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New Hampshire
Housing, Abortion, and Ayotte Are Top Topics at NH Dem Candidates' Forum in Exeter – NH Journal
When New Hampshire’s Democratic candidates for governor gathered for a forum at Exeter Town Hall Sunday afternoon, the top topics were affordable housing, abortion rights, climate change, Education Freedom Accounts, and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kelly Ayotte.
Left unmentioned?
Inflation, illegal immigration, anti-Israel protests roiling Granite State college campuses, and the other GOP candidate for governor, former state Senate President Chuck Morse.
The topics were selected in part by the organizers, students from New Hampshire high schools like Oyster River High, Raymond High, and Phillips Exeter Academy. But the three candidates were able to add their own topics, and it was clear they wanted to talk about Ayotte.
“We have to call Kelly Ayotte out for what she stands for,” former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig said. “She is the most dangerous threat to New Hampshire that we have ever seen.”
And, Craig added, “We need to make sure we put forward a candidate who can beat her, and I’m telling you, I can.”
Craig, the current primary frontrunner according to the most recent polling, fielded students’ questions in front of a crowd of around 100 people, along with Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington and former New Market town councilor Jon Kiper.
Kiper, the least well-known of the three candidates, was the first to speak. He said his campaign is “all about housing.”
“Every year that we don’t focus on housing as Democrats, we are losing young people and that’s our base,” Kiper said.
Asked by student about laws affecting the transgender community, Kiper said he opposed any restrictions on sex-change medical procedures and called the issue a GOP “smoke screen so we don’t talk about the real issues of property taxes and housing and homelessness and opioid addiction.”
NH Democratic candidate for governor Cinde Warmington speaks at a candidate’s forum in Exeter, N.H. on May 5, 2024
Warmington was the second to speak. She took the opportunity to promote her political bona fides as the lone Democrat serving on the state’s Executive Council. Asked about updates to New Hampshire abortion laws under GOP Gov. Chris Sununu, Warmington said she has gone “toe-to-toe” with him “on the danger of his abortion ban.”
(Sununu signed a law in 2022 allowing abortion for any reason during the first six months of pregnancy, and bans them — with exceptions — after that.)
Warmington also claimed “Republicans have made it perfectly clear that they do not want to run against me.”
“In fact, when the governor was asked about this race on the radio, and asked about the Democratic primary, his answer to the question was ‘Warmington will be formidable,’” she said. “He knows that because I am the only person in New Hampshire who ever goes toe-to-toe with Gov. Sununu.
“He doesn’t go down and talk to the legislature. He only talks to the press when he wants to. But every two weeks, at that council table, there I am asking the tough questions.”
Warmington also said public education “is under assault” by Education Freedom Accounts, a New Hampshire program offering families state funding should they choose to enroll their children in a non-public school.
Warmington was later quizzed about her time in 2002 working as a lobbyist representing Purdue Pharma, producers of the opioid painkiller Oxycontin. She defended her work and said she “argued that doctors should be the ones to make the decision about what patients receive.”
Craig focused much of her remarks on her time serving as the city’s mayor and said her chief concern as
NH Democratic candidate for governor Joyce Craig speaks at a candidate’s forum in Exeter, N.H. on May 5, 2024
governor, like Warmington and Kiper, would focus on affordable housing.
She told the roughly 100 attendees at Sunday’s town hall that Manchester “today has one of the hottest job markets in the entire country.”
She also expressed her opposition to the state’s EFA program.
“As governor, I will ensure that our public tax dollars go to our public schools and on day one,” Craig said. “I’m not opposed to parents having a choice of where they send their kids to school.
“What I don’t agree with is providing public dollars to go to private or religious schools.”
Craig later pivoted back to her experience as Manchester mayor, and her 2017 win over former Mayor Ted Gatsas.
“I also took on a very popular four-term incumbent Republican when I became mayor of Manchester, so I know what it takes to get through the tough elections,” she said. “I’ve done it, I have a roadmap, and I plan on doing it again.”
While it didn’t appear to make much impact on the audience, Kiper had a proposal that’s likely to get some attention in Concord. He wants to pay the legislature.
“What I propose is 500 bucks a week for just the six months that the legislature is in session,” Kiper said. “This will enable working class folks to run and serve as state representatives if they want to.
“It is really less than $5 million a year.”
New Hampshire
Possible 2028 Democratic White House contenders weigh in on Iran with New Hampshire voters
As the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran overtakes the foreign policy debate in Washington, two Democratic governors with potential 2028 presidential aspirations — Gavin Newsom and Andy Beshear — recently traveled to New Hampshire, introducing themselves to the state’s famously engaged voters. The two weighed in on the war and both criticized and questioned President Trump’s strategy and endgame.
“If a president is going to take a country into war, and risk the lives of American troops and Americans in the region, he has to have a real justification and not one that seems to change every five to 10 hours,” Beshear told CBS News after a Democratic fundraiser in Keene.
“This President seems to use force before ever trying diplomacy, and he has a duty to sell it to the American people and to address Congress with it,” Beshear continued. “He hasn’t done any of that. In fact, it appears there isn’t even a plan for what success looks like. He’s gone from regime change to strategic objectives and now is talking about unconditional surrender, which isn’t realistic where he is.”
Beshear also said he thought that Congress should have reined in Mr. Trump’s war powers.
“He is trying to ignore Congress. He’s trying to even ignore the American people,” Beshear said.
He went on to note that the president’s State of the Union address took place “three — four days before he launched this attack,” and Mr. Trump “didn’t even have the respect to tell the American people the threat that he thought Iran posed to us.”
Last week, both the House and the Senate failed to pass resolutions to limit Mr. Trump’s war powers and stop him from taking further military action against Iran without congressional support.
For Newsom, the war with Iran constitutes part of a broader criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
At an event last Tuesday in Los Angeles, Newsom had compared Israel to an “apartheid state.” Later, in New Hampshire, he sought to clarify his comment.
“I was specifically referring to a Tom Friedman [New York Times] column last week, where Tom used that word of apartheid as it relates to the direction Bibi is going, particularly on the annexation of the West Bank,” Newsom explained during a book tour event Thursday night in Portsmouth. “I’m very angry, with what he is doing and why he’s doing it, what he’s going to ultimately try to do to the Supreme Court there, what he’s trying to do to save his own political career.”
Friedman wrote that at the same time that the U.S. and Israel are prosecuting a war in Iran, within Israel, Netanyahu’s government has undertaken efforts to annex the West Bank, driving Palestinians from their homes; fire the attorney general who is leading the prosecution against Netanyahu for corruption; and block the government’s attempt to establish a commission to examine the failures that led up to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Jews by Hamas.
CBS News has reached out to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., for comment.
On Iran, Newsom said, “I’m very angry about this war, with all due respect, you know, not because I’m angry the supreme leader is dead. Quite the contrary. I’m not naive about the last 37 years of his reign. Forty-seven years since ’79 — the revolution,” Newsom said. “But I’m also mindful that you have a president who still is inarticulate and incapable of giving us the rationale of why? Why now? What’s the endgame?”
Many attendees at Newsom’s book event said that the situation in Iran is a top-of-mind issue for them, too. Some said they’re “horrified” by what is happening.
29-year-old Alicia Marr told CBS News she decided to attend Newsom’s event because of his social media response to the war with Iran.
“There was one spot left, and I decided to pick it up, and it was due to his response to the war, that it is just unacceptable, and I would agree with that,” Marr said.
While some voters like Marr are eager to hear about where potential candidates stand on foreign policy, many at Newsom’s event said they care most about how potential candidates plan to address domestic issues.
“I’m more focused on getting the middle class back on track and fighting the oligarchy, and I’m less invested in international issues,” said Anita Alden, who also attended Newsom’s event,
“I wouldn’t call myself America first, but we have so many problems at home that are my priority,” she told CBS News.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who may also be weighing another White House bid, told Fox 2 Detroit last week that she “unequivocally opposes” the Trump administration’s military action in Iran and urged Congress to take action.
“If we want to stop Donald Trump with this random decision that he has arrived at, then Congress must act, and Congress must act immediately. The American people do not want our sons and daughters to go into this unauthorized war of choice,” Harris said.
Mr. Trump has lashed out against Democrats who have pushed back on his Iran strategy, calling them “losers” last week and arguing that they would criticize any decision he made on Iran.
“If I did it, it’s no good. If I didn’t do it, they would have said the opposite, that you should have done this,” the president said.
Local News
Police say the Attleboro man was driving 104 mph in a 55 mph zone on Route 202 near in Rindge, New Hampshire.
A Massachusetts man was arrested late Wednesday night after police say he was driving more than 100 mph on a New Hampshire roadway.
Officers with the Rindge Police Department stopped a vehicle shortly after 11 p.m. on Route 202 near Sears Drive in Rindge following a report of a car traveling at excessive speed, according to a statement from Chief Rachel Malynowski.
The vehicle, a 2020 Kia Stinger, was spotted traveling at 104 mph in a posted 55 mph zone, Malynowski said.
The driver, a 21-year-old man from Attleboro, was arrested and charged with reckless operation of a motor vehicle, according to police.
He is scheduled to be arraigned April 5. If convicted, the man faces a fine of at least $750, in addition to the court’s penalty assessment, and a 90-day license suspension, Malynowski said.
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