There is No Substitute for Victory

Tuesday was a uniquely painful reminder to NH Democrats of the cost of not winning enough elections. But there's a way forward...

Before today’s column, a quick note: Please join me for a YouTube Livestream tomorrow (Thursday) at 1pm, when I’ll be the guest on Cliff’s Edge, a YouTube channel about politics with over 120K subscribers. Guest host Matt Robison and I will be discussing how many of President Trump’s recent actions - on immigration, tariffs, the breakup with Elon Musk and more - are impacting politics in battleground states (such as New Hampshire). You can join us here at 1pm on Thursday. You’ll also get an alert if you are a subscriber to my Substack as we go live. Thank you!

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The Thrill of Victory, The Agony of Defeat

The more you care, the better winning feels, and the harder losing hits. People of a certain age will likely remember the voice of the legendary Jim MacKay of ABC Sports. He was right about “the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat”:

I have won and lost in both sports and politics, and the pain of the losses makes the winning even more exciting. It is much better to win, but I know this: Nothing focuses the mind better than the pain of loss. When you lose, it typically makes you even more determined to do whatever it takes to avoid feeling the consequences of losing ever again.

Which brings us to the world of New Hampshire politics yesterday, June 10th, 2025.

One Day, Four Painful Reminders

It started around 10am with a pair of bill signings by Governor Ayotte on legislation Democrats fiercely opposed throughout the 2025 session.

First, SB295, which makes New Hampshire Education Freedom Accounts (eventually) universal, was signed into law.

New Hampshire already contributes less towards the per pupil cost of public education (as a percentage) than any state in America, and this law will likely reduce the state-level money available for public schools by tens of millions of additional dollars. The vast majority of those using these vouchers had already left their local public schools, and the bill Ayotte signed is actually more conservative than what she originally sought at the beginning of this year.

Second, around the same time, Governor Ayotte signed another big bill into law, HB10. It has been dubbed a “Parents Bill of Rights”, but the reality is that most of the provisions in it are already in state law (parents already had the right to opt their kids out of sex ed, for example, and already could review curricula). However, it now puts educators and school administrators in a tough spot if a student confides at school about a matter they are not comfortable discussing with their parents (for example, their sexual orientation). They would have 10 business days to truthfully and completely disclose any answers to questions asked by parents - including something a student has asked to keep private.

On a purely political level, HB10 is a classic example of Democrats being put in a defensive position. Calling it a “so-called Parents Bill of Rights”, which is what I often hear Democratic elected officials and activists say, actually has the effect of cementing the “Bill of Rights” language into the minds of New Hampshirites…most of whom are not following this at all, except for maybe a 90-second package on WMUR evening news one time.

GOP legislators, by packaging a couple of intrusive provisions into a larger list of no-brainers that already are permitted, put Democrats in a position of defending hiding information from parents. Of course, virtually no information is “hidden” from parents. The question really should be, “Why are these legislators so eager to put our most vulnerable kids in even more vulnerable situations?”

Third, Governor Ayotte announced the nomination of Caitlin Davis, a 15-year veteran of the State’s Department of Education, to succeed Frank Edelblut as commissioner of DOE. By all accounts, Davis will be nothing like Edelblut, in terms of being a polarizing political figure. After all, Edelblut had been a conservative state representative who nearly won the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 2016, running to the right of Chris Sununu is that tough primary.

It is likely not a coincidence that on the same day Edelblut’s crowning achievement - arguably America’s most libertarian school voucher program - was signed into law, his successor was named. And unless Republicans on the Executive Council find Davis insufficiently conservative or ideological (her background is bureaucratic, not political), she should cruise to confirmation.

But here’s the thing: Over much of the past decade, New Hampshire Democrats have had to rely on a Republican Governor being the moderating voice of the NHGOP in order to minimize the damage of budgets (Ayotte criticized the House GOP’s budget for being too draconian) or nominations (Ayotte replacing Edelblut with Davis) or even policy like abortion rights (Ayotte has told socially conservative House members to withdraw a 15-week abortion ban, for example).

Ayotte is more conservative than Sununu, but when Democrats control no elected body in Concord, the Overton Window shifts rightward, and the center of politics becomes (in this case) Ayotte, as the perceived midpoint of the Free Staters and mainstream Democrats.

Davis’s nomination Tuesday was a reminder that the Department of Education’s leader will be a Republican’s choice for at least a 12-year stretch, and that it is only through fortune that it will not be somebody as ideological as Edelblut.

Fourth and finally, late on Tuesday the New Hampshire Supreme Court, in a 3-1 decision, said that the Statewide Education Property Tax (SWEPT) is constitutional. In the case of Rand v State, a lower court had determined in late 2023 that both that SWEPT was unconstitutional and that the State does not meet the legal standard of “adequacy” for helping fund public education.

Tuesday’s decision puts the question of SWEPT to bed. 25 years ago, after the original Claremont lawsuits determined the State was not adequately funding education, Governor Shaheen and the legislature enacted SWEPT - a renaming of local property taxes into “statewide” property taxes, collected by the towns. If you collected more in SWEPT than a formula determined you were owed, then you had to take the extra property tax revenue and send it to the State to redistribute to poorer towns.

In 2011, the law was changed to allow towns to keep all the SWEPT money they collected - locally collected, locally spent, but called “statewide”. This elimination of the redistributive part of it is what the lawsuit sought to undo.

The other part of the case - about the amount of state aid being grossly below what state law requires - was heard last December, and the Supreme Court decision on that could come anytime. However, based on that the last 25+ years of history on this case, it is hard to be optimistic that the courts are going to rule in favor of the plaintiff…or that even if they did, there would be a fundamental change in New Hampshire’s system of funding education.

There is an irony that, in an effort to be really cheap in how we deliver education, we end up being so unfair and inefficient about it that it actually makes it quite expensive.

Ultimately, Tuesday’s court ruling is a reminder, after almost 30 years, that if you actually want to improve the way we fund, structure, and deliver public education, we cannot rely on the courts to do it.

It is fundamentally a political problem that requires political solutions from elected officials. New Hampshire Democrats have not yet figured out a way to develop a genuine solution to this problem that is also politically acceptable to the voting public.

“There is no substitute for victory.”

Ultimately, there is only one way all four of Tuesday’s downers could have been avoided: Win a lot more state-level elections. This is simple (not easy, but simple), and one might say that of course New Hampshire Democrats want to win more state-level elections!

But I fear that we Democrats, at both the state and national level, have become accustomed to opposing Republicans in power, rather than envisioning ourselves in power. We are very good at mobilizing in protest of what (and who) we oppose…but what are we doing on a daily basis to build durable, governing majorities? Or to construct big-picture narratives of what it would mean to New Hampshirites if Democrats had full control of state government?

I spend most of my time on those questions these days, and in the coming weeks, I’m very excited to begin unveiling what that looks like for 2026 and 2028. If we want to build the kind of broad support needed to consistently win elections, we’re going to need to stand on strong, branded, emotionally resonant values, while also welcoming into our party people who don’t prioritize issues the same way you might.

The agony of defeat - days like Tuesday - should be motivating enough for New Hampshire Democrats that we are willing to consider everything we do going forward through the filter of one question:

“Is the activism I’m doing today the best way to help Democrats win elections in New Hampshire?”

Of all people, Ronald Reagan may be as good an example as anybody of my lifetime in articulating the mindset New Hampshire Democrats must have going forward. In 1976, after challenging President Gerald Ford and nearly defeating him at the convention, Ford did something rather remarkable. Ford gave the typical closing keynote speech of the nominee…and then asked the man who challenged him to come up and make final remarks.

From there, Reagan gave one of the greatest political speeches of the television era - six minutes, full of emotion, uncompromising in his principles, but unifying, all at once. You can watch it here, but at a time when the national Republican Party was much weaker than our state or national Democratic Party is today, he got the bitterly-divided delegates on the same page, focused on what actually mattered. It is how we should approach the next 17 months, and beyond:

This is our challenge, and this is why we’re here in this hall tonight. Better than we've ever done before, we've got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we've ever been, but we carry the message they're waiting for. We must go forth from here united, determined, that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory.