NEWMARKET, NH — Jon Kiper may not have come out on top at Tuesday night’s Democratic primary election in New Hampshire, but he’s not ready to give up on becoming the state’s next governor.
“I’m feeling good,” Kiper told Patch by phone as the votes rolled in. “You know, we went into this thing with spending 3 percent of what my opponents were. Really, for me, the goal was to see what percentage of the vote we could get with the least amount of money.”
That percentage, as of just before 10 p.m., was 10 percent of the vote, with Kiper’s opponent Joyce Craig getting 48.5 percent and Cinde Warmington getting 41.6 percent. AP called Craig the winner later in the evening.
“Obviously, I wanted to win. I had hoped that we would gain more momentum amongst progressive political action committees,” Kiper said. “It turns out there really are none in New Hampshire because they were all just saying that they wanted to wait out the primary and support whoever the candidate was.”
He added: “Frankly, I didn’t realize that a lot of these groups and entities who claim to be progressives are really just as controlled by the party as the rest of the Democrats. They were really afraid to ruffle any feathers, which was shocking to me.”
Kiper, who owns a Latin American restaurant on the Seacoast, is a champion for the voices of working- and middle-class in New Hampshire. His campaign has focused on his efforts to fight inflation and increase housing affordability, including modernizing the state’s government systems, restructuring education funding, and addressing climate change.
“For too long,” New Hampshire’s working- and middle classes had been “drowned out by the wealthy elite,” Kiper told Patch last year. He added that it’s time to elect “representatives who know our problems because they have lived them.”
Kiper isn’t convinced that Craig and Warmington have what it takes to solve those problems.
“I had tried to get them to both address really obvious problems with their campaigns, Joyce’s being, how are you gonna solve homelessness as the state of New Hampshire if you couldn’t make a dent in it in Manchester?” he said Tuesday. “And I don’t know why Cindy couldn’t really come up with more explanations as to why she didn’t regret working for Purdue Pharma.”
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Two more major concerns are the way state agencies operate for small businesses, and that low pay for state representatives means that the position is commonly filled by the wealthy and retired, according to Kiper.
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Now a single father, Kiper grew up in Stratham, graduating from Exeter High School more than two decades ago before moving overseas to study audio engineering.
During that time, he recorded an album and published books. Nearly 10 years ago, he opened Jonny Boston’s International restaurant in Newmarket while serving on local committees, including the town council, ZBA, and energy and environment committees while back in the States.
Kiper offered extensive policy positions on his website, while also calling for “a world where we tax trash, pollution, and greed.”
Looking ahead to 2026, Kiper says he “has some time to see what the next move is.”
“I think that we’ve laid enough groundwork,” he continued. “I sort of lay a trail of posts on Twitter that say, ‘Hey, Joyce and Cindy are gonna lose. Do you guys wanna keep losing or do you wanna listen to someone that can win?'”
Tony Schinella contributed reporting.
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