Let's Talk About Jon Kiper

He ran in 2024 as a Democrat for governor; in 2026, he'll do it again...as an independent.

This is actually the first of two pieces about Jon Kiper’s nascent 2026 campaign - I think there is a lot for Democrats to learn. First, a few reminders:

• I have a pair of new podcasts up for your listening pleasure. On The Steve Marchand Podcast, I appeared as a guest on a national show with Matt Robison, a former Chief of Staff for former NH Congressman Paul Hodes. We discussed how what is happening with President Trump on immigration, tariffs, and more is playing out in New Hampshire, and what it means electorally. You can find it on iTunes or Spotify.

• The second episode is for my sports-themed podcast, By The Numbers. If you are a sports fan, you probably know about this weekend’s bombshell: Red Sox star Rafael Devers was abruptly traded to the Giants for four young players. It’s a big deal, and I recorded an emergency podcast to break it down. Find it on iTunes or Spotify.

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Last Sunday, 2024 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jon Kiper appeared on WMUR’s CloseUp to announce that he would be running for governor again in 2026.

The electoral performance of Kiper, a small business owner and former town councilor in Newmarket, presents a bit of a Rorschach test for Democrats trying to figure out how he did. He received 9.4% of the Democratic primary vote against nominee Joyce Craig and 2nd-place finisher Cinde Warmington, each of whom spent millions during the primary process.

Kiper, in contrast, raised and spent just over $60,000 - less than Craig spent during her campaign on processing fees to Stripe, the online payment system. And even that overstates Kiper’s fundraising; Kiper himself loaned the campaign about 60% (roughly $36,000) of it.

What did Kiper’s 2024 vote represent?

Since the primary last September, I’ve heard from Democrats who see the 11,789 votes Kiper received on a shoestring budget, starting from virtual anonymity, and are impressed: Craig and Warmington spent over five million between the two of them, combined for about 120,000 votes, and Democrats ultimately lost the general election by ten points to Kelly Ayotte. Kiper definitely was trying to represent something different from Craig and Warmington, and made some inroads. Pretty good for the new guy!

Others are dismissive, acknowledging that nobody really knows who these nearly 12,000 voters were - Kiper did no advertising, as a practical matter - and that Criag and Warmington largely failed to distinguish themselves from one another ideologically or stylistically, leaving a “none of the above” lane for Kiper. And there is some evidence that, certainly in Democratic primaries over the past decade, that just as some women voters will reflexively vote for a woman, men do the same thing. And Kiper was the only man running on the Democratic side in 2024.

I’ve gotten into a handful of discussion about Kiper since the election along these lines, with hardcore Democratic activists split on whether they perceive Kiper’s 2024 results as sneaky-impressive, or largely insignificant.

I’ve taken a look at the results by precinct to see if there’s any clear pattern (for example, did he do better in blue-collar towns, or towns with a more Republican PVI Index, or rural communities, towns where either Craig or Warmington did better, etc.). There isn’t really anything statistically significant; his two best towns overwhelmingly were his hometown of Newmarket, followed by the neighboring town of Newfields.

My observation: Because we don’t have data providing even an obvious theory to answer that question, activists’ opinions on this matter are probably more of a reflection on how they see the world than on the world itself.

Surprise! He’s not running as a Democrat

With no Democrat yet running for governor in the 2026 cycle (not from my lack of trying!), Kiper clearly sees the void, and is stepping into it…except the void he sees is not from the lack of a Democrat willing to step up as a candidate. It’s the void he sees in either party filling the void to represent working class voters.

That’s right - Kiper’s big news is that he is running for governor as an independent. Which means maybe we’ll get a better chance to see what his 9.4% last year represented.

The history of independents running for governor in New Hampshire is not great; in 2000, Mary Brown got 6.4% of the vote in a race involving incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican nominee (and former U.S. Senator) Gordon Humphrey. Brown was an accountant and state senator who (in the early days of the post-Claremont lawsuit era, when the state briefly acted like it might have to fund public schools in a constitutional way) largely ran as a Big Idea, single-issue candidate: A constitutional amendment that would create a 4% income tax, coupled with a tax cap on property taxes that could only hit 2% of the property’s value. (Little did she know at the time that this would not have helped much - today, that would mean a 4% income tax and an annual property tax bill of up to $10,000 for a home worth $500,000.)

There’s another model of running as an independent in New Hampshire: “Spoiler By Design”. In 1978, provocative three-term conservative governor Mel Thomson sought an unprecedented fourth two-year term, and ran against former Commissioner and State Representative Hugh Gallen. Gallen had unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination in 1974, and 1976, before finally getting it in 1978. And while Gallen ran largely on the issue of electric rates (CWIP), what likely provided the margin of victory was moderate former Republican Governor Wesley Powell running as a protest against Thomson, and getting 4.6% of the general election vote (Gallen won by four points). Powell knew he wasn’t going to win; he wanted to make sure Thomson didn’t, either.

(A more recent example of Spoiler By Design was in 2016, when Aaron Day, a Free Stater and libertarian-minded activist who explicitly ran against Kelly Ayotte in her U.S. Senate reelection bid against Maggie Hassan to try to cause Ayotte to lose, was successful. Ayotte lost by 1,017 votes to Hassan, while Day got 17,742 votes, calling Ayotte a Republican In Name Only, or RINO.)

It doesn’t seem like Kiper is running as a spoiler to disrupt the eventual Democratic nominee’s chances, though that could end up being his role (see below). It is possible that his message will evolve into a single-issue campaign, likely housing-related. If you were going to pick one issue to make your stand, that’s not a bad one: It remains overwhelmingly the number one problem in New Hampshire, according to the UNH Survey Center’s polling over the past few years, and cuts across party lines - critical for an independent candidate:

It’s too early to say, and like most candidates who enter a race 17 months before the election, Kiper’s candidacy will likely evolve to match what the “market” (the electorate) is telling us all it prioritizes. And in that regard, Democrats should be listening to what Kiper said to WMUR’s Adam Sexton this past weekend.

Tomorrow, I’ll have a second part to this that digs into Kiper’s remarks on the program. He is an improved candidate from 2024 (as is often the case), and there are at least five lessons Democrats should take away from what Kiper said last Sunday.