New Hampshire's housing shortage didn't happen by accident. Decades of exclusionary zoning made it illegal to build the kinds of homes most working families can afford: starter homes, duplexes, apartments above storefronts, small multi-family buildings. Then the federal government pulled out of housing construction in the 1980s and left it entirely to the private market. The private market builds what's most profitable. It always has. That hasn't been enough.

What you hear from both parties right now is mostly permitting reform and streamlining. That's fine as far as it goes, but you can cut permitting timelines in half and still end up with nothing but $600,000 single-family homes that a teacher or a nurse can't touch. Easier permitting doesn't change what gets built or who it gets built for.

There's also a connection most politicians skip over: we can't build the homes we need without fixing how we fund schools. Towns block affordable housing because new families cost more in school expenses than they pay in property taxes. Fix state school funding and that barrier goes away. Towns can welcome new residents without taking a financial hit. Fix the schools, build the homes.

What I'll do as governor:

• Create a New Hampshire Housing Corps. A state-level public developer that builds permanently affordable, mixed-income housing on publicly owned land. The federal government built workers' housing during World War I. We can do something similar here at the scale New Hampshire needs.

• Fund Community Land Trusts. A nonprofit trust owns the land, the homeowner owns the building, and when they sell, the price is capped to keep it affordable for the next buyer. Burlington, Vermont has made this work at scale. We can too.

• Legalize duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment buildings in residential zones statewide. Towns keep control over design standards and community character. The goal is to stop using zoning to lock people out.

• Support cooperative housing. Help residents own and govern their own buildings through cooperatives, with state-backed technical assistance and financing, especially for converting existing rental properties.

  Expand the senior property tax circuit breaker. A Granite Stater who has owned their home for 30 years shouldn't lose it because of a rising tax bill on a fixed income. We'll cap property taxes as a percentage of income for low- and fixed-income seniors.

• Fees on short-term rental speculation. Non-owner-occupied short-term rentals pull homes off the year-round market. We'll charge fees on those properties and put the money into housing trusts.

New Hampshire's "no income tax, no sales tax" identity is the state's whole personality. It's also incomplete. A Concord resident ran a full side-by-side comparison of what they paid in New Hampshire versus what they would have paid in Cambridge, Massachusetts, accounting for property, meals, vehicle, phone, and trash costs, and ended up $3,500 to $4,000 more expensive per year in New Hampshire. That result isn't surprising once you see where the money actually goes.

Property taxes here rank among the top five highest in the country. The meals and rooms tax sits at 8.5%, which clears the Massachusetts sales tax by two full points. Phone and internet bills carry a 7% Communications Services Tax. There are tolls, car registration fees, building permit fees, and transfer station fees. These things don't get mentioned in the "Live Free or Die" pitch, but they show up every month.

The arrangement works well for people whose income comes from investments rather than wages. A wealthy household living off a portfolio pays almost nothing to the state that protects their assets and quality of life. A renter, a retiree on a fixed income, or a small business owner paying commercial property tax rates downtown carries a much heavier load relative to what they earn.

When the Republican legislature repealed the Interest and Dividends Tax in 2021, roughly $150 million a year stopped flowing into the state's budget. That money came almost entirely from the highest-earning households. The state's needs didn't shrink to match. The gap landed on property tax bills.

Reinstating that tax and closing corporate loopholes would generate enough revenue to directly buy down property taxes across the state, giving real relief to homeowners and renters. The goal isn't to collect more overall. It's to stop asking the people with the least flexibility to carry the most weight.

There's also revenue sitting right across the border. Every state surrounding New Hampshire has legalized cannabis. Residents are already buying it, just not here, which means we're exporting the tax revenue and giving up any regulatory oversight in the process. A state-operated model, similar to how New Hampshire already runs liquor retail, would bring that money home and dedicate it to affordable housing.

What I'll do as governor:

• Reinstate the Interest and Dividends Tax on passive investment income, updated to better target the largest passive incomes. The legislature repealed it as a gift to wealthy investors. We'll bring it back.

• Reset the Business Profits Tax to 2015 rates. The cuts since then shifted costs onto everyone else while large corporations captured most of the benefit.

• Return the Meals and Rentals Tax to its pre-2021 rate. The Covid-era reduction served its purpose. It's time to end it.

• Establish a minimum corporate tax. Corporations doing business in New Hampshire use state infrastructure and draw from its workforce. They should pay a floor rate regardless of how profits get moved around on paper.

• End public funding of private school tuition. The Education Freedom Account program spent over $27 million in public funds in 2024, most of it flowing to families who were already paying private school tuition. That money belongs in public schools.

• Use new state revenue to reduce local property taxes. State education funding should replace local property tax dollars, not get layered on top of them. The goal is a lower overall burden on working families, not a bigger state budget.

• Legalize and regulate cannabis through a state-operated retail model. New Hampshire is surrounded by states that have already done this. The tax revenue from a state-run system goes directly to affordable housing, and we finally get regulatory oversight over what's already being sold here anyway.

New Hampshire has the lowest state share of education funding in the country. About 70 percent of what schools spend comes from local property taxes, so a child's classroom depends almost entirely on what their town's real estate is worth. The Supreme Court has ruled this unconstitutional twice. The state has never fully complied.

Meanwhile, the legislature expanded the school voucher program to universal eligibility in 2025. It cost $27 million last year and is projected to hit $50 million this year, potentially $102 million as it grows. Over 75 percent of recipients were already in private or religious schools before they applied. When auditors asked to review the program, the Department of Education refused to hand over the data. That money comes straight out of the fund that's supposed to pay for public schools.

There's also a direct link between school funding and the housing shortage. Towns block affordable housing because new families in modest homes cost more to educate than they pay in property taxes. Fix the funding formula at the state level and you remove that incentive. Towns can welcome growth instead of fighting it. One fix, two problems solved.

What I'll do as governor:

• Shift primary school funding to the state through fair progressive revenue, so every district has a real floor regardless of local property values.

• Use that funding to buy down local property tax rates directly. That's what actual tax relief looks like.

• End the voucher program. The research says it causes harm, the data shows it mostly subsidizes families who already chose private school, and the state won't show auditors how the money is spent. Public dollars belong in public schools.

• Invest in science-based literacy instruction. Mississippi went from 49th to 21st in 4th grade reading by screening early and intervening before kids fall too far behind. We should do the same.

• Fund universal school meals. Breakfast and lunch for every student, no eligibility forms, no stigma. A child who is hungry cannot learn. This is infrastructure, not charity.

• Invest in early childhood education. Research consistently shows that every dollar spent on quality early education returns seven to twelve dollars in better outcomes down the line, through higher graduation rates, better health, lower incarceration, and stronger communities. We keep treating pre-K as optional. It's the highest-return education investment we can make.

• Pay teachers competitively and treat them as the skilled professionals they are. The quality of a school depends on the people in it. We cannot recruit and retain good teachers while paying them like their work is an afterthought.

• Remediate environmental toxins in schools and homes. Lead pipes, PFAS contamination, and mold cause real developmental and neurological damage in children. A child dealing with lead exposure cannot focus regardless of how well the curriculum is designed. Prevention costs a fraction of what a lifetime of consequences does.

When my son Ollie was born, my restaurant was one year old. We couldn't afford childcare, so his mother and I traded shifts. When she got a job at the local church, Ollie spent his early years there, looked after by retired volunteers between her phone calls. We saved tens of thousands of dollars in childcare costs we didn't have. We were lucky. Most young parents in New Hampshire aren't.

Infant care in New Hampshire averages over $15,000 a year, more than in-state college tuition. For a family earning $50,000, that's not a budget line. It's a hard ceiling that forces parents out of the workforce, pushes families to delay having children, and puts crushing strain on households during the years when early development matters most. The people doing this work, overwhelmingly women, earn poverty wages. The system fails families, fails providers, and fails employers trying to hold staff.

The policy answer coming from Concord is a tax credit for large businesses that offer on-site childcare. That does nothing for small businesses, which employ most Granite Staters, and nothing for the providers themselves.

Childcare is economic infrastructure the same way roads and broadband are. Without it, the workforce contracts, kids miss critical early development, and communities pay the cost downstream in worse outcomes across the board. Treating it as a private problem has not worked.

What I'll do as governor:

• Sliding-scale subsidies so no working family pays more than a reasonable share of their income for care. Access to childcare shouldn't depend on luck or which employer you work for.

• Higher wages and real support for childcare workers. You cannot build a quality, stable childcare system on poverty wages. Providers need to be paid like the skilled professionals they are.

• Co-locate childcare with senior centers and libraries. Shared facilities lower costs, reduce isolation for both young and old, and build the kind of cross-generational connections that make a community more than just a collection of addresses.

• Paid family leave and living wages as child policy. Parents under severe financial stress cannot provide stable home environments. These things are directly connected and should be treated that way.

Too many Granite Staters are uninsured, underinsured, or skipping care because they can't afford what comes after. That's a solvable problem and it doesn't require burning down the current system to fix it.

The existing system spends an enormous amount on administrative overhead: claim processing, denials, prior authorizations, and the billing staff on both sides of those fights. That's not care. It's friction, and it eats into what's available for actual treatment.

Vermont tried to move to single-payer all at once and found it wasn't politically or financially feasible in a single step. A more practical approach is to build a public option incrementally, let it compete, and let it grow as it proves itself.

What I'll do as governor:

• Start with a public health plan for state employees. A state-administered nonprofit plan cuts out private middlemen for public workers, standardizes rates, and builds the administrative capacity to expand later.

• Expand community health clinics with sliding-scale payment for routine care. People rely on emergency rooms for primary care because there's no affordable alternative. That's expensive for everyone and we can do better.

• Grow the healthcare workforce. Training pipelines, loan forgiveness, reduced administrative burden, and updated scope-of-practice rules so nurses and other practitioners can do more. Access doesn't improve without the people to provide it.

• Open the public plan to voluntary buy-in for individuals and small businesses. Private insurance stays and competes. Competition on price and quality tends to benefit patients.

• Coordinate with other New England states on rate-setting, workforce planning, and purchasing power for drugs and equipment. Larger buying pools lower costs. That's how other countries control healthcare spending and there's no reason we can't apply the same logic regionally.

Healthcare decisions belong to patients and their doctors. That principle applies whether someone is deciding about a pregnancy, managing a chronic condition, or navigating gender-affirming care. Politicians inserting themselves into those conversations aren't protecting anyone. They're making medical decisions they have no business making.

New Hampshire has held a relatively moderate position on some of these issues compared to states further south, but that position is not guaranteed. Federal pressure, legal challenges, and legislative creep are real. A governor has to be unambiguous about where the state stands.

LGBTQ+ residents of New Hampshire are our neighbors, our coworkers, our family members. Trans kids in particular are being targeted by a coordinated national campaign that has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with politics. New Hampshire should not be part of that.

What I'll do as governor:

• Protect reproductive rights. Access to abortion care is a medical and personal decision. The state has no role in it.

• Defend gender-affirming care for trans youth and adults. Medical care for trans people is supported by every major medical organization. A governor should say so clearly and back it up with policy.

• Oppose any legislation that targets LGBTQ+ residents for discrimination under the guise of religious freedom or parental rights. Equal protection means everyone.

• Ensure state agencies and public institutions are welcoming and safe for LGBTQ+ residents, employees, and students.

Corporations get a lot from New Hampshire: limited liability, court enforcement of contracts, access to our markets and workforce. Those are real benefits, and they come with real obligations to the communities they operate in.

Right now, when John Deere locks the diagnostic software on a tractor so a farmer has to pay a dealer for repairs, that's not a free market outcome. It's a legally enforced monopoly on service. When a phone manufacturer makes battery replacement so difficult and expensive that most people just buy a new phone, that's a business model designed around waste — at the customer's expense and the environment's.

The Right to Repair means owners and independent shops can get access to the parts, tools, and software to fix what they own. It supports local repair businesses, lowers costs for consumers, and reduces the amount of stuff we throw away.

What I'll do as governor:

• Pass Right to Repair legislation. Owners and independent shops get access to what they need to fix the products they own.

• Enforce Extended Producer Responsibility. Companies that sell products in New Hampshire take financial responsibility for collection, recycling, or safe disposal at end of life. Waste costs shouldn't land on taxpayers while profits go to shareholders.

• Require community value in corporate incentives. Tax breaks and state contracts should come with demonstrated track records on jobs, local investment, and environmental standards.

• Favor local, small, worker-owned, and cooperative businesses in state procurement. These businesses keep money circulating in the community. State policy should reflect that.

When I was a kid I told my mother I wanted to be president. She laughed and said only rich people get to be president. I've spent my adult life hoping she was wrong.

Researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page looked at decades of policy outcomes and found that the preferences of average Americans have essentially no measurable impact on policy, while wealthy donors and organized interest groups have substantial influence. That's not an accusation. It's a documented pattern.

Money has too much say over who runs, who wins, and what gets done. That's a structural problem and it needs structural fixes.

What I'll do as governor:

• Support a constitutional amendment clarifying that corporations are not people and money is not speech. New Hampshire can be part of that national push.

• Advocate for publicly funded elections with a small-donor matching system. A $50 civic credit for every voter would make thousands of small donors matter as much as a handful of big ones.

• Automatic voter registration and expanded early voting. Voting should be easy and accessible.

• Make Election Day a state holiday. People working hourly jobs shouldn't have to choose between voting and their paycheck.

• Pay state legislators fairly. $100 a year means the legislature skews toward whoever can afford to work for almost nothing. A paid legislature is a more representative one.

• Full disclosure of all political spending in New Hampshire. No dark money. Open books.

• Make it easier for workers to organize. Unions give workers a voice in decisions that affect their lives. That's good for working people and good for democracy.

• Protect free speech and a free press in New Hampshire. The current federal administration's hostility toward journalists and protesters sets a precedent that shouldn't be followed at the state level. Jon will protect the right to dissent, organize, and report freely.

New Hampshire's outdoor economy — tourism, agriculture, recreation — depends on the land and water staying worth protecting. Climate change is a real cost to real people, and the companies that contributed knowingly to it while publicly disputing the science should face accountability for it. We went after Big Tobacco and Purdue Pharma. The same logic applies here.

What I'll do as governor:

• Stronger penalties on pollution and dangerous emissions, and active litigation against corporations that have damaged New Hampshire's environment.

• Invest in solar, wind, and renewables with real incentives for homeowners and businesses. Jon supports nuclear energy, including Small Modular Reactors, as part of a long-term clean energy plan.

• Build real transportation alternatives. Public transit, bike paths, pedestrian infrastructure. Fewer cars on the road means less traffic and lower fuel costs for everyone, including drivers.

• Fund efficiency upgrades for homes and small businesses. Lower energy use means lower bills.

• Curbside composting programs. Less methane, lower landfill costs, and good compost for farmers.

• Moratorium on new landfills while we build better diversion infrastructure.

• Protect conservation easements and New Hampshire's natural heritage. The Connecticut Lakes, the White Mountains, the seacoast — these belong to everyone, not just the current generation.

"Live Free or Die" is supposed to mean something. It means you can walk to school without being afraid. It means you can call an ambulance when someone is hurt. It means your neighbor doesn't disappear because they drove to work without the right paperwork. When people in a community are too afraid to access basic services, that community is less safe for everyone in it, including people who were born here.

Being tough on crime and being smart about public safety are not the same thing, and for decades we've confused the two. Locking people up is expensive, disrupts families, and has a poor track record on reducing the conditions that lead to crime. Stable housing, mental health care, and economic security do more to keep communities safe than incarceration, and the evidence on this is not close.

New Hampshire governors don't set federal immigration law. But a governor decides whether state resources get used to carry out federal enforcement, and that's a meaningful choice. Local police who spend time acting as immigration agents are not doing local policing. Communities where people are afraid to report crimes, seek medical care, or send their kids to school have real public safety consequences that fall on everyone.

New Hampshire also has a genuine gun culture built around hunting, sport shooting, and rural life. Law-abiding people who handle firearms responsibly have rights that should be respected, alongside a reasonable obligation to keep guns out of situations where they cause harm.

What I'll do as governor:

• Prohibit state and local law enforcement from acting as immigration agents. Their job is public safety in New Hampshire communities, not federal immigration enforcement.

• Ensure immigrants can access schools, hospitals, and emergency services without fear. A community where people are afraid to call for help is a less safe community, full stop.

• Oppose mass surveillance programs that target people based on national origin, religion, or immigration status. What gets tested on one group rarely stays there.

• Fund mental health co-responder programs so crises get a clinician alongside or instead of a cop. Several New Hampshire communities are already doing this. It should be the standard.

• End cash bail for non-violent offenses. Sitting in jail before trial because you can't post bail is a punishment for being poor, not a response to danger.

• Expand restorative justice programs for non-violent offenders, particularly young people. Repairing harm and keeping people connected to their communities produces better outcomes than incarceration.

• Drug treatment over incarceration. Addiction is a public health issue. The criminal justice system is a bad treatment provider and an expensive one.

• Require transparency and accountability in policing. Body cameras, public reporting on use of force, and real oversight build the community trust that makes policing actually work.

• Support the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Granite Staters alongside common-sense measures that keep firearms out of dangerous situations.