of New Hampshire. Sample frames: the 2004 ballot figures are likely voters, matching the April 2026 UNH likely-voter ballot; the March 2026 Saint Anselm ballot is registered voters. The Lynch–Warmington favorability comparison pairs full-sample readings in both years: Lynch’s 17%/69% is among N.H. adults (July 2004); Warmington’s 16%/22%/47% is among N.H. residents (April 2026).

Presidential approval and environment. Trump 38% approve / 57% disapprove, June 2026 — Silver Bulletin weighted average, per First Light Strategies memo, June 10, 2026. Bush at 38% approve / 60% disapprove — CNN/USA Today/Gallup, fielded February 28–March 1, 2006 (news.gallup.com, “Bush Job Approval at 38%”: within a point of his lowest approval and tied for his highest disapproval to that date). Bush’s 2006 range thereafter — Gallup’s December 8–10, 2006 review: a low of 31% in early May and a 2006 high of 44% in mid-September; final pre-election standing 37%–58%, fielded October 20–22, 2006, with Gallup reporting a 39% average since the beginning of June (”Bush Job Approval Steady at 37%”). Trump in New Hampshire: 58% disapprove; U.S. military action in Iran 40% approve / 59% disapprove; Democratic generic congressional ballot lead 49%–41% (from 46%–42% in November) — Saint Anselm College Survey Center, 1,491 N.H. registered voters, March 16–18, 2026, ±2.5% (verified against the survey’s weighted marginals and summary of findings).

N.H. consumer sentiment. 65% say the national economy is getting worse (53% in February); Republicans expecting to be better off financially in a year: 81% (February) to 45% (May; Republican-respondent subsample) — BIA Report on Consumer Confidence, conducted by the UNH Survey Center; 1,198 N.H. residents surveyed online May 21–25, 2026, via the Granite State Panel; ±2.8%; released May 28, 2026 (UNH Scholars’ Repository, “Widespread Concern Over Gas Prices in NH as Consumer Confidence Shows Sudden Slump”).

Inflation and the Iran war. CPI 4.2% annual for May 2026, a three-year high (core 2.9%) — Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 10, 2026, per CNBC, June 10, 2026. Annual inflation at 2.4% in January 2026, the month before the war began — The Hill/NewsNation, citing the January CPI; the U.S.–Iran war began in late February 2026. Trump Oval Office quotes (”I love the inflation,” in response to whether the CPI print concerned him; post-war inflation “coming down like a rock”) — CNBC and CBS News, June 10, 2026. April ceasefire — contemporaneous market and wire coverage, April 8, 2026. Ceasefire rupture: U.S. Apache helicopter down near the Strait of Hormuz the evening of Monday, June 8, Trump attributing the downing to Iran; retaliatory U.S. strikes; Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the region — NBC News and CBS News live coverage, June 9–10, 2026. Trump to Fox News: “may keep going” with strikes on power plants and bridges — June 10, 2026, per NBC News and The Jerusalem Post.

Ayotte job approval, issue handling, and ballot. 47%–47% February, lowest of tenure — UNH Survey Center Granite State Poll, 1,702 N.H. residents, fielded February 12–16, ±2.4%, released February 24, 2026. 49%–47% March (49%–43% in November 2025, per the Saint Anselm trend); ballot 46%–39% with 15% undecided (registered voters); top-concern series ranking elections/democracy first (26%), affordability second (15%) — Saint Anselm College Survey Center, March 16–18, 2026 (verified against the weighted marginals). April: ballot 47%–39%, 4% another candidate, 10% undecided (likely voters); 97% of Republicans and 48% of Independents for Ayotte; issue handling (crime 43–28; taxes 36–40; economy 34–38; education 31–50; housing 28–44; cost of living 27–44); most important problems (housing 22%; taxes 17%; cost of living 12%; education 11%); Ayotte favorability 43%–41%, net +2, unchanged since January; Warmington 16% favorable / 22% unfavorable / 47% don’t know enough to say — UNH Survey Center Granite State Poll, 1,295 N.H. residents, April 17–21, 2026, ±2.9%, released April 23, 2026; topline and crosstabs at scholars.unh.edu. The April release notes the taxes share has risen since 2023–25; “highest in the poll’s two-decade tracking” reflects the release’s trend chart, in which the 17% reading exceeds all readings shown since 2002 (February’s 16% was itself reported as an all-time high). The Saint Anselm College Survey Center and the UNH Survey Center are separate organizations; their concern series use different question formats and are never combined here.

Ayotte stated record. Bail reform, no sanctuary policies, expanded school choice, parental rights, 60-day permitting — Gov. Ayotte’s own on-air characterization, New Hampshire Journal podcast (Michael Graham), June 6, 2026. NH Journal is a friendly conservative venue; the framing is hers, on her chosen turf.

Housing record. Inaugural address, January 9, 2025: “we’ll tackle this crisis head-on”; overhauling agency approvals “so they take no more than 60 days from start to finish”; “We need to make the process as frictionless as possible” — official transcript, governor.nh.gov. Zoning-bill signings (10 bills) — New Hampshire Bulletin, July 23, 2025. InvestNH expiration without state-backed replacement; Housing Champions: “Ayotte’s budget did not continue funding the program… Instead, it extended the lapse date for the $5 million appropriated in 2023” — NHPR / New Hampshire Bulletin, May 20, 2025. Partners in Housing: HB 572 (2025) policy language incorporated into the House budget without the bill’s appropriation — NHFPI House Finance analysis, April 2025; the standalone bill was retained in committee — New Hampshire Bulletin, July 23, 2025. Housing Champions repeal (HB 1196): House Housing Committee 10–8, January 20, 2026; full House 185–166, February 5, 2026, with the claw-back question referred to Ways and Means; Ayotte opposing the repeal (”No, I don’t support that”); Senate Commerce Committee 5–0 against the repeal, April 2026 — NH Business Review, January 28 and February 11, 2026; Manchester Ink Link, April 17, 2026.

Fiscal record. Hiring freeze in her second week, “facing a budget deficit,” business taxes more than $80 million short of forecast — NHPR, January 2025. Revenue projections $527 million above House Ways and Means across the biennium, and above her own agencies’ estimates — New Hampshire Bulletin, February 2025. House cut of about $643 million from her $16 billion two-year, total-funds proposal, citing overly optimistic revenue projections — NHFPI, “House Finance Committee State Budget Reduces Funding by About $643 Million from Governor’s Proposal,” April 14, 2025; Valley News, April 2025. FY2026 unrestricted revenue $156.7 million (5.7%) ahead of plan through May (eleven months) — DAS Monthly Revenue Focus, May FY2026, as reported by InDepthNH, “State Revenues On Target for May,” June 5, 2026. Tax amnesty: $103.8 million collected December 1, 2025–February 15, 2026 ($96.7 million from business taxes), against a $5 million plan — NH DRA, per Union Leader, March 23, 2026, and NHFPI, April 6, 2026. The $57.9 million ex-amnesty surplus is the DAS Monthly Revenue Focus’s own framing; the figures reconcile as $156.7M = $98.8M of above-plan amnesty receipts ($103.8M collected against the $5.0M in the plan) + $57.9M from all other sources. Business taxes through May: $947.2M year to date, $12.6 million (1.3%) below plan, though $24.3 million (2.6%) above the prior year — DAS Monthly Revenue Focus, May FY2026.

The paint veto (HB 451). Sponsored by Rep. Karen Ebel, D-New London; passed the House on a voice vote; passed the Senate 13–11 in January 2026 over opposition from some top Senate Republicans; supporters included the paint industry (PaintCare model) and the New Hampshire Municipal Association, whose defeat NH Journal noted directly; Ayotte signaled the veto on the NH Journal podcast in January after Americans for Tax Reform declared the bill a violation of the no-tax pledge she and most GOP legislative candidates signed in 2024; vetoed March 16, 2026, writing “No sales tax!” in red ink on the bill and posting it to social media (”NO Sales Tax. Not now. NOT EVER!”); AFP-NH applauded the veto the same day as killing a “hidden paint tax”; the House override attempt in April drew a 186–169 majority, short of two-thirds, with House Republicans splitting 169–30 to sustain — New Hampshire Bulletin (March 16, 2026), Union Leader (March 17, 2026), NH Journal (March 17, 2026), Waste Dive (March 19, 2026), The Center Square (March 17, 2026, carrying the AFP-NH statement), InDepthNH (April 2026).

The turnpike bill (SB 627). Sponsored by Sen. David Watters, D-Dover; doubles turnpike toll rates for motorists without a New Hampshire E-ZPass while entitling every New Hampshire resident to a free transponder, so no N.H. driver pays more; an estimated $50–53 million a year for turnpike projects; Ayotte in January: “No. I think I’ve been pretty clear that we’re not going to raise tolls,” and, asked whether that meant the plan was dead, “Yes”; the Senate passed it on a voice vote March 5, 2026; the House initially endorsed it without debate on a voice vote in April 2026 — Union Leader (Kevin Landrigan), January 29, March 5, and April 24, 2026; NHPR, April 2, 2026.

The SB 498 fight. SB 498 (Sen. Regina Birdsell, R-Hampstead) would have required private insurers to help fund the FAST Forward wraparound mental health program, covering roughly 160,000 children, about 10 percent of the state, the majority insured by Anthem; passed the Senate on a voice vote March 26; House Commerce voted 14–4 on May 6 to send it to interim study, which Ayotte called “appalling,” telling reporters it was “unbelievable to me that they think it is more important to support the insurance companies than it is to support the children of this state” — InDepthNH (Paula Tracy), May 6, 2026; Keene Sentinel, May 6, 2026. Her morning statement urging passage (”It’s appalling that Anthem and other carriers would deny coverage for critical services to any child experiencing a mental health crisis”) — NH Journal, May 6, 2026. On May 14 the House voted to send the bill to interim study; Ayotte: disappointed to see “elected representatives choose subsidizing insurance companies over kids’ mental health care”; Anthem spokesman Jim Turner called her criticisms of the industry “inaccurate and misleading”; Anthem insures the largest share of children enrolled in FAST Forward; the Senate revived a version of the measure that Thursday night via a floor amendment to HB 1323 — Concord Monitor, May 14, 2026; InDepthNH, May 15, 2026.

The open-enrollment collapse. Republican lawmakers, including bill architect Rep. Kristin Noble of Bedford, chair of a House education committee, said the governor’s office ignored repeated private outreach before publicly opposing the universal open-enrollment bill; “the latest example of rifts between the governor and Republican lawmakers on key pieces of legislation” is the Concord Monitor’s own characterization; UNH political scientist Dante Scala attributed the collapse to Ayotte’s “go slow” approach to policy beyond her campaign issues — Concord Monitor, June 3, 2026 (republished by the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, June 9, 2026).

The Trump reversal. Un-endorsement statement of October 8, 2016, the day after the Access Hollywood tape’s release: “I cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women,” with Ayotte stating she would write in Mike Pence — contemporaneous national reporting. Her statement that character matters when she thinks about her children — WNTK radio interview, 2016, as reported by CNN and Politico (paraphrased here). 2024 reversal: “As you know, we had our differences in 2016, but I think as we look at where we are as a country right now, there’s no question he’s the right choice for the White House” — WMUR CloseUP interview with Adam Sexton, April 26, 2024; the repeated decline to say whether she regretted the 2016 withdrawal — WMUR CloseUP, April 30, 2024. Both interviews available at WMUR.com. Elapsed time computed from April 26, 2024.

The filing speech and the first ad. Ayotte filed for re-election June 4, 2026, telling supporters “I know that we’re still only one election away from becoming Massachusetts” and that Warmington “cannot be our governor, or we will go the way of Massachusetts,” while saying her second-term ambitions include creating more housing — NH Journal/Patch (syndicated report), June 2026; the source text spells the first name “Cindy.” First broadcast TV ad of the 2026 governor’s race: Joyce Craig’s 2024 primary attack on Warmington’s OxyContin lobbying, paid for by the Ayotte campaign, airing from Monday, June 8, with the introductory voiceover “The following is an unedited television ad from Cinde Warmington’s previous Democratic opponent” — NH Journal, June 8, 2026. The editing finding — the Ayotte version “clips several bits from Craig’s ad, which was 30 seconds long, though the sum and substance remain unchanged” — The Downballot Morning Digest, June 2026, from its side-by-side comparison of the two spots.

Warmington message and tax pledge. Campaign launch, Wednesday, February 18, 2026, led on affordability: “The prices of groceries, housing, electricity and property taxes are crushing working families” (statement and launch video; the trailing clause varies slightly by outlet), with pledges to oppose any sales or income tax, end Education Freedom Accounts, and reverse the budget’s Medicaid premium increases — New Hampshire Bulletin, NHPR, and Union Leader, February 18–19, 2026; Concord Monitor, February 18, 2026. The Volinsky/Fernald “3-3 Tax Savings Plan” (3% income tax plus $3 per $1,000 statewide property tax) unveiled March 3, 2026; denounced by Ayotte and by Democratic legislative leaders — New Hampshire Bulletin, Union Leader, March 3–4, 2026. Warmington to WMUR that week: “We will have no income tax, we will have no sales tax on my watch” — per NH Journal, March 3, 2026, and Union Leader, March 4, 2026. “Cinde Warmington will veto an income tax or sales tax — end of story” — campaign spokesman, per The Keene Sentinel, April 15, 2026. Income tax opposition: 71% opposed, including a 47%–43% plurality of registered Democrats — Saint Anselm College Survey Center, March 16–18, 2026 (verified against the release’s summary of findings). The specific 3-3 plan: 65% opposed (54% strongly, 11% somewhat), with Democrats split — UNH Granite State Poll, April 2026 (scholars.unh.edu).

Opioid counterattack. Warmington’s Purdue Pharma legal work, 2001–2002, and its airing in the 2024 primary — New Hampshire Bulletin (William Skipworth), June 8, 2026; Union Leader and NH Journal coverage of the 2024 primary and 2026 relaunch exchanges.

Affordability figures. Median single-family sale price, N.H., 2025: $535,000 — N.H. Association of Realtors Monthly Indicators (December 2025), cited in NHFPI, “Property Taxes in New Hampshire,” April 9, 2026 (verified against the report). Property tax per capita, FY2022: N.H. $3,388 (2nd, behind New Jersey’s $3,617); U.S. average $1,943; the 74%-above-average figure is arithmetic on those two numbers — NHFPI, April 9, 2026, citing the Census of State and Local Finance, FY2022 (verified against the report). N.H. gas prices approximately $4.49–$4.53 in May 2026 — AAA data via InDepthNH, May 8, 2026; “not willing to drop the state gas tax at this point” — InDepthNH, May 6, 2026, from the same press conference as the SB 498 remarks. Six in ten Granite Staters worried about paying for gasoline over the next twelve months, with two-thirds holding President Trump very responsible for the increase — BIA Report on Consumer Confidence, May 28, 2026.

Projection. Race closing to roughly 5 points by fall — Steve Marchand, “For Trump, ‘26 Is Looking Ominously Like ‘06,” The Politics of New Hampshire (Substack), June 3, 2026; the observation that this is the path absent further deterioration is this page’s gloss, not Marchand’s caveat. Marchand is a former mayor of Portsmouth and a two-time Democratic candidate for governor.

Those are the Fiscal Policy Institute’s numbers, and they describe this month. Not a forecast. Now.

Here is the connection Governor Kelly Ayotte and the Republican majority would rather you not make. New Hampshire has no income tax and no sales tax — the famous New Hampshire Advantage. But the absence of those taxes doesn’t make the cost of government disappear. It relocates it. With no other major revenue source, and among the lowest state aid to towns in the country, New Hampshire leans on the property tax harder than any state in the nation — nearly every local tax dollar comes from the levy on your house. That’s the Advantage’s hidden invoice. And it lands hardest on the people it was sold to protect: the poorest fifth of Granite Staters pay more than three times the share of their income in state and local taxes that the top one percent do.

So when Governor Ayotte vows to “protect and strengthen the New Hampshire Advantage,” hold the slogan up against the bill. Every state tax the majority gives away lowers the cost of nothing — it just shoves more of the load onto the one major tax left standing, the one on your home. “Protect the Advantage” is not a shield. It’s a promise to guard the machine that mails the bill.

No One Left to Blame

In April, before the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, Ayotte asked New Hampshire to judge her on results. Fair enough. She’s the governor; her party holds the House, the Senate, and the Executive Council — and has held all four since 2021. She’s had the corner office for seventeen months; her party has run every lever of state government for five years, with no divided government to blame and no one with the power to stop it. Whatever this economy is now, it’s the one they built.

So when two of the state’s most powerful Republicans sat for interviews in the first week of June — the Senate Majority Leader on drive-time radio, the governor on a friendly conservative podcast — the only question that mattered was the one voters keep asking at the kitchen table: what have you done about the cost of living?

The answers are worth reading slowly. Not because they were evasive — because they were honest. Read closely, the two of them don’t just admit relief hasn’t come. They explain, without meaning to, why it can’t.

The View From the Windshield

On June 5, Senate Majority Leader Regina Birdsell went on NH Today with Chris Ryan, who led with the only question that counts: “What have you done to bring down my costs?”

She didn’t duck. She talked about housing — one-department permitting now — and the money behind it: $55 million in PFAS settlements, $100 million for wastewater, $11.5 million for a regional water line. She talked about energy: off-grid providers, no offshore wind, utilities free to build their own generation.

That’s the GOP record, and it’s worth saying so, because the easy and false version of this column would be that Republicans did nothing. They did not do nothing. They permitted, they appropriated, they reformed — every one of those a thing government does to itself, not a dollar that ever came off your bill.

But listen to the tense.

Ryan pressed: where does the revenue that turns this into lower costs come from, and when? Her own words answered. The spending, she said, was “so that when we do have the revenue, we can put additional money in for the housing champions program.”

When we do have the revenue. The case for relief is a conditional, payable on a date no one would name. Ryan asked for the date. There wasn’t one.

He gave her an out — and precision matters: the “multifaceted issue” line, conceding the failure isn’t any one official’s fault, was Ryan’s, not Birdsell’s. He even noted that after years of talk “it doesn’t feel like there’s been anything of significant substance.” Here’s how she answered: driving around her district, she could see housing going up — Londonderry, Stoddard, a first C-PACER groundbreaking. “So it’s starting,” she said. And again: “It’s starting.”

That’s the affirmative case, from the person best placed to make it: construction through a windshield. The verb is starting — the present tense of a thing that hasn’t happened.

Energy was the same. On the cost of power, she pointed to micro-nuclear reactors: “That’s looking at the future, and I think that’s where our energy costs are going to go down.” Going to. The reactors don’t exist. And the housing money she listed was plumbing — necessary, but a pipe in the ground is not a roof anyone can afford. Asked about the cost of housing, she reached for the pipes. The substitution is the tell.

The Friendly Confessional

The next day, June 6, the governor sat with the conservative blog New Hampshire Journal — as friendly a venue as exists in this state for her. It opened on whether it even counted as a podcast and closed on the best sundae on the ice cream trail. If Ayotte had a record of lowering the cost of living, this was the room to lay it out.

Kelly talked about ice cream.

She recited her first-term record: bail reform, no sanctuary policies, expanded school choice, parental rights, 60-day permitting. Notice what’s not on it. Not one item is a cost that came down — every entry is a policy or a process, not the number a voter feels in a rent check.

Reaching the cost of living directly, she said: “I’m about making sure that we lower costs.”

There’s no past tense in it — nothing lowered, only a lowering she is, unfinished, about. Then the quiet part: “I don’t look to the past, Michael. I look to the future. And this election is about the future.” She’s right that it’s a choice. The future is where you campaign when the present won’t vouch for you.

It is a familiar move. Two years ago, asked twice whether she regretted breaking with Donald Trump in 2016, she changed the subject both times and never answered — the same reflex that won’t revisit the past now declines to account for the present.

What filled the space where a record would go was contrast: Ayotte branded her opponent Cinde Warmington a “taxer and a spender,” attacked her past lobbying work, and vowed to “protect and strengthen the New Hampshire Advantage.” Her argument is don’t let it get worse, not it got better. And we already know what that vow protects: the machine that mails the bill. Hold it against the number she never mentioned — a $535,000 home, out of reach for the families already here, seventeen months into her term.

The Vote of No Confidence

You could call all of this a partisan reading — a critic’s hit on a Republican governor. So don’t take it from a critic. Take it from the Business and Industry Association, New Hampshire’s statewide chamber of commerce and the closest thing the state’s employers have to a single voice.

In March, BIA president and CEO Michael Skelton reported that nearly four in ten New Hampshire businesses expect the state’s business climate to decline over the coming year — a significant jump from the year before. And the single most-cited policy concern among the state’s employers wasn’t taxes or regulation. It was housing supply: nearly nine in ten named it as the thing strangling their ability to recruit and keep workers. The same issue the Senate Majority Leader says is “starting.” The same issue the governor answered with ice cream.

Then came the confidence numbers. In the BIA’s late-May survey of Granite Staters, conducted by the University of New Hampshire, forty-five percent said they were worse off than a year ago, and just sixteen percent said better — down from twenty-eight percent who felt better off only three months earlier, in February. A quarter expect good times for New Hampshire business in the year ahead; thirty-six percent expect bad times, up from twenty-eight percent in February. Sixty-five percent say the economy is getting worse, up from fifty-three. This is not a Democratic talking point. It is the business community’s own dashboard, and every needle is pointing down.

Here is the part that should retire the “pro-business” branding for good. The collapse isn’t coming from Democrats — they were already pessimistic. It’s coming from Republicans. The share of New Hampshire Republicans expecting good times for state business fell from seventy-five percent in February to fifty percent in May. The share who expect their own families to be better off a year from now fell from eighty-one percent to forty-five. In three months, the governor’s own base lost the faith. When your own voters stop believing the economy is working, the slogan has stopped working too.

Skelton made the diagnosis without naming a culprit: businesses, he wrote, need an environment that is “predictable and stable,” and the force dragging confidence down is uncertainty. Set that against the one answer the people running Concord gave for when relief arrives — “when we do have the revenue,” no date, no commitment, payable never. That is not stability. It is the manufacture of uncertainty, sold as prudence. A government that delivers the exact uncertainty its own business community says is killing confidence, and cannot move the one issue those employers rank first, does not get to call itself pro-business. Pro-business in the brochure. Anti-growth in the result.

Why No One Could Name the Date

The Republicans promising relief “when we have the revenue” are the same ones who spent nearly a decade making sure there wouldn’t be any — giving up, by the Fiscal Policy Institute’s count, more than $1 billion through cuts to the business taxes, the rooms-and-meals tax, and the interest-and-dividends tax.

They’ll tell you the cuts paid for themselves — that business-tax receipts rose even as the rates fell. For a while they did, riding a wave of pandemic-era corporate profits that has now crested. The Department of Revenue Administration’s own May report is the obituary: “many traditional revenue streams are in deficit for the year to date.” The state looks roughly $157 million ahead of plan, but two-thirds of that is a single $103.8 million tax amnesty — one-time money, with gambling and investment interest on top. You can’t collect a windfall twice, and you don’t build a standing relief program on one. The revenue that could fund a permanent fix is the revenue they shrank.

The pattern repeats wherever you look. When the Department of Transportation said its highway plan was $400 million short and needed the first toll increase since 2007, the governor’s answer was blunt: “There will be no toll increase.” No alternative offered. The Housing Champions Program that Birdsell cited as proof things are “starting” is the program her own caucus refused to fund — in February, Senate Republicans killed a bill to add $5 million to it, 16 to 8, asking “where’s the money?”, a fair question they vote down every answer to. That program supported 45 percent of the state’s new housing in 2024. Meanwhile the unavoidable bills grow: pending claims from Youth Development Center abuse survivors are valued at as much as $1.8 billion, the state carries no insurance against them, so taxpayers are on the hook — and a 2024 law caps the settlement fund at $75 million a year, the maximum its administrator requested, while lawmakers have funded only a fraction of that. And it made New Hampshire a universal school-voucher state with no dedicated funding, so every voucher drains the same pool that’s supposed to someday pay for housing, roads, and lower power bills.

Against that ledger, “when we do have the revenue” is not a timeline. It’s a sentence with no date its authors will put in writing — spoken by the people who removed the date on purpose.

The only date anyone in this story can name is the third of November, when voters render a verdict before the relief is scheduled to arrive — the family priced out of a home and the employer who can’t recruit one into the state casting the same ballot. Five years of total control, and relief is always one budget away, one technology away, one election away. Always starting. Never arrived. And on no timeline they will commit to in public.

In April, Kelly Ayotte asked to be judged on results. Her own leadership — and now her own business community — have told us, in their own words and their own numbers, what the results are.

They’re starting.

Sources & Notes

Interviews & quotes. Sen. Regina Birdsell on NH Today with Chris Ryan (drive-time radio), June 5, 2026 [episode link]; Gov. Kelly Ayotte on the New Hampshire Journal podcast, hosted by Michael Graham, June 6, 2026 [episode link]. All quotations are verbatim from these broadcasts. The “multifaceted issue” concession was host Chris Ryan’s, not Sen. Birdsell’s.

GOP control timeline. New Hampshire has had a Republican trifecta — governor, House, Senate, and Executive Council — continuously since January 2021, when the legislature flipped back to Republican control after the 2019–2020 Democratic majorities. Gov. Ayotte took office in January 2025; the seventeen-month figure refers to her tenure, the five-year figure to her party’s unbroken control.

Earlier piece and the Trump reversal. “Who Is Kelly Ayotte?”, Granite Perspectives, April 6, 2026, documents that in back-to-back WMUR CloseUP interviews in April 2024 Ayotte reversed her 2016 position on Donald Trump and then, asked directly whether she regretted withdrawing her 2016 endorsement, declined to answer on two consecutive attempts.

Stated records. The accomplishments attributed to each official are their own on-air characterizations. Sen. Birdsell’s account — one-department permitting, $55 million in PFAS settlements, $100 million for wastewater, $11.5 million for the Southern New Hampshire regional water line, the energy-policy changes, and the Housing Champions and C-PACER programs — is as she stated it on NH Today, June 5, 2026; the dollar figures are hers. Gov. Ayotte’s recited record — bail reform, no sanctuary policies, expanded school choice, parental rights, and the 60-day permitting process — is from the New Hampshire Journal podcast, June 6, 2026.

Housing & affordability. The $535,000 median, 15 percent affordability rate, 49.4 percent of renters cost-burdened, $33,900 childcare wage, and $1,833 two-bedroom rent are from the NH Fiscal Policy Institute (March 2026). At a $33,900 salary, $1,833 a month is about 65 percent of monthly income.

Property taxes. New Hampshire’s nation-leading reliance on the property tax (the largest share of local revenue of any state, about 98 percent of all local tax revenue), its bottom-tier state aid to local governments (48th of 50 in per-capita aid), and the regressivity figures (an 8.9 percent effective state-and-local tax rate for the lowest-income fifth of households versus 2.8 percent for the top 1 percent — more than three to one) are from the NH Fiscal Policy Institute’s report “Property Taxes in New Hampshire: How They Work and How They Compare” (April 9, 2026), drawing on U.S. Census Bureau FY2022 data and Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy modeling.

Business climate and consumer confidence. The finding that nearly four in ten New Hampshire businesses expect the state’s business climate to decline, that housing supply is the most widely cited policy concern among business leaders (nearly nine in ten), and that employers need a “predictable and stable” environment are from the Business and Industry Association’s monthly Business Perspective column by BIA president and CEO Michael Skelton (Sunday News, March 13, 2026). The consumer-confidence figures — sixteen percent of Granite Staters better off than a year ago and forty-five percent worse off (versus twenty-eight percent better off in February); twenty-five percent expecting good times and thirty-six percent bad times for New Hampshire business (bad times up from twenty-eight percent in February); sixty-five percent saying the economy is getting worse (up from fifty-three percent); and the decline in Republican optimism (expectations of good times for NH business falling from seventy-five to fifty percent, and personal-finance optimism for the year ahead from eighty-one to forty-five percent) — are from the BIA Report on Consumer Confidence, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, fielded May 21–25, 2026 (n = 1,198; margin of sampling error ±2.8 percent).

Revenue. The roughly $156.7 million FY2026 surplus through May, its reliance on a $103.8 million tax amnesty plus gambling and investment-interest revenue, and the "many traditional revenue streams … in deficit for the year to date" language are from the Department of Revenue Administration's May report, via InDepthNH (Garry Rayno, June 5, 2026). The estimate of revenue forgone through the business-tax, rooms-and-meals, and interest-and-dividends cuts is the NH Fiscal Policy Institute's, which puts the 2016–2024 total as high as $1.2 billion; it was reported in InDepthNH (Rayno, April 3, 2026), in a piece whose headline finding — that New Hampshire posted the fourth-worst post-pandemic revenue rebound among the fifty states — comes from a separate source, The Pew Charitable Trusts' Fiscal 50 project.

Transportation & the Housing Champions vote. The roughly $400 million Ten-Year Plan shortfall and Ayotte’s rejection of a toll increase are from the Union Leader (Kevin Landrigan) and CBS Boston (2025–26). The 16–8 defeat of SB 419’s $5 million for the Housing Champions Program, the “where’s the money?” objection, and the program’s 45 percent share of 2024 new housing units are from InDepthNH (Paula Tracy, February 19, 2026).

Youth Development Center & EFAs. A 2024 law caps the YDC settlement fund at $75 million a year (Union Leader, 2025); the more than $1.8 billion in pending claims and the absence of state insurance are from The Boston Globe (January 2026) and InDepthNH (2025–26). The removal of EFA income limits with no dedicated funding is documented in prior Granite Perspectives reporting and NH Department of Education data.

Donald Trump had just been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women. Republicans across the country were calculating — how much could they stomach, how much did they need him, where exactly was the line. Most of them found a way to stay.

Ayotte drew a line.

“I cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women.”

She went further. In a radio interview days later, she said Trump’s comments were — in her own words — “fundamentally talking, unfortunately, about assault.” She wrote in Mike Pence. She told a host she “wouldn’t want my daughter in the room” with Trump. She said: “Character does matter when I think about my children.”

She said it clearly. She said it publicly. And it cost her.

She lost her Senate seat that November — in part because of the chaos of her Trump un-endorsement in the final weeks of the campaign. It was one of the more painful political defeats in recent New Hampshire history.

Give her this: in 2016, Kelly Ayotte told New Hampshire voters exactly who she was. The problem is what happened next.

She didn’t disappear after 2016. Within months, she agreed to serve as Donald Trump’s “sherpa” for his first Supreme Court nominee — Neil Gorsuch. The woman who said she could not support a man who bragged about assaulting women was now working to help him reshape the federal judiciary. That Supreme Court — with justices confirmed through that process — would later vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

She moved into the private sector. Among her positions: a seat on the board of Blackstone — the nation’s largest corporate landlord — at $150,000 per year in cash compensation, plus stock. By the time she ran for governor, she held over $2.2 million in Blackstone shares.

None of that is disqualifying on its own. People rebuild careers after political defeats. People serve on corporate boards. But the context matters — because in 2024, Ayotte needed Republican primary voters. And Republican primary voters, in 2024, meant Trump voters.

So she made a calculation.

Then came 2024.

In April of that year, sitting across from WMUR’s Adam Sexton for a CloseUP interview, Kelly Ayotte reversed two of the most significant positions of her political career in a single conversation.

On Trump: “As you know, we had our differences in 2016, but I think as we look at where we are as a country right now, there’s no question he’s the right choice for the White House.”

On immigration: she reversed her 2013 support for a pathway to citizenship, which she had once called “tough but fair.”

Then Sexton asked the question directly. Do you regret withdrawing your endorsement of Trump in 2016?

She did not answer.

He asked again.

She did not answer.

What she said instead: “You know, Adam, I certainly appreciate that where we are as a country right now, it’s important that we have new leadership… there’s no doubt for me that where we are, we need new leadership and the contrast between the two administrations, the choice is clear in this race.”

She never said she was wrong in 2016. She never said she had changed her mind about his character. She simply moved on — because the political math had changed.

That double dodge is worth sitting with. A politician who can say clearly, on the record, that a man’s words constitute “fundamentally assault” — and then cannot say, eight years later, whether she was right or wrong to say it — is telling you something. Not about Trump. About herself.

Now she is governor. And the question of who Kelly Ayotte really is has a governing record to answer it.

The House Majority Leader she works with — Jason Osborne — told a libertarian audience this year, at a Free State Project event: “Sometimes you have to go on the 6 o’clock news and have to say with a straight face something that you don’t actually believe.”

Read that again. New Hampshire’s House Majority Leader, at a public event, telling an audience that saying things he doesn’t believe — on camera, to voters — is part of how he governs.

Ayotte has not commented.

That same event featured Jeremy Kauffman, whose organization posted that it is “perfectly permissible to kill” a New Hampshire politician who poses a credible threat of introducing an income tax. The Attorney General investigated. Before the 2024 election, a photo published in Bedford Patch shows Ayotte standing next to Kauffman, Osborne, and Rachel Goldsmith of Moms for Liberty — the organization that offered a $500 bounty on public school teachers.

Ayotte has not commented on any of it.

She has also been silent as a member of her own Senate caucus was removed from all committees by the Republican Senate President for harassing staff, and as a House member posted a reference to a “final solution” directed at a Jewish colleague.

The silence is not incidental. It is a governing choice.

Her predecessor, Chris Sununu, vetoed bills pushed by this same caucus and kept his distance from the Free State network. Ayotte posed for the photo.

And then there is this. Osborne’s wife owns a private education business that receives money from the school voucher program Osborne voted to expand and Ayotte signed into law — a $51.6 million, rapidly growing, wholly unfunded universal voucher program that, according to the state’s own data, sends 97 percent of its money to families who were already in private school. The legislative oversight committee required by law to monitor the program went over a year without meeting — and only convened after being publicly called out for the lapse. When auditors last looked closely, they found problems in nearly one of every four accounts reviewed. The families receiving that money were, in the legislature’s own words, “costing the state zero dollars” before the program paid them.

Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity — the Washington-funded conservative group that keeps a fully staffed presence at Free State Project events and grades every legislative vote — has praised Ayotte's first term in office. AFP is simultaneously running a petition campaign to kill a bipartisan road funding bill that road builders, engineers, and bus companies across New Hampshire support, and that would cost New Hampshire residents nothing. Not one person testified against the bill at its public hearing. Ayotte has said she will veto it anyway. She already vetoed a paint recycling bill that the Business and Industry Association, Waste Management, and every city and town in New Hampshire supported — after AFP called it a "hidden tax." AFP said no. Ayotte said no. Both times.

This is what governing with that caucus looks like.

At her State of the State address to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce on April 2, 2026, Ayotte told the room that New Hampshire had “passed Vermont as the best place to raise a family.”

She did not mention that the median home in New Hampshire now costs $535,000, and that only 15 percent of residents can afford it. She did not mention that nearly half of renters are paying more than 30 percent of their income just to keep a roof over their heads. She did not mention that a childcare worker earns $33,900 a year while market rent for a two-bedroom apartment runs $1,833 a month — leaving her $848 short.

She did not mention that New Hampshire’s property taxpayers bear the highest share of education costs in the country — 70 cents of every education dollar — or that she signed a law this session making that burden permanent while removing the ability to challenge it in court.

She also did not mention that while New Hampshire families were being priced out of housing, she was collecting $150,000 a year serving on the board of Blackstone — the nation’s largest corporate landlord, known for aggressive rent increases across its 274,000 rental units — and had accumulated over $2.2 million in company stock.

When asked directly about the minimum wage — New Hampshire is the only state in New England with sub-$10 wages — she said: “The market handles it.”

She did not mention her promised veto of the road funding bill, or the paint recycling veto, or Jason Osborne, or Jeremy Kauffman, or Americans for Prosperity.

She asked the room to judge her on rankings.

The Pew Charitable Trusts ranks New Hampshire 4th worst in the nation for revenue recovery after COVID. The state ran a $67.3 million deficit last year and tapped its rainy day fund. Vermont — which kept its tax base — ranks 3rd best.

Judge her on results.

In 2016, Kelly Ayotte told New Hampshire she could not and would not support a candidate who bragged about degrading and assaulting women. She said character matters when she thinks about her children.

In 2024, she said there was no question Trump was the right choice for the White House. When asked whether she regretted changing her mind, she changed the subject. Twice.

In 2026, she is asking New Hampshire for another term.

The question for voters is not what Kelly Ayotte said she believed in 2016. It is whether she still believes it — or whether the lesson of her career is that she believes whatever is most useful at the time.

She told us who she was in 2016. Then she showed us.

Sources & Notes

On Ayotte’s 2016 statements: Ayotte’s statement that she “cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women” and her characterization of Trump’s Access Hollywood comments as “fundamentally talking, unfortunately, about assault” were confirmed by Ayotte herself in an April 26, 2024 WMUR CloseUP interview with political director Adam Sexton. Her statement that she “wouldn’t want my daughter in the room” with Trump and that “character does matter when I think about my children” were reported by CNN (Andrew Kaczynski, November 2, 2016) and Politico (Cristiano Lima, November 2, 2016), both sourcing a radio interview on WNTK 99.7.

On the Trump reversal and double dodge: Both occurred in back-to-back WMUR CloseUP interviews with Adam Sexton — the reversal on April 26, 2024, and the double dodge on April 30, 2024. Both are available on WMUR.com.

On the Gorsuch sherpa role: Referenced in the April 30, 2024 WMUR CloseUP interview and in contemporaneous reporting from 2017.

On the Blackstone board position: Reported by the Union Leader. Compensation figures and share holdings confirmed by SEC filings. Blackstone’s rental unit count sourced to company disclosures.

On Jason Osborne’s “6 o’clock news” quote: Reported by NHPR (Josh Rogers, March 9, 2026), InDepthNH (Garry Rayno) and the Union Leader (Alice Wade op-ed, April 2026). All three outlets independently confirmed the quote from the NH Liberty Forum, March 6-8, 2026, Concord.

On Jeremy Kauffman and the death threat post: Reported by NHPR. The New Hampshire Attorney General investigated. Kauffman leads the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire and is associated with the Free State Project.

On the Bedford Patch group photo: Published September 12, 2024 at patch.com/new-hampshire/bedford-nh. The caption identifying all individuals — Rachel Goldsmith, Jeremy Kauffman, Kelly Ayotte, Jason Osborne, and Sharon Osborne — was published verbatim by Patch. The photo was originally posted to Twitter/X.

On Moms for Liberty and the teacher bounty: Reported by the Granite Post and multiple outlets. Rachel Goldsmith is identified in the Patch caption as a Moms for Liberty leader.

On the Senate caucus member removed from committees: Sen. Tim McGough (R-Senate District 11) was removed from all Senate committees by Republican Senate President Sharon Carson and investigated for harassing staff. Reported by NH Journal, April 2026, and WMUR.

On the “final solution” reference: Rep. Travis Corcoran (R-Weare) replied to a message from Rep. Jessica Grill — a Jewish colleague — with a reference to “a final solution for theater kids in politics.” Reported by the Union Leader (Alice Wade op-ed, April 2026) and NHPR.

On Chris Sununu’s distance from the Free State caucus: Sununu vetoed multiple bills championed by the Free State-aligned caucus during his tenure and publicly kept his distance from the Free State Project. His record is documented across multiple terms of the NH Legislature.

On the EFA program — cost, demographics, and oversight: All figures sourced to NH Bulletin reporting by William Skipworth (December 3, 2025) and Ethan DeWitt (December 8, 2025). The $51.6 million cost figure and 97% enrollment-already-in-private-school finding come from NH Department of Education data released November 2025. The “costing the state zero dollars” characterization is from the Education Freedom Savings Account Oversight Committee Democratic minority report, 2024. The oversight committee lapse and subsequent meeting after public pressure are reported by NH Bulletin, December 8, 2025. The one-in-four accounts finding comes from a Department of Education compliance monitoring review released 2024.

On Americans for Prosperity: AFP’s praise of Ayotte’s first term is documented in AFP press releases. AFP’s petition campaign against the road funding bill (SB 627) is documented on AFP-NH’s official Twitter account, reposted by AFP-NH State Director Greg Moore. AFP’s characterization of the paint recycling bill as a “hidden paint tax” is reported by NHPR (Josh Rogers, March 17, 2026).

On the road funding bill (SB 627): Reported by InDepthNH (Paula Tracy, March 5 and March 31, 2026) and the Union Leader (Kevin Landrigan, March 31, 2026). The finding that not one person testified against the bill at its House public hearing is confirmed by both outlets. Ayotte’s stated intention to veto the bill is confirmed by the Union Leader, March 31, 2026.

On the paint recycling veto: Reported by NHPR (Josh Rogers, March 17, 2026). Support from the Business and Industry Association, Waste Management, Casella, and the NH Municipal Association confirmed in the same report. AFP’s opposition confirmed by NHPR.

On the State of the State address: Reported by the Union Leader (Paul Feely, April 2, 2026). All direct quotes attributed to Ayotte are from that report. The minimum wage quote — “The market handles it” — is from the same Union Leader report. New Hampshire is confirmed as the only New England state with a sub-$10 minimum wage.

On housing and affordability data: All figures — $535,000 median home price, 15% affordability rate, 49.4% of renters cost-burdened, childcare worker salary of $33,900, median two-bedroom rent of $1,833 — sourced to the NH Fiscal Policy Institute housing report, March 2026.

On property taxes and HB 1815: The 70% property tax share of education funding is reported by InDepthNH (Garry Rayno, March 28, 2026). HB 1815’s passage and Ayotte’s signature are confirmed by InDepthNH and NH Bulletin reporting.

On New Hampshire’s revenue performance: All figures — 4th worst revenue rebound nationally, $67.3 million FY2025 deficit, rainy day fund draw-down, Vermont’s 3rd best ranking — sourced to The Pew Charitable Trusts “Fiscal 50” report, reported by InDepthNH (Garry Rayno, April 2026).

Dear Members of the New Hampshire Executive Council,

My name is Christopher Stewart. I have worked for more than ten years in clean energy development in New Hampshire and across New England, including on large-scale projects requiring sustained engagement with utilities, regulators, municipalities, and state agencies. I am a Manchester resident and a former two-term member of the Manchester Board of School Committee (2012–2015), as well as a former board member of Clean Energy New Hampshire and The Nature Conservancy. I write to urge you, on behalf of New Hampshire ratepayers, to reject the nomination of Christopher J. Ellms Jr. as Chair of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC).

The Chair of the PUC is a quasi-judicial role, not a political or advisory appointment. Under New Hampshire law, the Commission is a regulator charged with adjudicating contested cases involving utility rates, capital investments, and long-term resource planning. Pursuant to RSA 363, RSA 365, and RSA 374, the Commission must make findings based on an evidentiary record to ensure that rates are just and reasonable and that utility expenditures are prudent. As Chair of the Commission, and as a member responsible for managing and participating in contested proceedings, the Chair must be capable of evaluating complex evidentiary records and expert testimony and issuing orders that can withstand appellate review.

Measured against these statutory responsibilities, Mr. Ellms is not qualified for this position.

In addition, the Chair of the Public Utilities Commission also serves as Chair of the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee, which conducts separate, formal adjudicative proceedings governing the siting of major energy infrastructure. Those proceedings require the presiding officer to rule on evidentiary issues, manage sworn testimony and cross-examination, and issue detailed written findings under an independent statutory framework. Given the legal and procedural complexity of that role, it has traditionally been filled by individuals with substantial legal or adjudicative experience. Mr. Ellms’ background provides no indication that he possesses the qualifications necessary to fulfill these additional responsibilities.

Mr. Ellms’ professional background is overwhelmingly political and legislative. He holds a degree in political science and has spent his career as a campaign operative, legislative director, and policy adviser. He has no demonstrated experience in utility ratemaking, cost causation, or contested administrative adjudication. While recent PUC leadership has included commissioners with legal, engineering, or economics backgrounds, Mr. Ellms’ experience is primarily in legislative liaison work. This is not a peripheral gap; it is a lack of the core competencies required to fulfill the Chair’s statutory function.

Beyond résumé deficiencies, Mr. Ellms’ own public testimony underscores this concern. In legislative settings, he consistently speaks the language of policy advocacy rather than regulatory analysis—offering generalized explanations of market volatility while avoiding the technical mechanics of rate design or evidentiary standards. A PUC Chair who cannot independently analyze these matters cannot fulfill the Commission’s duties under RSA 374 or issue defensible orders capable of surviving judicial review.

Equally concerning is Mr. Ellms’ record at the Department of Energy. During his tenure, the Department failed to advance initiatives identified by the state’s Consumer Advocate as beneficial to ratepayers. Most notably, the statewide energy data platform—designed to lower costs through granular usage data—was delayed for years and effectively abandoned despite a positive cost-benefit analysis. The Consumer Advocate publicly stated his belief that the Department deliberately slowed the process to administratively sunset the project. Whatever the motivation, a ratepayer-beneficial tool died on Mr. Ellms’ watch.

Similarly, Mr. Ellms acknowledged before this Council that tens of millions of dollars in federal energy-efficiency funds remained largely unspent years after being awarded. These failures occurred while New Hampshire households faced some of the highest electricity and heating costs in the nation.

Finally, this nomination raises a serious institutional concern. When the Department of Energy was created in 2021, many warned it would blur the line between energy policy advocacy and independent regulation. Appointing the Department’s second-in-command to lead the Commission does not merely blur those lines; it effectively eliminates the practical check and balance necessary for independent regulation. The Commission is required to act as an independent arbiter, and creating a circular regulatory loop between the Department and the Commission undermines regulatory legitimacy.

New Hampshire’s persistently high energy costs demand a PUC Chair with deep technical expertise and demonstrated independence. Mr. Ellms’ background does not meet that standard. As a Manchester resident whose neighbors are struggling under a significant energy burden, I respectfully urge the Executive Council to reject this nomination and insist on a search for a qualified, independent regulator.

Respectfully,

Christopher Stewart
Manchester, New Hampshire

You fund the BIA because it presents itself as New Hampshire’s statewide business advocate—a tax-exempt business trade association with a substantial annual budget funded largely by dues and major corporate contributions. Its stated mission is to improve the state’s economic competitiveness. You are not paying for networking events or glossy publications. You are paying for results.

By that standard, the BIA’s 2025 Legislative Report reads less like an agenda and more like a performance review—and an unsettling one.

By the BIA’s own account, New Hampshire’s core business problems are not improving. Housing affordability is worse. Energy costs remain among the highest in the region. Workforce constraints are tightening. Childcare shortages persist. These are not marginal concerns. They are the binding constraints on growth.

A Decade of “Listening,” No Delivery

For more than a decade, the BIA has convened panels, task forces, listening sessions, and working groups on housing, workforce shortages, and energy costs—often featuring the same speakers, the same data, and the same conclusions.

Housing is unaffordable.
Energy costs are too high.
Employers can’t find workers.
Childcare is scarce.

Every donor already knows this. What donors should reasonably expect after years of funding this work is political pressure, accountability, and outcomes. Instead, the BIA has institutionalized a different model: permanent diagnosis without confrontation.

Many donors privately acknowledge this. Few hear it said out loud by the organization they fund.

Housing Without Capital Is Not a Strategy

The 2025 report correctly identifies housing as the dominant economic threat. Median home prices nearing $565,000 are incompatible with workforce growth. Employers cannot recruit or retain talent under these conditions.

But after naming the crisis, the report avoids the only question that matters: how housing at scale is actually paid for.

There is no serious discussion of infrastructure funding, bonding capacity, or revenue tools. Housing is framed primarily as a permitting and process problem rather than a capital problem.

Process reform without capital is not a solution. It is a way to look active while ensuring nothing changes.

For years, Republican leadership has opposed the funding mechanisms required to build housing at volume. The BIA has chosen not to challenge that reality—even as its members absorb the cost through wage inflation, recruitment failures, and abandoned expansions.

Energy Costs and the Price of Silence

The report states plainly that energy costs are manufacturers’ number one challenge and cites data showing New Hampshire’s commercial and industrial rates far exceed national averages.

And yet, when accountability is required, the BIA goes quiet.

Governor Kelly Ayotte recently chose to renominate Jared Chicoine—one of the central figures in New Hampshire’s energy governance—for another term. His tenure has coincided with persistently high energy costs, weak long-term planning, and ongoing regulatory dysfunction. Reasonable people can disagree about policy approaches, but sustained outcomes matter.

The BIA said nothing.
No public objection.
No warning to members.
No signal that performance matters when it conflicts with political relationships.

If this were a CEO performance review, silence would not be interpreted as neutrality.

Promises, Committees, and a Performative “Efficiency” Report

As Gov. Ayotte told reporters last week, according to InDepthNH, her priorities for 2026 include housing, childcare, and public safety. These priorities will sound familiar to anyone who has attended a BIA event in the last decade.

What was missing—again—was funding, implementation, or accountability.

The same is true of Ayotte’s Council on Government Efficiency (COGE) report. Marketed as evidence of seriousness, it is a performative “efficiency” exercise—heavy on vague recommendations and management jargon, and almost entirely disconnected from the structural cost drivers facing employers.

There is no path to housing at scale.
No plan to lower energy costs.
No workforce investment strategy.
No revenue realism.

No serious business would accept this level of rigor from its own management team.

Manufactured Alarmism, Real Cost Blindness

The report does, however, devote real energy to warning about hypothetical taxes that did not pass. Carbon credits are treated as an existential threat. Meanwhile, the real, compounding costs already hitting employers barely register.

Unfunded systems do not disappear. They shift costs—onto businesses. Higher wages without productivity gains. Recruitment incentives. Turnover. Missed growth opportunities.

The BIA warns loudly about taxes that do not exist and whispers about costs that already dominate your balance sheet.

The Question Donors Should Ask

This is not a Democratic argument. It is not a pro-tax argument. It is a governance argument.

If you are a major donor, ask yourself:

Why are we still funding studies of problems everyone agrees on?
Why are failed leaders shielded from accountability?
Why does the BIA treat access to power as an end in itself rather than a tool to produce results?

At some point, this stops being caution and starts being misrepresentation.

Organizations that cannot convert influence into outcomes eventually lose credibility—no matter how long they have been in the room. That is a risk BIA donors should be actively managing.

New Hampshire’s business community deserves advocacy that produces results—not another report explaining why nothing will change.

New Hampshire is now one of the most expensive electricity markets in the country and among the very highest in New England. After years of Chicoine in senior energy roles in the administration since 2017, and as commissioner of the Department of Energy since 2021, there is still no comprehensive, credible plan for new in-state generation, storage, or transmission that would materially change the cost trajectory for employers or make major development projects pencil out.

Yet Ayotte renominated him anyway, without offering any serious public rationale.

If you read my Substack last week — “New Hampshire’s Business Community Must Face an Uncomfortable Truth” — none of this should surprise you. The Chicoine renomination is not an aberration. It reflects a broader governing posture that is no longer aligned with New Hampshire’s economic needs.

And it is the clearest warning that 2026 cannot look anything like 2024.

How 2024 Delivered the Wrong Governor

The tragedy of 2024 is that the race began with two genuinely credible candidates: Republican Senate President Chuck Morse and Democratic Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington.

For the record, Morse was not my choice — I disagree with much of his conservative worldview. But he understood state government: appropriations, budgeting, and agency oversight. He knew how Concord worked from long experience.

Warmington was my choice, and she should have been the Democrats’ choice too. Her two terms on the Executive Council gave her real operational experience and a strong grasp of how the state actually functions.

Neither survived their primary.

Morse lost to Kelly Ayotte — a former U.S. Senator–turned–corporate lobbyist who had been largely absent from state policy discussions for years. Warmington lost to Joyce Craig, an unemployed former mayor whose tenure ended with her hand-picked successor losing to a political unknown.

And while I cannot prove it, the dominant view inside both parties is clear: many of the same Democratic insiders who told voters to “write in Joe Biden,” and many of the same Republican operatives who insisted Donald Trump deserved reelection, were also the ones pressing donors and activists to back Joyce over Cinde and Kelly over Chuck.

It worked out terribly for almost everyone.

The general election that followed was hollow. While Ayotte and Craig traded superficial attacks, the last Sununu budget was already showing major structural problems. Revenue had been cut repeatedly, long-term obligations were mounting, and the one-time federal money that papered over the gaps was disappearing. Budget writers and agency leaders could see that significant cuts or new revenues would be unavoidable in the next biennium.

Neither candidate leveled with voters about that reality. Voters never heard the truth about what the next governor would face.

It was, as I wrote at the time, a dog’s-breakfast election.

Ayotte Inherited a Mess — and Made It Worse

When Ayotte took office, she had one responsible move: level with voters.

She could have explained that years of business tax cuts, growing liabilities, and expiring federal relief had created a structural deficit unlike anything the state had seen in decades — and that stabilizing the situation would require real choices on both spending and revenue.

Instead, she framed the answer primarily as “recalibration”: holding the line on new revenues, trimming spending, and promising “greater prosperity for all of New Hampshire” through discipline rather than new investment.

Her budget and the Republican budget process that followed produced a pattern we now know well: reductions and eliminations in childcare supports, housing funds, oversight functions, and agency staffing that was already stretched thin. The $15 million childcare workforce fund created in the prior budget disappeared. The final budget contained roughly $40 million less for housing than the previous one and sharply reduced support for the Affordable Housing Fund. The Office of the Child Advocate — the watchdog for some of the most vulnerable kids in the state — emerged from the process significantly downsized and weakened.

Then two early decisions turned a difficult situation into a much more serious, long-term problem.

First, the administration and legislative allies pushed through legal changes to the Youth Development Center (YDC) settlement framework that survivors’ attorneys now argue broke the original deal and undermined the independence of the settlement process. Meanwhile, total claims to the YDC settlement fund have climbed above $2 billion. Whatever one thinks of the legal strategy, the state’s potential exposure is now far greater — and far less predictable — than the original framework was designed to contain.

Second, Ayotte signed SB 295, which removed income limits for Education Freedom Accounts and effectively made New Hampshire a universal voucher state. That law created an automatic growth mechanism for EFAs — more students, more cost — without any dedicated funding source. Every new dollar for EFAs now comes out of the same finite pool needed for schools, infrastructure, and everything else.

Ayotte inherited a mess from Chris Sununu. Her decisions made the state’s long-term position materially worse.

The Chicoine Renomination Proves the Pattern

Energy is now one of the top cost drivers for New Hampshire employers. The state’s energy commissioner should understand markets, grids, planning, and investment at a level that gives businesses confidence there is a strategy to bend the cost curve.

Before being moved into energy administration, Jared Chicoine’s career was in campaign politics and libertarian Republican politics. He served as Ron Paul’s New Hampshire state director, later as a leader for Rand Paul, and then joined the Sununu operation. Only in 2017 did he enter state government, and only in 2021 did he become commissioner of the newly created Department of Energy.

Whatever one thinks of his ideology, nothing in his professional background suggests deep technical or industry experience in energy markets or utility regulation.

In my own interactions with his Department several years ago, on behalf of national energy companies, my clients left with the impression that the office did not have a firm grasp of basic electricity fundamentals or modern resource planning. The public record since then — stalled modernization, limited progress on serious in-state resources, and no coherent affordability roadmap — doesn’t do much to contradict that impression.

Ayotte’s decision to renominate him is not a small misjudgment. It is a governing philosophy: continuity without improvement, ideology over expertise, and loyalty to the status quo even when the status quo is actively damaging the state’s competitiveness.

2026 Must Be Different — Or New Hampshire Pays the Price

The next governor will inherit:

• a multi-year structural deficit,

• a YDC liability and claims environment now north of $2 billion,

• a universal EFA program with no dedicated revenue stream,

• a shrinking and aging workforce,

• a housing crisis that is already blocking economic growth,

• a transportation plan with a $400 million funding hole, and

• executive agencies that have been thinned out after a decade of under-resourcing.

This is not a partisan challenge.
It is an operational threat to New Hampshire’s economic trajectory.

If the state elects another unprepared governor, the consequences will arrive quickly: stalled capital projects, slower permitting, higher municipal taxes, delayed infrastructure, and weakened competitiveness relative to neighboring states that are investing in growth.

2026 is the last off-ramp before these problems become much more expensive to solve.

What Serious People — Especially Donors — Must Demand

A serious candidate for governor must be able to produce:

1. A credible plan to stabilize state finances.

Not slogans — arithmetic.

2. A targeted revenue strategy that protects families and small businesses.

The money has to come from somewhere. Serious candidates should be able to say where and why.

3. A real economic plan.

Housing, childcare, workforce, permitting capacity, and energy modernization are not talking points; they are the core of any plausible growth strategy.

4. Independence from national ideological groups.

The state cannot afford a governor who is effectively a franchisee for national messaging shops and dark-money networks.

5. A plan to rebuild state capacity.

If agencies cannot hire, retain, and equip qualified people, the best-written policies in the world will fail in execution.

If a candidate cannot do this, they should not receive support from anyone who understands the stakes.

The Choice Is Coming

The Ayotte–Chicoine renomination crystallizes the problem: New Hampshire’s most urgent challenges are being met with denial, delay, and drift.

Employers see it.
Developers see it.
Municipal leaders see it.
Families see it.

The only people pretending otherwise are the ones in Concord with the power to fix it.

If 2026 becomes another low-seriousness campaign, the bill that arrives in 2027 and 2028 will make today’s crisis look manageable.

New Hampshire needs a governor prepared to govern — not simply campaign.

And this time, there is no excuse for getting it wrong.

For decades, New Hampshire’s business community operated on a familiar assumption: that Republican leadership — even when imperfect — would broadly sustain the conditions necessary for economic competitiveness. The last 13 months have challenged that assumption in ways that are now impossible to ignore. This is not a partisan critique. It is a review of the public record — budgets, agency analyses, economic data, and the governor’s own statements — and the record shows a pattern of policy choices that undermine the state’s long-term economic health.

Across childcare, housing, infrastructure, energy, and exposure to federal trade shocks, the direction coming out of Concord is not stabilizing the economy. It is destabilizing it.

1. Childcare: A Self-Inflicted Workforce Constraint

Businesses and economists agree that childcare is workforce infrastructure. BIA CEO Mike Skelton called it “critical to New Hampshire’s labor market and long-term competitiveness.”

Yet Ayotte’s 2025 budget eliminated the state’s $15 million childcare workforce fund and attempted to replace it with a plan to use federal TANF reserves — despite state officials warning in advance that regulators would likely reject it. They did. The entire allocation was rendered unusable.

According to the state’s own data, staffing instability worsened within months. This was not an unavoidable outcome. It was the predictable result of ignoring well-documented constraints on New Hampshire’s workforce capacity.

2. Housing: Developers Issued Clear Warnings — They Were Ignored

New Hampshire’s housing crisis is rooted in finance, not zoning slogans. Even a well-designed project will not “pencil out” without state investment to close gaps.

Developer Dick Anagnost put it plainly: anyone claiming deregulation alone solves the crisis “has never built a single unit of affordable housing.”

Yet the budget:

• Blocked expanded funding for the Affordable Housing Fund,

• Froze the AHF at $5 million,

• Cut more than $40 million in housing support compared to the prior budget.

State housing data show New Hampshire now has among the lowest availability rates of any state in the country. Employers feel this every day in recruiting and retention. These consequences were forecasted — and then ignored.

3. Infrastructure: A $400 Million Shortfall and No Plan to Close It

The Department of Transportation has identified a $400 million gap in its Ten-Year Plan, putting foundational projects — from I-93 expansion to I-293 upgrades to regional safety improvements — at risk.

DOT recommended a modest toll adjustment, the first since 2007. Even with the increase, NH would remain among the least expensive toll states per mile.

Asked by WMUR and CBS whether she would consider it, Governor Ayotte responded the same way: “No.” She offered no alternative mechanism to preserve these projects.

Without revenue, these projects cannot be built. That is not ideology — it is math.

4. Energy: Higher Costs, Fewer Solutions

New Hampshire businesses already face some of the highest electricity rates in the country. PUC-approved increases will push fixed charges into the $40 monthly range by decade’s end.

Despite this, the 2025 budget sharply reduced the Renewable Energy Fund, diverting most of it to the general fund. The REF is not symbolic; it is the tool towns, schools, and small businesses use to finance solar, weatherization, and efficiency projects that reduce operating expenses.

The state increased costs while cutting the very tools designed to mitigate them. That is the opposite of a competitiveness strategy.

5. Federal Tariffs: High Exposure, Zero State-Level Response

New Hampshire is one of the most trade-exposed states in the region. According to the state’s own trade data, exports to Canada — our largest partner — fell more than 40% year-over-year. Manufacturers and builders consistently report rising input costs linked to federal tariffs.

Independent economists and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warn that states with NH’s trade profile face elevated recession risk.

Yet Governor Ayotte has offered no public opposition, no pressure on the delegation, and no alternative plan. Silence in the face of economic harm is not neutrality. It is acquiescence.

The Pattern: A Governing Approach Misaligned With Economic Reality

Across sectors, the pattern is unmistakable:

• Workforce capacity weakened

• Housing production constrained

• Infrastructure projects jeopardized

• Energy modernization undermined

• Trade exposure intensified

These are not isolated policy disagreements. They form a governing philosophy fundamentally misaligned with the conditions New Hampshire needs for sustained economic competitiveness.

The Necessary Reassessment

The business community long supported the NHGOP out of a belief that it delivered stability, pragmatism, and economic stewardship. The public record of the last year challenges that belief.

The question is no longer ideological:

Does continued allegiance to the current NHGOP advance or undermine New Hampshire’s economic future?

Based on the evidence, the answer increasingly points to the latter.

Reassessment is not abandonment. It is strategic realignment — the same discipline businesses apply when assumptions and market conditions change.

New Hampshire’s economic future depends on leaders willing to confront the facts honestly. If the business community wants stability, it will have to demand it, because the current political leadership is not providing it.

Over the weekend, Garry Rayno put it plainly in his Distant Dome column: “New Hampshire lacks the resources to invest in itself.” He’s right. But the deeper issue is how we got here — and whether those who finance the system will let it continue. The 2026 election must be a referendum on how we build and fund state government.

For years, Concord cut revenue to please lobbyists and national groups while quietly stacking up billions in obligations with no plan to pay for them. Now the hole is hundreds of millions deep, and the gimmicks that masked it are gone.

The Math That Can’t Be Spun

• Business tax cuts since 2015: $160–235 million lost annually.

• Repeal of the Interest & Dividends tax: $135 million gone.

• School funding obligations: $200–500 million depending on compliance with court order.

• Education Freedom Accounts: $78–92 million with no funding stream.

• Youth Development Center settlements: $100 million per year for a decade.

• Revenue shortfalls already showing up: $61 million this year alone.

This isn’t partisan noise. It’s arithmetic. If New Hampshire were a company, no serious investor would touch it.

The Consequences Are Here

These numbers already show up in cuts across the state. Our 2025 budget just past gutted health care, higher education, and public safety. The NH Council on the Arts was eliminated. Bridges and dams go unrepaired. Development stalls. And towns hike property taxes to backfill what the state abandoned.

Meanwhile, major reforms on workforce housing and energy — the top priorities of both voters and businesses — were shelved. Not because of politics, but because there is no money. The business community got nothing it asked for.

That’s not a model. It’s a slow-motion collapse disguised as “low taxes.”

But it gets worse.

What Comes Next

Within a few years, lawmakers will hit a wall. New Hampshire, unlike Washington, can’t simply print more money to cover shortfalls. Our choices will be unavoidable:

• Cut services so deeply the economy and public order destabilize.

• Push double-digit property tax hikes onto homeowners and businesses.

Either path destroys the so-called “NH advantage.” And anyone still pushing trickle-down tax cuts is ignoring thirty years of evidence, here and everywhere else.

The Elite Donor Problem

Donors helped build this mess. Business leaders and wealthy individuals kept funding both parties, convincing themselves that balance would ensure prudence. Instead, Republicans pushed ideological tax cuts, Democrats ducked hard choices, and the state’s balance sheet imploded.

And for all that spending, business got nothing in return. Housing, energy, and property tax relief — the very policies employers and voters wanted — remain unfunded. Donors are paying for both sides to dig the hole deeper, while their own priorities are ignored.

The same donors who bankrolled fake math have the leverage to demand real reform. They can keep underwriting decline, or they can force Concord to face arithmetic.

The Way Out

The only real choice is whether we face this reckoning on our own terms in 2026 — or let the collapse choose for us. The election must be a referendum on whether New Hampshire continues with 20th-century tax structures and no plan for the future, or finally adopts reforms that restore solvency.

A disciplined set of targeted revenues could raise $160–210 million annually: restoring business taxes to 2018 levels (still the lowest in the region), taxing marijuana like every neighboring state, adding a narrow capital gains surcharge on out-of-state profiteers, and modest luxury/tourism fees. These are not broad taxes on working families. They are surgical fixes that stabilize the budget and free up capacity for housing, energy, and property tax reform.

The real referendum is simple: fake math or real arithmetic. Another round of cuts and gimmicks means deeper deficits, higher property taxes, and failing services. A credible revenue plan means stability, competitiveness, and the ability to invest in the future. 2026 will decide which path New Hampshire takes.

The Choice

Republicans engineered this collapse. Democrats lacked the courage to stop it. Both parties are now fully complicit. The question for donors and elites is clear: will you allow the same failures that wrecked the last decade to continue into the next?

The 2026 election is not about slogans or personalities. It is about whether New Hampshire will keep running government on fake math, or finally adopt reforms grounded in arithmetic.

The revenue options are clear, targeted, and achievable. What remains unclear is whether those who call themselves the “adults in the room” will act like it. New Hampshire has run out of gimmicks. The bill is coming due. The only choice now is whether elites lead responsibly in 2026 — or bankroll another round of collapse.

The ink is barely dry on New Hampshire’s newly signed two-year budget, yet the writing is already on the wall: this is not a serious plan to safeguard our state’s finances or protect the future of our communities. It’s built on overly optimistic forecasts, one-time revenues, and uncertain assumptions—all while ignoring a billion-dollar legal obligation that is about to come due.

As an independent voter and a parent, I believe strongly in fiscal responsibility and practical, sustainable solutions. Let’s start with the most pressing issue: the YDC settlements. New Hampshire’s state-run youth facility was, for decades, the site of horrific abuse. We rightly owe survivors more than a billion dollars in settlements. This obligation isn’t theoretical—it's real, it's massive, and it's imminent. Yet the budget signed in Concord fails to establish a dedicated, sustainable funding source to cover these payments. Instead, state leaders are relying on uncertain assumptions, hoping a booming economy or a single land sale will bail us out.

Meanwhile, the state has already spent the projected proceeds from selling the former YDC property in Manchester—money tied to a sale that hasn't happened and may never fetch the expected price. This is budgeting built on uncertainty. If that sale stalls or falls short, towns and local taxpayers will bear the consequences.

All this might be tolerable if the state were otherwise making smart investments in areas that keep New Hampshire strong: affordable housing for local workers, accessible childcare so parents can return to work, mental health services to combat addiction and crises, and robust public schools. But the current budget underfunds each of these priorities. Contributions to the university system remain stagnant. Local schools continue to shoulder costs shifted down from Concord. The retirement system is shortchanged yet again, ensuring higher costs down the road. When this fragile budget inevitably falls short, local property taxpayers will foot the bill.

New Hampshire families deserve better. Our small businesses, police departments, hospitals, and schools all depend on stable, predictable state support. The budget signed this month simply does not deliver that.

The good news is it's not too late to change course. With the looming YDC liabilities, the Legislature may be forced to hold a special session. Even if they don’t, lawmakers will return this fall to patch up a deficit that was entirely predictable. That will be the moment to do things right.

We can start by restoring business tax rates to their 2018 levels. Back then, we had already lowered rates significantly below our New England neighbors. Returning to those rates would still leave us highly competitive—and raise over $100 million more each year. We can also finally legalize and tax recreational marijuana, as every state around us has already done, generating an additional $30 to $50 million annually without touching New Hampshire homeowners’ wallets.

Next, we should ensure wealthy out-of-staters who profit from New Hampshire help fund the services our communities need. A targeted 3.5% surcharge on profits over $2 million from nonresidents selling property or businesses in New Hampshire would generate about $20 million annually. This protects local families—even if they sell multimillion-dollar properties—and places the responsibility on investors and second-home speculators using our state for their financial benefit.

Finally, modest increases to fees on luxury boats, high-end vacation stays, and top-tier property transactions can ensure that heavy users of our roads, lakes, and emergency services help fund the infrastructure they rely on. Altogether, these ideas can generate approximately $160 to $210 million each year in new, predictable revenue, primarily from those who can afford it and who aren't full-time residents.

This isn’t about expanding government. It’s about responsibly meeting our obligations—including the YDC settlements—while finally investing in housing, childcare, mental health care, and strong public schools that help keep property taxes manageable. It’s about ensuring local families aren't stuck paying for Concord’s decades of avoidance.

The alternative means more last-minute scrambling, more temporary fixes, and surprise tax hikes on the very people our elected leaders claim to protect. New Hampshire voters deserve an honest budget that meets our obligations, invests wisely, and keeps our communities affordable. If lawmakers want to show real leadership, they'll adopt these solutions—whether in a special session this summer or in the fall when the consequences of this shaky budget become too clear to ignore.

New Hampshire is in a budget crisis. Not because we spend too much—but because we believed a lie.

For more than a decade, this state has been running a high-stakes economic experiment. The theory? Cut business taxes, and growth will take care of everything else. Let profits run free, and the rewards—jobs, investment, and booming state revenues—would supposedly trickle down to the rest of us.

This was the promise behind what some called “The New Hampshire Advantage.” Just trim a few decimal points off the Business Profits Tax and Business Enterprise Tax, we were told, and the economy would pay for itself.

It didn’t.

We’re now seeing the results play out in real time. The Department of Corrections says it can’t meet even basic safety standards. School funding lawsuits are piling up. Vital state services—from public health to mental health to road maintenance—are being quietly hollowed out. The problem isn’t spending. The problem is revenue.

And it’s not hypothetical anymore. According to the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Budget Assistant, New Hampshire is on track to run a deficit in the current fiscal year.[¹] We’re bringing in less than we budgeted, even as inflation continues to erode purchasing power across state government. The numbers are there in black and white.

Since 2015, the Business Profits Tax has dropped from 8.5% to 7.5%. The Business Enterprise Tax has fallen from 0.75% to 0.55%.[²] According to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, those cuts have cost the state between $795 million and $1.17 billion in forgone revenue.[³] That’s money we could’ve used to strengthen our public schools, modernize infrastructure, expand mental health access, and reduce the property tax burden on working families and seniors.

Instead, we handed out tax breaks and hoped prosperity would trickle down. It didn’t.

As longtime journalist Michael Kitch recently wrote, New Hampshire’s economic strength owes far more to our proximity to Boston than to our tax structure.[⁴] We’ve benefited from the spillover of a booming metro economy. But while our geography has helped us, our tax policy has actively harmed us.

The idea that we can tax less, invest less, and still maintain strong public services is a fantasy. And that fantasy has brought us to the brink.

So the question now isn’t whether the experiment failed. It did.
The real question is: What are we going to do about it?

Here’s a three-part fix that restores stability, preserves our competitiveness, and puts working families first:

1. Restore Corporate Tax Rates to 2018 Levels
This isn’t a radical proposal—it’s a return to fiscal responsibility. We’re not talking about jumping back to 1990s rates. Just a modest reset to 2018 levels: 7.9% for the Business Profits Tax and 0.675% for the Business Enterprise Tax.

At those levels, New Hampshire would still rank among the most business-friendly states in the Northeast. We’d still have no income tax, no sales tax, and a lean, efficient government. But we’d also reclaim over $100 million in annual revenue—money we desperately need to keep the lights on.

And let’s be clear: anyone who opposes this proposal should be the first to make their case publicly. Explain to the people of New Hampshire—on the record, in front of the cameras—why we should tolerate failing infrastructure, underfunded schools, and unsafe prisons just to shave a few tenths of a percent off corporate tax rates. If there’s a better solution, let’s hear it. But the current path is failing. Refusing to fix it isn’t fiscal conservatism—it’s fiscal denialism.

2. Legalize and Tax Adult-Use Cannabis
New Hampshire is the last state in New England clinging to cannabis prohibition.[⁵] Meanwhile, our neighbors are cashing in. Massachusetts brought in over $280 million in cannabis tax revenue last year alone.[⁶]

Our residents are crossing the border, buying cannabis legally, and handing over their tax dollars to other states. That’s not a moral stance. It’s a policy failure.

Legalizing, regulating, and taxing cannabis like alcohol could generate $30–50 million in new annual revenue. It would create jobs, shrink the black market, and reduce criminal justice costs. And not a dime of it would come from working families.

3. Use Smart, Targeted Fees
We can also raise modest revenue by asking those who can afford more to pay just a little bit more. Consider fees on luxury real estate transactions, short-term vacation rentals, and high-end DMV services. Together, these could generate another $10–20 million annually.

This approach protects low- and middle-income families while ensuring that those benefiting the most from our economy are contributing fairly to maintain it.

Add it up, and this three-part fix would raise well over $150 million a year—enough to close the current deficit, reinvest in essential services, and stabilize the state’s finances for the long term.

And it would do so without ever touching a sales or income tax.

But revenue alone isn’t enough. We also need to rethink how we deliver services—and how we make government work better for the people it’s supposed to serve.

Take public education. We can—and should—tie increased funding to meaningful, equity-driven reforms:

• Statewide Open Enrollment: Let families send their kids to any public school with available space, regardless of ZIP code, if they can arrange transportation.

• Weighted Per-Pupil Funding: Allocate more to districts with high-need students.

• Career & Technical Education: Expand pathways tied to real workforce demands.

• District Consolidation Incentives: Encourage administrative efficiency by aligning funding with shared services and cooperative models.

These are not liberal or conservative ideas. They’re just smart governance.

We still have time to change course. The Senate and Governor Ayotte can reject this failing model and chart a better one—one that is fiscally responsible, economically competitive, and morally defensible.

But to do that, we need to stop pretending we can have something for nothing. The numbers don’t lie. The budget isn’t balanced. The services are fraying. And the theory behind it all has collapsed.

We tried trickle down. It failed.

Let’s fix it.

Endnotes

[¹] New Hampshire Office of Legislative Budget Assistant, General Fund Revenue Reports, FY2024. https://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/LBA/budget/
[²] NH Department of Revenue Administration, Business Tax Rate History. https://www.revenue.nh.gov/faq/business-tax.htm
[³] NH Fiscal Policy Institute, “Impact of Business Tax Cuts on State Revenue,” April 2025.
[⁴] Michael Kitch, “The New Hampshire Advantage: Rhetoric, Not Reality,” InDepthNH.org, April 22, 2025. https://indepthnh.org/2025/04/22/blowin-in-the-wind-the-new-hampshire-advantage-rhetoric-not-reality/
[⁵] National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), “State Cannabis Laws Overview.” https://www.ncsl.org/health/state-medical-marijuana-laws
[⁶] Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission, FY2023 Annual Report. https://masscannabiscontrol.com

Every Granite Stater should be outraged. If you're not, it's likely because those in power are obscuring the truth—and too many others are letting them.

Let’s start with the facts. This budget cuts Medicaid reimbursement rates by 3% at a time when our healthcare system is already overburdened. It eliminates funding for family planning services and nutrition programs for low-income women and children. It slashes reentry and treatment programs in our prisons, cuts nearly 100 staff positions, and sets the stage for another Sununu Center-style failure. It shutters the State Council on the Arts and defunds the Office of the Child Advocate. All while preserving $1.17 billion in corporate tax breaks.

This didn’t happen by accident. It happened because New Hampshire’s politics are being shaped by out-of-state think tanks and dark money groups—especially Americans for Prosperity-NH. The House GOP has outsourced its priorities to the Josiah Bartlett Center and media echo chambers like NH Journal. And yes, it happened because Democratic leaders too often retreat into caution rather than confront this extremism. They’ve allowed anti-government dogma to go unchallenged. Both parties have failed to put the people of New Hampshire first.

This is what a two-party monopoly looks like—insulated, unaccountable, and disconnected from the people it claims to serve. And yes, this is what happens when we, the voters, allow it to continue.

Our media institutions share responsibility, too. The press is supposed to be the Fourth Estate—not stenographers to power, but challengers of it. Yet access journalism has become the norm. Proximity to politicians has replaced investigative rigor. This isn’t just a national problem; it’s happening right here in New Hampshire. After the last election, it’s clear our media must do better. Constitutional protections come with Constitutional responsibilities: to investigate, to challenge, and to inform. The press must ask harder questions—starting now.

We just spent 24 months and $30 million litigating a governor’s race that revealed almost nothing about our budget, our schools, our infrastructure, or our tax system. We were fed slogans about "freedom" and vague fears of "becoming Massachusetts," while the state’s foundations quietly crumbled.

We brought this upon ourselves. But we don’t have to accept it.

Let’s also not forget: the very budget now being dismantled was signed less than two years ago by then-Governor Chris Sununu and a GOP-controlled legislature—well before the last election. Sununu and his party spent that campaign season touting their budget as responsible and visionary. But that narrative was never true. It was a political illusion. Now, with the spotlight gone, Sununu has stepped away, leaving Governor Ayotte with a fiscal and political crisis. She inherited a mess—and so did we.

But we still have time to change course. The Senate and Governor Ayotte can reject this path and chart a better one. Here’s what a serious, fiscally responsible, people-first alternative would look like:

1. Restore Corporate Tax Rates to Pre-2018 Levels
Corporate tax cuts since 2015 have cost the state up to $1.17 billion in lost revenue. They failed to deliver on their promises. Restoring those rates would generate $100 million annually without raising taxes on working families.

2. Advance Real Public Education Reform
Tie increased funding to meaningful, equity-driven reforms:

• Statewide open enrollment: Allow students to attend any public school with available space if they can arrange transportation.

• Weighted per-pupil funding to support high-need students.

• Expansion of competency-based learning and career & technical education aligned with workforce demands.

• Incentives for district consolidation to reduce administrative inefficiency.

3. Protect Public Safety and Oversight
Reverse the proposed Department of Corrections cuts. Maintain treatment programs, staffing levels, and safety standards. Preserve the Office of the Child Advocate. The cost of inaction is measured in human harm and institutional failure.

4. Lead on Energy Independence
Stop obstructing the development of clean energy. Expand community solar. Modernize the grid. Invest in local renewable sources. Governor Ayotte has the authority to lead—she must act.

5. Invest in the Arts, Public Health, and What Makes NH Livable
The arts are not expendable. They are essential to mental health, education, and economic vitality. Defunding the State Council on the Arts—at a cost of just $1.7 million over two years—undermines our communities for no real fiscal gain.

6. Confront the Core Problem: The Two-Party Monopoly
Until we challenge the grip of party machines and donor-driven politics, our state will remain stuck in cycles of dysfunction. This budget crisis isn’t just about dollars—it’s about values, power, and who our government really serves.

This budget is a betrayal—but it’s also a warning. If we don’t build something better, no one else will.

We brought this upon ourselves. Now let’s fix it—while we still can.

In March, I wrote about the urgent need to address our overreliance on imported natural gas, which still accounts for over 60% of our electricity. This dependence leaves us vulnerable to price volatility and supply chain disruptions while stalling progress toward a cleaner, more sustainable energy system. Compounding the issue, New Hampshire has not built any significant new electrical generation in years, further entrenching our reliance on imports and stifling opportunities for local economic growth. The time has come to move beyond this stagnation. With fresh leadership, we have the tools and the will to do it.

Energy Security: A Transformative Opportunity

Achieving energy independence means creating energy security, which involves establishing a reliable, locally controlled energy supply that minimizes exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets. This process begins with deploying large-scale wind, solar, and storage projects here in New Hampshire. These investments offer direct and tangible benefits to Granite State ratepayers, as evidenced by the success of states like Texas and Iowa.

In Texas and Iowa, strategic investments in large-scale renewable energy projects have not only bolstered energy security but also directly lowered electricity costs for ratepayers. By tapping into their natural resources, these states have created a stable energy supply insulated from the volatility of fossil fuel markets. Ratepayers in both states now enjoy some of the lowest electricity prices in the nation, thanks to their reliance on wind, solar, and battery storage, which offer stable and predictable energy costs.

Similarly, New Hampshire can reduce its reliance on volatile external markets and keep energy dollars circulating in our local economy. Instead of being subject to unpredictable spikes in natural gas prices, ratepayers here could benefit from the stability of renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs), which lock in low, long-term electricity prices. Clean energy projects make financial sense for New Hampshire families and businesses, enabling them to spend less on energy and more on other priorities.

Focusing on In-State Generation Assets

New Hampshire should focus on developing energy generation assets within its borders to maximize local economic benefits and ensure greater control over energy resources. By doing so, we ensure that Granite Staters retain control over these assets and the benefits they generate. Relying on out-of-state generation has repeatedly demonstrated that New Hampshire ratepayers do not share in the full economic and energy security advantages as they would with in-state projects. By focusing on locally sited wind, solar, and storage projects, we can build a system where energy dollars stay within New Hampshire, driving local economic growth and reducing rates for all.

Offshore wind, while promising, faces significant challenges at this moment in time. Federal policy uncertainty under the new administration and the consistently high costs of offshore wind power purchase agreements (PPAs) have delayed large-scale adoption. Additionally, recent examples from other states show project cancellations due to cost overruns, further highlighting the risks involved. Instead, New Hampshire should direct its efforts toward deploying currently available land-based wind, solar, and storage technologies. These solutions are cost-effective, proven, and can be developed with a direct focus on serving New Hampshire ratepayers. By selling this power directly to the state, we can establish a model of energy independence that lowers costs and keeps control firmly in local hands.

Leadership for Change: Appointing Qualified Administrators

The ongoing legislative debates in Concord—from restructuring energy administration to advancing offshore wind projects—show that energy remains a priority for New Hampshire lawmakers. However, these discussions don’t go nearly far enough.

For the past eight years, New Hampshire’s energy policy has been characterized by stagnation and missed opportunities. Under the previous leadership at the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and Department of Energy (DOE), our state consistently ranked last—or near last—in electricity prices, energy security, and energy investment. This failure has left Granite Staters burdened by some of the highest electricity rates in the country while other states have surged ahead in renewable energy development and innovation.

Governor Ayotte must act decisively to appoint qualified, forward-thinking administrators to these critical agencies. Without significant personnel changes, we risk many more years of ineffectual leadership and squandered opportunities. These appointments are not just bureaucratic decisions—they are the foundation for the transformative policies and projects New Hampshire needs to succeed. Governor Ayotte’s legacy will depend on whether she has the courage to bring in fresh leadership that prioritizes innovation, efficiency, and results.

Building Partnerships, Creating Change

Achieving energy independence requires bold leadership and collaboration. Public-private partnerships will play a crucial role in driving large-scale energy projects. By leveraging private-sector expertise and partnering with the world’s best clean energy developers, New Hampshire can deliver transformative projects that maximize innovation and efficiency while directly lowering costs for ratepayers.

With 1.4 million residents, we have significant collective buying power. Governor Ayotte should harness this strength and negotiate on behalf of all Granite Staters for the best energy deals possible. For example, bulk procurement agreements for renewable energy could help reduce electricity costs for every household and business in the state.

Additionally, nuclear power is back under consideration as a viable energy source nationwide, and New Hampshire must approach this opportunity strategically. At this moment in time, the best use of nuclear power is to focus on existing assets. Expanding the Seabrook nuclear plant should be carefully evaluated as a first step. Seabrook was originally designed for two reactors and still has capacity for interconnection into the grid. While a final decision on expansion is far from certain, Governor Ayotte should initiate a thorough review of the site’s potential. This exploration would provide valuable insights into whether expanding Seabrook is feasible and beneficial for the Granite State, both economically and environmentally.

Acting Quickly to Identify Land

Time is of the essence. Governor Ayotte must act swiftly to identify land masses suitable for large-scale energy development in New Hampshire. Our state possesses abundant space to generate clean and affordable energy independently. New Hampshire can power our own clean energy revolution using less than 1% of our state’s total land area. Yes, less than 1%. Moreover, the technology needed to secure our independence is readily available today.

By acting quickly, the Governor can help unlock significant economic and environmental benefits for the state. As a first step, she should prioritize identifying land north of Route 26 in communities that are willing to work collaboratively on energy development. This approach ensures these communities can best reap the massive economic benefits that hosting clean energy projects will bring while fostering a sense of local empowerment. Establishing clear zones for wind, solar, and storage projects will provide developers with the guidance they need to focus their efforts where they can make the most impact. Without a clear framework, time and resources will be wasted on protracted debates or projects sited in less appropriate locations. Strategic land identification is essential to ensuring that clean energy development moves forward efficiently, delivering measurable gains for our economy and environment while respecting community values.

A Future Worth Fighting For

New Hampshire has always been defined by its resilience and ingenuity. With visionary leadership and broad public support, we can turn today’s challenges into tomorrow’s opportunities. By promoting energy development, pursuing innovative partnerships, appointing bold leadership, and exploring the potential of nuclear energy, we will secure a cleaner, more affordable energy future for all Granite Staters.

This is our chance to leave a legacy of sustainability, prosperity, and independence. Let’s seize it.

However, amidst our successes, we face unprecedented energy challenges. Over reliance on natural gas and a shortage of new electric generation capacity within the New England energy market leave us vulnerable to supply chain uncertainties and market fluctuations.

Granite Staters already live with some of the highest energy costs anywhere in America. Without a dramatic change it’s almost certainly going to get much worse.

Consider these figures: New Hampshire needs about 2,000 Megawatts (MW) of electric power to meet its current electricity demand. With the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, data centers, and the trend toward electrifying various aspects of our lives, analysts anticipate a yearly rise in demand of 5% over the next ten years.

By 2034, this would require an additional 1,300 MWs to meet our state’s electric needs. However, we’re not adequately addressing this. In fact, we are doing almost nothing to facilitate building electrical generation at scale in New Hampshire or the rest of New England. Offshore wind, small-scale nuclear, and hydro from Canada are all distant prospects, while demand-side management and energy efficiency are helpful, but don’t generate new electrons.

In New Hampshire, we must abandon the notion that someone or something will rescue us and take charge of our destiny. To meet our growing energy demands and ensure a resilient future, we must immediately make serious plans for how to enable large-scale wind and solar generation within our state borders. Such planning will guide the upfront strategic investments necessary to address our urgent need for increased capacity and will position New Hampshire as a leader in sustainable and self-reliant energy production.

Our state possesses abundant space to generate clean and affordable energy independently. New Hampshire can power our own clean energy revolution using less than 1% of our state’s total land area. Yes, less than 1%. Moreover, the technology needed to secure our independence is readily available today, as demonstrated by states like Iowa, which already has enough operational wind turbines to power New Hampshire’s 2034 needs. Large-scale onshore wind and solar energy offer an immediate and feasible solution that can be implemented in New Hampshire right now.

New Hampshire has a rich tradition of preserving vast expanses of land for a sustainable and thriving future. The Connecticut Lakes Headwaters stands as a testament to this commitment, conserving approximately 171,000 acres, which represents about 3% of the state’s land. This area constitutes the largest contiguous block of privately owned land in New Hampshire and serves as a national model for safeguarding significant landscapes through a stewardship approach vital to our state’s natural resources.

As a state celebrated for its pristine scenery, we must carefully navigate the balance between development and conservation. By employing cutting-edge mitigation techniques, we can ensure the safeguarding of our wildlife habitats and ridgelines, reaffirming our dedication to both clean energy and environmental stewardship. Just like we came together to protect clean water and tourism with the Connecticut Lakes, we can come together and decide where and how to site the energy infrastructure of tomorrow.

A thoughtful proposal, based on deliberate and careful stakeholder engagement, to allocate land for wind and solar projects presents a forward-thinking response to our challenges, moving us toward energy independence and offering profound advantages for our state. This initiative shields us from the unpredictable fluctuations in the ISO-NE power markets, creating a buffer against external shocks and ensuring a cheap, stable, and reliable energy supply for our residents and businesses. It also sets New Hampshire apart from other states, realizing a true “NH Advantage”.

As we anticipate a surge in demand driven by technological advancements and population growth, our next governor and legislature will face critical decisions, with energy costs and independence ranking among the most pressing issues. Identifying and allocating land for wind and solar projects goes beyond a commitment to clean energy; it signifies a bold step toward ensuring our state’s energy independence and resilience against market uncertainties and rising demand.

If ratepayers, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and advocates come together with common goals this type of initiative can be successful. As the winds of change blow and the sun shines upon us, let New Hampshire lead the way in responsible innovation and environmental stewardship, embodying the spirit of “Live Free or Die.”

Both major party candidates—armed with massive war chests funded by national political action committees and ideological groups—blanketed the state with advertisements devoid of substance. Voters were inundated with negative messaging, each side painting their opponent as unfit for office rather than offering meaningful solutions to the challenges our state faces.

Meanwhile, critical issues like outdated energy infrastructure, the affordable housing crisis, and rising property taxes were sidelined. Serious debates about long-term solutions for our schools or addressing the growing budget gap caused by reckless fiscal policies were notably absent.

Now that the election is over, the consequences of this wasted year are hitting us hard. Historic budget cuts and layoffs loom over New Hampshire, and we are woefully unprepared. State leaders spent the last year bickering over nothing, ignoring the fiscal challenges that everyone knew were coming. Instead of preparing for this reckoning, we endured months of noise and distraction, leaving New Hampshire families to bear the brunt of this failure.

What did New Hampshire families get for $30 million? Noise. Noise from special interests that see New Hampshire as nothing more than a stepping stone in their broader national agendas. Noise that drowned out the conversations we should have been having about how to ensure our state thrives in the coming decades.

The 2024 gubernatorial race is yet another example of how the two-party system has failed to deliver for the people of New Hampshire. Instead of fostering informed debate and meaningful engagement, it has become a competition to flood our airwaves with cynicism and fear.

This dysfunction isn’t unique to New Hampshire. On the national stage, the 2024 presidential election told a similar story of partisan decay. In January 2024, Donald Trump campaigned in Keene, New Hampshire, alongside Representative Matt Gaetz—then under investigation for alleged sexual misconduct. The message from New Hampshire Republicans was clear: loyalty to Trump, no matter the cost. Trump praised Gaetz as a “fearless warrior” for conservative values, ignoring the glaring ethical implications. Less than a year later, Gaetz’s political career collapsed under the weight of scandal, and Trump, now a convicted felon, returned to the White House for another four years. The Republican Party’s willingness to back these figures underscores its prioritization of power over principle.

The Democratic side fared no better. Kathy Sullivan, former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, spearheaded a write-in campaign for President Biden in the state’s primary. Her unwavering endorsement ignored growing concerns about Biden’s age and capacity to serve another term—concerns that became undeniable when Biden announced he would not seek re-election just months later. As Biden’s first term nears its end, his visible frailty highlights the Democrats’ prioritization of party unity over the nation’s needs.

These examples, both in New Hampshire and nationally, expose the rot at the heart of our two-party system. Rather than offering voters leaders of integrity and competence, the Republican and Democratic parties alike have placed loyalty to their power structures above the interests of the American people.

Why New Hampshire is Perfect for an Independent Candidacy

Contrary to conventional wisdom, New Hampshire offers one of the most advantageous landscapes in the country for an independent candidate to launch a credible and competitive campaign. With its unique political and cultural environment, the Granite State is primed for an outsider to challenge the status quo and deliver meaningful change.

A Small State with Affordable Media Markets

New Hampshire’s small size and compact media markets mean statewide campaigns don’t require the astronomical budgets needed in larger states. Targeted and cost-effective advertising, combined with grassroots engagement, makes it possible for an independent to run competitively without being outspent.

Accessible Ballot Requirements

State law makes it relatively easy for independent candidates to secure a spot on the general election ballot. A $100 filing fee and 3,000 signatures from registered voters are all that’s required. This low threshold ensures that serious candidates with a clear vision can reach voters without being blocked by bureaucratic hurdles.

A Wealth of Issues to Champion

Partisan gridlock in both Washington and Concord has stalled progress on critical issues that matter to Granite Staters. Energy independence, affordable housing, education reform, and fiscal responsibility are all ripe for bold, independent leadership. With voters increasingly frustrated by the lack of action from both major parties, an independent candidate could run on a platform laser-focused on pragmatic, nonpartisan solutions.

Significant Financial Support for Reformers

National organizations, reform-minded donors, and political action committees are actively seeking candidates willing to take on the entrenched two-party monopoly. For the right candidate with the right message, these networks could easily match, if not exceed, the typical $10–15 million pledged to party-backed candidates. This funding could transform the race into a referendum on the corruption and dysfunction in Washington.

New Hampshire’s history of independent thinking, combined with these structural advantages, makes it uniquely suited to lead the charge for a "New Hampshire First" revolution in American politics. The opportunity is here for a bold, credible candidate to prove that Granite Staters are ready to break free from the two-party trap and elect a senator who will prioritize the people over the party.

A "New Hampshire First" Voice for New Hampshire in the U.S. Senate

The 2026 Senate race in New Hampshire presents a pivotal opportunity to break free from the two-party stranglehold and give our state the independent, principled leadership it desperately needs. An independent candidate—someone not bound by partisan loyalty or beholden to special interests—can embody the values that Granite Staters hold dear: integrity, pragmatism, and a focus on real solutions.

Electing an independent senator would mean putting New Hampshire First—prioritizing the needs of New Hampshire families and addressing the critical issues that Washington continues to ignore. From energy independence to affordable housing, from education reform to fiscal responsibility, a "New Hampshire First" senator would be guided solely by what benefits New Hampshire, not by the demands of national party leaders or corporate donors.

Granite Staters have always taken pride in leading the way for the nation. By electing an independent candidate in 2026, New Hampshire can send a clear message: We are done with "Party First" politics. We demand better. We demand leadership that puts our state and our families above all else. It’s time for a New Hampshire First future.