The jon kiper show

What's happening? My name is Jon Kiper. I'm running for governor of New Hampshire. Welcome to Jon Kiper Show. So today I really want to talk about campaign finance. We have been having a conversation for sure on the left about campaign finance since Citizens United, which was the 2010. Decision by the Supreme Court, which basically said that corporations are people and corporations as people can give unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns through PACs, Political Action Committees, super PACs, and various other methods.

And this has so warped our political system that we really need to talk about it. So the biggest issue just with that court decision and, and I'm one person who believes the Supreme Court is occasionally wrong, and this is one of those times, because if money is free speech, then somebody with more money has therefore more free speech.

That doesn't make a lot of sense, and it has led to this point where we're now spending roughly $7 billion on all of the federal races across the country when a president's elected, 7 billion. Think about what we could do with that money, $7 billion, if we weren't giving it to campaigns to spend on TV ads and Facebook ads.

Think about all the things we could do with $7 billion. Housing, um. Homelessness, education, healthcare, spending—like, there's so many things that we could better spend that money on, and that's frankly one of my biggest gripes with the whole system. Is it's just a waste of money. We don't need to be doing it like this.

We don't need to have ads running ad nauseam. And I just wanted to talk about how my experience, uh, was with campaign finance in 2024. So, when I first got into the race for governor, you know, I didn't think I was really even gonna have a campaign manager. I didn't know how that would work. So I basically just was ready to use social media, and my name was on the ballot, and I figured if I get lucky, one of my social media videos will go viral or something like that.

But I, um, quickly met Amanda Bolden, who became my campaign manager. She introduced me to a lot of people in Democratic Party and sort of got me into the fold and got me attending the regular events that I would never have known about otherwise. But I just wanna explain to you how this works. So, if you're a candidate running in New Hampshire, this is how you deal with a party.

Uh. They basically treat you like a, um, a, a revenue source, okay? And you're expected to contribute money to every event that you attend. This looks different depending on the event, but usually it's at minimum, you know, uh, an ad in the bulletin, which would go from, the ads might go from 250 bucks for a small one to a thousand dollars for a big one, depending how big the event is.

And even small barbecues, you know, like a town will be having a barbecue and they'll be a fundraiser for them and they'll want the, uh, candidates to be donating money to. So, so when you're running for governor, you basically are not just don, campaigning to fund your own campaign, but you have to fund.

All this money to just give back to the party in various ways, which doesn't really make a lot of sense to me because if you want the governor to win, don't you want the governor to have as much money as possible? Why would you want to siphon off that money? Especially like, you know, you have a town like Portsmouth, right?

That's blue, right? It's a blue town. It's, it's Democrats. Now, they recently wanted me to speak at one of their events and, or no, sorry, they didn't want me to speak. They wanted me to attend one of their events. The speaking was already full, so they didn't want me to speak, but they, you know, sent me the.

The ad listing, they wanted me to pay, you know, up to 250 bucks, I think it was, to advertise in their bulletin. And I'm like, I'm not spending 250 bucks. It doesn't even make sense for me to give Democrats in Portsmouth money when I need the money more. And they're guaranteed to win. Like there's just, there's no world in which they're not gonna win it.

It just doesn't make any sense. But I think a lot of this was logic that we inherited from the last, you know, 50 years if not longer, that we've been doing these things for longer than Citizens United. So it sort of doesn't make sense anymore. And obviously these, the party has things that they need to pay for.

They have staff that need to be funded and various, um. You know, you know, obviously they have infrastructure they have to pay for, you know, lists. The voting list has to be updated and um, and it just costs money. So I'm not saying that they shouldn't raise money. Obviously they should, but to me it doesn't make sense to do it on the backs of your candidates.

Another very frustrating thing is that the party wanted $75,000 for the statewide voter list. Now this is a voter list that they get from the Secretary of State's office and they add information to it. So for instance, every time Maggie Hassan has people knocking doors for her campaign, she will, um, she will have people collecting information.

So like, maybe they'll ask the person that, it's not that, that whose door they're knocked, they'll say. What's a big issue for you? Is it guns, is it abortion? Is it environment? And they'll then put that into their spreadsheet. So there's all this information about you literally just floating around on the internet for sale, which on its face should probably disturb you.

Like the amount of information that I can buy as a camp, anyone can buy, is, is really, is, is really messed up, frankly. And it's, it's, it's not right. But that's just part of the whole game is that we are, um, we are now. Information vessels, if you will. You know, we, we give information, well, we don't give it voluntarily, but we put all this information online through Facebook or, you know, when you donate to a campaign, it's, um, public, open, open information.

And it's just really important for people to understand how much information's out there and how it's being used by these campaigns. You know, before I got into the, uh, campaign last time, I, um. I was talking to a friend who had worked on many campaigns in, in New Hampshire. He had been, uh, formed a, a political action committee and he'd, he'd worked, uh, uh, through a number of cycles in New Hampshire Democratic politics.

And I said, I said, explain something to me. Why would the Democrats, after eight years of a Republican, Chris Sununu being governor, why would their two candidates be one, Cindy Warmington, who was a lobbyist for Purdue Pharma, and if you don't know, Purdue Pharma made OxyContin. Which to me would be very hard to win a general election with the lobby, with the name lobbyist for Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, attached to your, to your name.

You've got her, or you've got Joyce Craig, who had been the mayor of Manchester. Now the thing was, I did the research. We have not elected a mayor of Manchester governor in over a hundred years. The reason is because Manchester is a city and we are much, we are pretty much a rural state, so no one thinks of Manchester and thinks this is the heart of New Hampshire.

We just don't think like that. And people see a lot of crime and homelessness in Manchester and they think, oh, we don't want that in the rest of our state. And the fact is. There's crime and homelessness in every city in the world, and there's some in Manchester. But because of people's attitudes towards Manchester, they don't think of that as how they want the rest of the state to look.

And I knew that from just not being an idiot. I'm like, okay, the mayor of Manchester's gonna have a hard time unless she's done massive. Uh, you know, improvements in the city which she had not really. And again, we have this other woman, so this is Joyce Craig, former mayor of Manchester, and Cindy Warmington, executive counselor, who had all this legal baggage.

And I said to her, why would, why would these be the people that the Democrats want? Can't they just see how unelectable both these people are? How is it that I, as just an outsider, can tell this and they have no idea? And my friend said to me, he said, you gotta understand. These are rich people with rich friends who will give money to the party.

They'll show up to the events and they'll buy the thousand dollar ticket. And the fact is, you don't have rich friends. You're no value to the party. You, you, you, you, you're, you're useless to them because they need rich friends. And that was at the very beginning. So I was thinking about this the whole time, and frankly, it's something that I've, I've come to realize is true, is that.

The way that the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, um, and the, the New Hampshire Democratic Party function is their business model just requires wealthy people to be the candidates, to fund everyone else and to bring in all this money so that, you know, it's like a Ponzi scheme, basically, to, to, to pay up.

You know, you gotta bring your friends in and everyone donates. I mean, think about it. If you're a lawyer or a doctor, right, probably a lot of your friends are lawyers and doctors. You can call up 10 friends and probably get. $10,000 bucks or $15,000, the limit, or you know, some other large amount of money.

And boom, you got $100,000 to get going. Like, I can't do that. I don't have a bunch of rich friends. And you know, you see this happening with, in Maine with Graham Platner. The party will do anything to not have him beat the candidate because they do not want working class people who don't have rich friends and who aren't being basically bought out by the donors.

And this is why they brought Janet Mills in because she's rich. And, and they want wealthy people who are, uh, going to work with the donors. And this is what's so important for people to understand is about the donors. Okay. So basically, because of Citizens United, we have these wealthy people that are allowed to give unlimited amounts of money to campaigns.

And so the donors end up warping the messaging 'cause they say to the candidate. If I want you to push whatever my agenda is, and if you push that agenda, I'll give you this large check. A political action committee will do this as well, and it frequently will make the candidate unelectable. Right. And when I say unelectable, what I mean is that, um, take for instance, um, in this last election with Joyce Craig and Cindy Warmington, right, at some point they didn't start out saying this, but at some point in the middle of the primary campaign, Joyce and Cindy both started talking about banning AR-15 firearms.

Now. Whether you like AR-15s or don't like AR-15s or, or you know, whatever, uh, obviously guns kill people and we should try to minimize that. And every gun death is a tragedy. But the reality is in New Hampshire, the Republicans have a gerrymandered, uh, control of the Senate. It's gonna be very hard to un.

To win the Senate until we can, uh, fix the gerrymandering. And so a ban to gun, a gun ban would never pass the, the Senate. It just wouldn't, not with Republicans there. And if you campaigned on banning guns, you're even guaranteed to lose the Senate as Joyce Craig did. You know, she didn't help the Senate, the people running for Senate.

She lost by nine and a half points, and one of the reasons she lost, not the only reason, but one of many, is that. This gun ban made her unelectable because there are a group of people in New Hampshire, not a lot, but there's a bunch of independent voters who are Democrats or would be Democrats in a lot of categories except for gun ownership.

And gun ownership is actually the only issue that they care about or vote about, much in the way that there's Republicans who only vote on abortion and there's Democrats that are only voting on, um, say, uh, environmental issues. There are, there are independents that only vote on gun issues. And I know these people, I've met them, I've talked to them, and they basically said, I want to vote for Democrats, but I'm afraid they're going to take my guns.

And with Joyce Craig and Cindy Warrenton go around saying, we're going to ban your guns, they have good reason to think that. So there's no, and this is the problem. You're not gaining any voters by saying that you're going to ban. Because all of the people that want guns banned are already Democrats. So you're not gaining anything.

There's no one sitting on the sideline going, oh, I'd vote Democrat if only they were a little bit harder on, on gun owners. And the thing about New Hampshire is like, we've never really, the, the Senate and the House of Representatives understands this. And they're never trying to push any massive gun bans 'cause they know wouldn't, wouldn't get through.

They just do, you know, simple common sense gun safety stuff, which is, which is where we should be focused. Uh, but the ultimate point is that. If you wanna do anything on guns, you need to have majorities and you gotta understand the political layout. But either Joyce and Cindy didn't understand the political, um, climate, or what is probably more likely, the, the, the situation is they were given money by an out of state political action committee who wanted to ban firearms like they're banned in Massachusetts.

Ban in California. And so these groups out of state say, hey, we want you to take this national issue, which is banning AR-15s, and we want you to campaign on it, and if you do, we'll give you this amount of money. And so they get the money, and then they, it changes how they campaign, and it makes them unelectable.

The same thing happened with Kamala Harris. Now, I don't know how many of you're paying attention, but at the very beginning of her campaign, I heard an ad on my, one of my podcasts from her, saying how they were gonna fight to. Uh, fight inequality and fight to fix, um, the, uh, you know, tax the wealthiest so that we could fix the system of government so that it worked for middle class and working class people.

She had this ad going at the beginning, and then that message completely fizzled out. And the reason that the rumor, and I, I can't say this is a fact, but it seems to make sense, is that she went to California. And she went to these rich donors and said, "Hey, gimme your money." And they said, "Okay, but shut about taxing the wealthy."

I mean, there's even a line from Mark Cuban who said, she, he said something to the extent of like, "Don't worry about her saying she's gonna tax us rich people. She's not really gonna do that." And so why would, and why would rich people give money to politicians to have them tax them? And this is the problem because the rich people can give basically infinite amount of money because of the campaign over um.

Campaign laws that change with Citizens United, they can give almost infinite amounts of money. And so what's the motivation for the candidate to say, I'm gonna tax rich people if the rich people aren't gonna give them the money to win the election? But then what ends up happening is, because they're unwilling to talk about things like taxing the rich.

They become unelectable. So the, the Democrats are really in this catch-22 where they cannot win under the current circumstances. I don't know how we do it because it's hard to run a campaign without money, and you need to get the money from the donors. Now, that said. You can go pretty far on small number donations, small number donations, small dollar donations.

Like, you know, this is how Bernie Sanders, AOC, um, some other people have done pretty well is, you know, trying to get $5 or $10 off of a lot of people. This is actually how Marjorie Taylor Greene, she receives the most, um, small dollar donations as anyone, or, or the most in any, as of anyone in Congress. And so she is able to, um.

To not rely as much on these bigger donors who then control what you talk about. This is also, you know, more evident when you look at APAC, um, that APAC is the, um, uh. Lobbying for armed, basically of the Israeli government, and they give out money to people. And then those people become oddly quiet about the billions of dollars we're sending to Israel.

And, and let's just think about this for a second, because it's really important to understand how the money gets to Israel, because much of it is not actually just money given to Israel. Like, we're not giving billions of dollars in cash to Israel. In quite the way I think people think we are. We give them money, but the deal is the money has to be spent on US defense weapons or munitions or systems that are made in the US.

So basically what happens is the Israeli, uh, AIPAC lobbies and with the defense industry lobbies Congress and says, "Hey, we've gotta give billions of dollars to Israel because they're a democratic, democratic, um, country in the Middle East. They're our ally, biggest ally in the Middle East." And Congress goes, okay, we need to send, you know, money to Israel, but we're not sending money.

We're sending weapons and, and bombs and all this stuff that are manufactured in the US. So who wins? Well, the defense industry wins because they're getting billions of dollars in their products bought by the federal government, given to Israel. And members of Congress benefit as well because often these manufacturing facilities for.

The weapons industries are strategically placed all over the country. So every senator and congressman has got in their district some business that's making money off of war, and therefore they have this secondary motivation to keep their, uh, people employed, their, their constituents employed, who work for the defense industry.

And this is true in New Hampshire. We've got several defense contractors. And when you look at the bigger picture, you, you, you pan out, you go, you know, the whole system is so. Messed up because the Defense Department sends this money to Israel. Israel has to spend it on US manufacturing for weapons and stuff, which also employ people, but they also pay taxes.

So even the defense companies that are paying taxes, and they're probably not paying as much taxes as they should because we know all the corporations are very good at weaseling out their tax burdens. But there, with those tax monies, some of that is going to fund social services. For instance, in New Hampshire, like one of our big.

Companies, BAE Systems, and they make these, you know, complex weapons, um, systems. And they also, because they make millions of dollars, they also pay a lot of taxes which go to help the state. So you couldn't just say, tomorrow we should ban all weapons manufacturing because it would hurt some people, poor people who would not be getting the money for social services through the taxes that these corporations pay.

Now, that said. I think the problem that we have now is this military industrial complex combined with the way that we finance campaigns means that the weapons manufacturers are basically incentivized to want war in the world, right? Because they'll make money and they will keep politicians in office who can.

Make more wars, right? I mean, Iraq war, Afghanistan, that was a huge, they made billions of dollars, probably even trillions off of the wars on terror. And so what, what incentive would any politician have to fight for world peace or even bring up world peace because war is profit, you know? And it's, it's, this whole thing is just such a mess that it's just really important for people to understand it.

And so, going back to just the original idea of campaign finance and the way that we fund campaigns. I think that, and what my campaign is trying to do is raise small dollar donations. That's why if you could donate $5 to my campaign, that would be great. That would really help us out. You know, bigger donation would be great, but the hardest part is that if you are a, you know, middle class working class person running for office, the people you are looking to support are also probably having financial struggles right now.

As am I. So it's tricky. It's hard. It's, it's not something that I really even have a good answer for as to how we fund campaigns in a way that is going to, you know, actually work. Now, my campaign, uh, we should talk about this because in the primary of last year, or sorry, of 2024, yeah, I guess last year, um, I spent about $60,000.

Most of that was donations, but we also, I had a little bit of money saved up and we had some credit cards that I basically just maxed out, and I spent 60 grand. So I got about, uh, nine and a half percent of the vote. That works out to about four or $5 per vote. Cindy and Joyce both spent a. Uh, $2 million, which works out to $30 to $35 per vote.

So I spent significantly less per vote than they did. So my ROI, my return on investment, was much better. And how did I do that? Well, number one, I use social media, which is free. I mean, we did pay for some ads, but a lot of our attention was gained through just free social media. And then the other thing that we did was I talk like a normal person.

I don't know how many votes we got just because I can communicate normally, and I did in a, in a WMUR debate, but. That is, it goes a long way. People really, um, respect that. So both of those things, though, are pretty much free. I mean, social media's free, and talking like a normal person is free. So my point is that you can get into this game without a ton of money if you're smart, and we do like a lot of stuff in house.

You know, we just had a volunteer make our website. It probably would've cost. Thousands of dollars if he hadn't done it. We have volunteers that do our graphic design. You know, we just do as much as we can for free. I'm a Yankee, I'm cheap. Um, and, and, and one thing to know about me is that I opened this restaurant we're sitting in.

It's, it's closed right now, so I can focus on the campaign, but I opened this restaurant for $10,000. Right. And how did I do that? By being very sneaky, you know? Uh, it might've been a little bit more. It might've been like 15,000, but it wasn't, it was not more than that. And. I did everything myself. I did the menu design, I did, you know, the graphic design, I did the website, I did everything myself, set up everything myself, did all the construction, was just me and my dad.

Um, you know, painted, did basically everything. We didn't farm anything out. And it was really funny 'cause before this I told one of my friends, I said, "Hey, I think I'm gonna own, own a restaurant for $10,000." And he said. I don't think you can do that. I don't think that's possible, but I did it. Now, in the long term, it was very hard because we didn't have a lot of operating capital, but we, we are open long enough that if you stay open six months, then there's ways that you can start borrowing money from the bank in ways that you didn't have before.

So, um, basically point being I know how to do things on the cheap. I've done it in this restaurant, I've done it in business and I've done it with this campaign. And that's how we're, we are moving forward. Just, it's really hard and it's, it's soul destroying, frankly. We, we are currently campaigning using, using a website called Donor Atlas.

Now Donor Atlas basically is made by some kids from, I think Harvard or MIT, I think Harvard, and they scraped basically all the available donor information off of the internet. So if you've ever donated to any candidate, it's public information. And so what they've done is compiled all the public information into a database where we can go into this database and literally write in.

Uh, Bernie Sanders, uh, donors who gave to Bernie Sanders from California that donated more than $500 in the last 10 years. And it'll give you a list of all those people. I put in, uh, you know, a list of people in New Hampshire that donate to Zo. Ron wasn't a lot of people, but there's maybe 20 or so people, and for a lot of 'em has their contact, a phone number and email and stuff.

And so you just start calling 'em up. So here I am calling all these people and you know, some of them are very rich and Donor Atlas also shows their net worth, all the property that they own, everything available from them. So I'm calling out these very rich, you know, millionaires and even I even called a billionaire, he didn't pick up, but you know, you're calling all these people and it's just so hard.

'Cause I'm like, why would this, and this is just like what everybody does and this is what you gotta understand. Politicians are doing this. Every day, hours of the day, they call it call time, and they call it just working the phone, and they just do it all the time to raise money because they've basically become obsessed with this idea that whoever raised the most money wins the election, but.

We're now beginning to see that that's not true. Kamala Harris raised a billion and a half dollars and still lost the election, because at the end of the day, and this is what's really important for people to understand, if you're running a Democratic candidate who doesn't have a good message and isn't a good messenger, they're gonna lose.

So that's why my message is, uh. Community First economics. We're gonna focus on housing, property taxes, and education funding. And it's a simple message and it's an important message that affects Republicans, independents, and Democrats. And that's why we're focusing on those issues because they're, they're universal.

You know, housing is hurting everybody. It doesn't matter which way you vote, it's gonna hurt you. So, and why am I a trustworthy messenger? I think one of the issues that we've had in this party is that, you know, if you elect a millionaire. Who's saying I'm gonna work for the working class? What happens?

They don't. They get in there, they say, oh, didn't work out. Didn't, couldn't, couldn't, couldn't figure it out, couldn't help you out. Sorry about that. But if you, I, and the reason is this, alright. A millionaire's in there and their friends are all millionaires, more or less. This is how it works. You know, if you're a lawyer, most of your friends are probably lawyers and the millionaires.

They're not gonna tax themselves. And the donors know this, right? So the donor will trust a millionaire with a donation in a way they would not trust me with a donation because they don't know what I'm gonna do. I might tax them. And why would I tax them? 'Cause I'm not friends with them. I'm not in a room with millionaires all the time.

Can you imagine, just like from a per relationship perspective, if you are in a room with a bunch of millionaires and you're in, you're. Office and you were like, "Hey, I just put up a bill to like raise everyone in this room's taxes by 3% or 5%," they're gonna be like, "Screw you, dude. Why are you raising my taxes?

We're not gonna invite you to the next cocktail party. We're not gonna invite you to our Christmas party." And likewise, as a middle class working class person, if I'm in a room, it's mostly middle class working class people. I don't wanna raise their taxes. I wanna raise taxes on people I don't hang out with, which is rich people, millionaires, right?

So this is where people have gotta understand. We as Democrats have gotta stop electing poor people to solve. Uh, we've gotta stop electing rich people to solve poor people's problems, okay? We've gotta recognize that only by electing working class candidates will we ever solve all these problems, and it's gonna be really hard.

We're gonna have to figure out how to fundraise and look, here's the thing. If you can't help me with money, that's fine. What is more important than that is that you help me on social media and spreading the word in your own life, and how can you do that really simply? Go on Facebook and just spread the word vote kuer.org.

Um, I have people that go on and just find articles about Kelly Ayotte and read the comments and find people complaining about Kelly Ayotte, our current governor, and they'll just say, "Hey, you should vote for Jon Kiper if you're mad about Kelly Ayotte." That's helpful. Um, even just telling your friends next time you're at dinner with some friends, tell 'em about me.

When you're on the phone with, um, your family, just tell 'em about me. Text somebody and say, "Hey, have you heard about Jon Kiper?" Spreading the word via, um. Word of mouth is just the most important thing you can do. And I know this from my restaurant, because we are very successful at getting people to tell, and I didn't ask people to do it.

But when they have a good experience at a restaurant, they tend to tell people. So I'd ask you, if you're having a good experience with me as a candidate, you think you like what you're hearing, spread the word. Uh, that's the, that's the biggest message that I'd love for you to take from this video, is that if we don't have money, we need word of mouth.

Thank you. We're out.