New Hampshire sure is beautiful this time of year, apolitically speaking

It’s mid-October, and New Hampshire has never been more stunning. How stunning? The autumn reds and golds are barely muted by the pall of another election season.

Not that this campaign cycle hasn’t tried its soulless best to drape the landscape in gray.

This year’s ads, namely those featuring (or targeting) U.S. Senate candidates Chris Pappas and John Sununu, are as dispiriting as in any season I can remember. The heavy reliance on AI is a big contributor to that, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen politicians appear more uncomfortable in their own skins. These wooden creatures are our great hope to navigate the rough-and-tumble reality TV world of Donald Trump’s Washington? Oh, brother. Worse, the ads typically run the gamut from unhelpful to contextually dishonest — and nearly all of them are contemptuous of voters in one way or another.

Maybe it would be helpful for the candidates to consider a little known fact about New Hampshire voters: Not everyone here views politics as entertainment or sport. Some, if you can believe it, even consider members of Congress to be public servants in our employ rather than minor celebrities.

It’s a dwindling population, sure, but it’s still sizable. For every Granite Stater role-playing as an out-for-blood spectator in a modern Roman Colosseum, plenty of others just want to understand why healthcare premiums have become a de facto annual pay cut for workers. They want someone to explain how removing income caps on school voucher programs helps anyone other than those who need the money the least. They don’t want to just hear the word “crisis” applied to housing, childcare and affordability, or be told who to blame; they want to be shown — in tangible ways — that they are wanted here, that their children are wanted here.       

My sense is that most people agree on what the main problem is — too much money leaving household budgets and not enough coming in. To varying degrees, they also understand that the main contributor to that main problem is a political system that favors the titans of industry over the people — who happen to be the drivers of those industries. Wealth inequality data tells this story plainly, and the salt on the wound is that 57 Trump officials, PBS News reported in August, are worth more than $100 million dollars and more than half of the 535 members of Congress are millionaires.

What the American people don’t agree on, traditionally, is how to better balance the scales, with the right arguing that an unrestrained free market will fix everything (the trickle down) and the left prioritizing the social stabilization and spending power of the lower and middle classes (the trickle up).

American politics has always been mean and messy, but there was a time when that collision of ideas felt more productive than polarizing. “Felt” is doing a lot of work there, I know, because the other thing that’s true about American politics is populations have always been marginalized, sometimes violently. 

And no amount of book-banning or rewriting of history can change that truth.

But over the past two decades, and especially since the American political system signed its own death warrant with the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, that collision of ideas is a sideshow at best. Policy is not the field on which the interests of industry and the people are sorted out to maximize mutual benefit but rather a proving ground for how much industry can take before the people notice they’ve been swindled.

Some congressional politicians are more subservient to industry than others, but all of them are subject to the 21st-century rules of the money game. In a nation dominated by private special interests, that should leave voters with a disquieting question to ask themselves: Is a candidate’s desire to serve in Congress almost disqualifying in itself?

And in New Hampshire, maybe even more so if the candidate hasn’t spent any time working in the State House?

Whatever your opinion of the politics of U.S. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, both served multiple terms as governor. That means they had a well-formed understanding of what New Hampshire needed from Washington well before they packed their bags, and at least some “player development” work on how to bridge political differences. Former Gov. Chris Sununu and Gov. Kelly Ayotte could say the same, should they ever decide to head south. But of the eight candidates (independent and third-party candidates included) on the ballot for the state’s two congressional seats and open U.S. Senate seat, only Pappas has spent meaningful time working in the State House (as an executive councilor for three terms).

The primaries, too, weren’t exactly packed with veterans of state politics, from either side of the aisle.

I get that it’s not a prerequisite to serve as governor or even as a state representative or senator before running for Congress, but I do find the choice to aim for Washington right out of the gate a little curious. There’s a good fight to be had here in Concord, and that’s especially true as this state finds itself increasingly at the mercy of the nearsighted Wreck-it Ralphs of the Free State Project. While that gang treats Granite Staters like laboratory rats for their ideological experiments, you can’t shake the feeling that they always have one eye on the back door so they can slip away to Texas, Florida or some other red bastion when the bills come due. And they will come due.

So why travel all the way to Washington to join a do-nothing Congress when you could fight the good fight right here in beautiful New Hampshire, at least for a term or two? 

I’d wait for the answer, but I feel like we already have it.