New Hampshire
On the trail: Kuster to headline Biden campaign event
When U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster announced in March that she wouldn’t seek re-election this year, the six-term lawmaker in New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District said that she still planned to hit the campaign trail on behalf of fellow Democrats up and down the ballot.
And starting next week, the Democrat from Hopkinton, N.H., will start doing just that, beginning with the candidate at the top of the ticket – President Joe Biden.
Kuster will headline an event for the president’s re-election team in New Hampshire when she joins a group of veterans next Wednesday in Concord for a roundtable discussion focused on what the Biden campaign calls “the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy and the ongoing threat of political violence under a second Trump term.”
The event will spotlight the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by right-wing extremists and other Trump supporters who temporarily delayed Congressional certification of Biden’s 2020 election victory over the then-president.
According to the Biden campaign, Kuster will highlight what they call the “ongoing threat of political violence, Donald Trump’s blatant attacks on American democracy, and the urgency in reelecting President Biden and Vice President Harris to ensure history does not repeat itself.”
Since his defeat at the hands of Biden in November 2020, Trump has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims that the election was “rigged” due to “massive voter fraud” and “stolen” from him. The former president has made his allegations a key part of his 2024 bid to win back the White House, has not said if he would unconditionally accept the election results in November if he loses, and has pledged if he wins to pardon some of his supporters convicted for their roles in the Capitol attack.
Kuster was one of the final members of Congress evacuated from the House floor as rioters attacked the Capitol, and she has talked extensively about the experience and how democracy could have died on that dark day.
And in the months after the storming of the Capitol, Kuster spoke out about the harrowing experience and her battle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), noting that it took roughly five weeks to recover with the supporter of family, friends, and professional treatment.
Looking ahead to this autumn’s Biden-Trump presidential election rematch, Kuster said in a recent interview that “I truly believe this is an existential moment in our country.”
“I believe that our democracy is threatened by Donald Trump and I want to do everything in my power to make sure that democracy and civility and stability prevail,” she emphasized.
Kuster’s headlining of a Biden campaign event with veterans will come a week after the president made an official White House stop in New Hampshire to tout the success of the PACT ACT, a measure which increased healthcare access for veterans with injuries from burn pits or other toxic exposure.
Biden stressed the importance of allowing veterans with medical issues caused by battlefield exposures to get the health care they need without having to face extra hurdles.
The president noted that “too many service members have not only braved the battlefield,” but that they did it “while breathing in toxic fumes from burn pits and other means.”
Biden also made a stop at the VFW in Merrimack, N.H., to meet with veterans and their families.
The president was greeted by Gov. Chris Sununu, Manchester Mayor Jay Ruis, and Kuster as he arrived Tuesday morning at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport. U.S. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan flew aboard Air Force One on the flight to New Hampshire.
After his stops in New Hampshire, Biden headed to Boston later in the day for a trio of campaign fundraising events.
Biden holds a single-digit advantage over Trump in the battle for New Hampshire’s four electoral votes, according to a new non-partisan public opinion survey.
Biden grabs 44% support and Trump 41% among Granite Staters likely to vote in the presidential election, a University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll released on Thursday indicated. Biden’s margin is within the survey’s sampling error.
Democrat turned independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr stood at 3%, with Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 2%, independent Cornel West at 1% and 8% undecided.
According to the poll, in a two-person matchup, it’s Biden edging Trump 52%-48%. And 85% of those questioned said they’ve definitely made up their mind, with 12% leaning towards a candidate and the rest undecided.
The poll was conducted May 16-20, with a large sample including 1,140 likely voters in New Hampshire.
The Democratic president stands at 42% support among likely voters in the Granite State, with his Republican predecessor in the White House at 36%, according to a UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion and YouGov poll released this week.
Eleven percent of those surveyed said they were backing Kennedy, with 9% saying they were undecided and 2% supporting other candidates.
The survey indicated that favorable ratings for Biden, Trump, and Kennedy were all well underwater.
“As is true of the national electorate, most New Hampshire voters polled are unhappy with the presidential ballot,” Rodrigo Castro Cornejo, the Center for Public Opinion’s associate director and a UMass Lowell assistant professor of political science, said.
The poll was conducted on-line May 6-14, with 600 likely voters in New Hampshire questioned. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus 5.24 percentage points.
A separate poll conducted by Praecones Analytica for the conservative leaning NH Journal indicated the race in New Hampshire was deadlocked, with the president and his GOP challenger each at 36% support and Kennedy at just under 15%.
For the past quarter century, New Hampshire’s been considered a swing state in presidential elections, with winning margins nearly entirely in the single digits.
Trump lost New Hampshire to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton by roughly 3,000 votes but four years later Biden carried the state by a more comfortable margin of just over seven points.
Most pundits expect a close contest this autumn, which will likely mean a good amount of travel to the state by the candidates and their top surrogates.
This week’s stop was Biden’s second trip to New Hampshire this year, following a visit in early March that included a policy event in Goffstown where the president made the case for budget proposals he announced days earlier in the State of the Union Address and spotlighted how his administration has been trying to help lower costs for American families coping with rising prices due to persistent inflation.
The president also stopped in Manchester after his Goffstown event to formally open his re-election campaign’s first coordinated field office in the state, and to speak with Democratic operatives, activists, and supporters. The campaign field office stop appeared to be part of the president’s political mission of patching up hard feelings from the primary season.
The March trip was Biden’s first time back in New Hampshire since an April 2022 stop in Portsmouth, N.H.
Biden angered plenty of Granite State Democrats in the wake of a move early last year by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — following the president’s lead — to bump New Hampshire from its traditional role as the first-in-the-nation presidential primary state.
New Hampshire, adhering to a state law that mandates its presidential primary goes first, did just that — which meant the state’s Jan. 23 nominating contest was unsanctioned on the Democratic side.
Biden kept his name off the ballot and steered clear of the state, but thanks to a well-organized write-in effort by New Hampshire’s Democratic establishment leaders, the president easily won the primary over his long-shot challengers. A couple of weeks ago, the DNC announced it would welcome New Hampshire’s delegates to the national nominating convention this summer in Chicago after the state party conducted a very small party-run presidential primary days earlier.
New Hampshire
More businesses would be exempt from a key state tax under a proposal heading to Ayotte’s desk
The New Hampshire House and Senate stopped shy of cutting a major state business tax outright Thursday, but did pass a plan to lift the tax’s filing threshold, and spend $2.5 million to lift Medicaid provider rates at state nursing homes.
“What you have before you is a bill that will protect our nursing homes, and protect our small businesses,” said Republican Sen. Tim Lang of Sanbornton.
Under the bill, the threshold on the state business and enterprise tax would be lifted from $297,000 to $400,000, a move GOP leaders expect will exempt about 4,000 small businesses from having to pay the tax.
The bill’s inclusion of money to boost provider rates for nursing homes was a policy the Senate prioritized, and its inclusion in the bill earned the plan some Democratic support. But that evaporated when Republicans in the House pushed to add a trigger to the bill to automatically reduce the rate of the tax when collections from the levy far exceeded estimates.
“The rate cuts are reckless and irresponsible and would potentially cost hundreds of millions of dollars in the future,” said Sen. Cindy Rosenwald of Nashua.
Under the plan, the tax rate, which now stands at 0.55%, would automatically drop by .005% anytime collections on the tax surpassed estimates by $100 million until the rate of the levy reached 0.25%, equivalent to the rate when the tax was created in 1993. Any reduction would also require the state’s Rainy Day Fund to hold a strong balance.
Cutting business taxes has been a focus for GOP leaders in Concord for years, and they’ve dropped the rate of the Business Enterprise Tax four times since 2016.
Lebanon and Israel provisionally agreed in Washington to a new ceasefire Wednesday. But hours later Israel continued attacks and the militant group Hezbollah said it rejected any ceasefire that did not start with the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese territory.
The fighting appeared to jettison immediate prospects of a wider ceasefire between the United States and Iran. Iran has said it will not agree to a ceasefire with the U.S. and Israel unless there is one in Lebanon.
UNIFIL, the U.N. peacekeeping operation for Lebanon, announced Thursday that one of its peacekeepers had been killed and others wounded when mortars hit their position near Marjayoun in southeastern Lebanon.
A U.N. source said the mortars appeared to have come from Hezbollah. The attack came as Israel and Lebanon were negotiating a ceasefire in Washington. The person asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the issue. Hezbollah has been targeting Israeli army installations in the vicinity.
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Esmail Qaani was quoted by Iranian state media Thursday saying that Israel must withdraw to pre-war positions as the first step in a ceasefire with Lebanon. Before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, Israel held five positions across the border in Lebanon. It now occupies large parts of the south of the country.
The U.S. does not speak directly to Hezbollah, which it classifies as a terrorist organization. Lebanon’s negotiations in Washington were carried out without direct inclusion of the Iran-backed group.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said Thursday that the ceasefire would come into force within 24 hours of all concerned parties approving it, especially Hezbollah.
A Hezbollah official told NPR that Hezbollah officially informed the Lebanese president that it would not accept any ceasefire that did not begin with the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon.
The official asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.
Israeli defense minister Israel Katz said Israel was demanding the creation of what it called a de-militarized zone within Lebanon while being able to continue attacks against Iran-backed Hezbollah. He said Israel would not be withdrawing from the south.
Jawad Rizkallah contributed reporting from Beirut.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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