Edit September 11th, 2024: The Primary is over. See my endorsement of Joyce Craig.

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On Tuesday September 10th 2024, New Hampshire goes to the polls for the primary elections.

In the governor race for the Republicans are two extremists who would harm individual freedoms for women, LGBTQ+ people, children in need of education (so, all of them), and other minorities not yet identified by them. Both support the former president who has admitted to abusing very young women, has been convicted of 34 felonies, attempted to overturn the 2020 election result, promised to willfully damage the climate, said that Christians won’t need to vote again in 2028, and promised to be a dictator on day one of becoming president.

In the governor race for the Democrats are two women and one man. The man seems nice enough, but doesn’t appear to be taking winning seriously – it appears he’s standing in order to argue for more reasonable pay for state members of Congress, which I support wholeheartedly. If you ask members of Congress to effectively take a full-time job for no pay, what you’re going to get are retired people, or people who are independently wealthy – so not “representative” people. Side note: New Hampshire has 400 members in its House of Representatives, which makes it larger than all but 27 countries in the world, and easily the largest of the US states!

Joyce Craig: Things you need to know

Joyce Craig was Manchester’s recent mayor. She did a fantastic job and is being weirdly smeared for a homelessness ‘problem’ which is neither her fault, nor something she could do any more about than she did. In fact, but for two recent decisions, she would have my vote in this election:

Attack adverts

Cinde Warmington was the target of an aggressive attack advert put out by Joyce Craig’s campaign. It was based on twisting the truth and ignoring inconvenient similarities with Craig’s spouse. I wouldn’t have seen this advert because I am under 70 and so do not watch any linear television. And I have YouTube Premium. Fortunately, I learned about it through the debate’s that WMUR, fortunately, put on YouTube. In summary, Joyce Craig blamed some of the Opiod Epidemic, which has killed more than one person in New Hampshire every single day since 2015 (source), on Cinde Warmington’s legal work before it was known that Purdue Pharma were lying about their drugs. In fact, she argued in favor of letting doctors decide, which is pretty much the line all sensible people are taking on reproductive health, today.

Death penalty

And it was in that debate that Joyce Craig made her largest error: She said she would support the execution of New Hampshire’s last and only remaining death row inmate.

The death penalty would be immoral in a place with a perfect judicial system, but in one where errors are made all the time, it’s unforgivable. Of course, you know what the rapist, would-be dictator, Trump thinks, which should be an indication. The supposedly not-land-of-the-free, European Union, banned the death penalty regardless of circumstances 24 years ago. It was banned in the United Kingdom in 1969 – fifty five years ago – and despite that has a lower crime rate. And it’s barbaric for another reason: If you commit a crime, you are overwhelmingly likely to be suffering from some form of mental illness. Even if you believe in free will, which I don’t, punishing people for mental illness is depraved.

Rehabilitation and treatment should be the goal of the vast majority of the judicial system’s effort. There are a few people – like serial killers and pedophiles – that should probably be locked away forever, but they should be treated humanely. There but for the Grace of God, and all that jazz. The death penalty is a symptom of a justice system that has abandoned “justice” and is instead trying to be retributive. We don’t need to punish people as deterrent, because no-one in their right mind would get themselves involved in the justice system. Every actually guilty criminal has been failed by one of more of the following: genetics, parents, society, or their own brains. We should not be punishing that.

NH’s next Governor

Let’s agree that the next Governor of New Hampshire should be against dictators (so not Kelly Ayote or Chuck Morse), but that they should also be against the smearing of opponents, and the murdering of criminals.

That’s why I’m voting for Cinde Warmington on Tuesday September 10th, 2024.

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