Amid the quiet bustle of downtown Newmarket, locals say they feel like they know Jon Kiper.
He is a former town councilor, a community organizer, and perhaps most notably, the owner of Jonny Boston’s International, his restaurant that closed last year.
When Kiper ran for governor in 2024, his hometown was his stronghold. Newmarket was the only place where he beat Democratic primary opponents Cinde Warmington and Joyce Craig, and fellow residents generally like his focus on housing, property taxes and education issues.
Moreover, they see him as a “man of the people.”
“He walks the streets, you know? And he doesn’t walk it in a pair of pleated pants and a collared shirt,” said Bob Downing, who’s lived in town for 36 years. He sat at an outdoor table eating ice cream with his wife, Nancy.
Kiper is making a second bid for the corner office, this time as an Independent. He’s still a relative newcomer to state politics, banking on his “outsider persona” and lived experience in the working class to turn out progressives who he contends aren’t being served by the state’s Democratic Party.
After trying to shift the party from within in the 2024 primary, he said he’s on the outs with leadership and is switching up his strategy, hoping to effect change externally. He said left-leaning voters don’t have a “meaningful voice” in state government.
“The success of the third party is not always in winning. It’s often in just moving the conversation,” Kiper said. “Without some group threatening to leave the coalition, they [Democrats] will just become more and more conservative and more to the center.”
Outside the bubble of Newmarket, however, Kiper is largely unknown. If he can get on the ballot in November — he has hundreds of signatures, he said, but needs 3,000 — he’ll face incumbent Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte and Democratic nominee Cinde Warmington.
That’s a tough hurdle to clear with virtually no name recognition, said Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire. Even with relatively unpopular opponents, he said, running without the backing of a major party requires a great deal of fundraising and advertising.
“Going the Independent route, it’s a lot,” Scala said. “Even in a small state, there’s just a lot of hurdles, and I don’t think the hurdles get lower over time.”
Kiper, who closed his restaurant last year amid soaring costs, said his life partner is financially supporting him while he focuses on the campaign full-time. He’s raised just under $50,000 but is operating $32,000 in the red due to an outstanding loan, according to campaign finance records.
“Without a ton of money and insider connections, it’s just, it’s really hard,” Kiper said.
Progressive inroads
Wary of being lumped in with Libertarians under the Independent label, Kiper is running on what he calls the “Community First Party.” It aims to build an economy that supports the working class directly, he said, rather than trickle-down economics.
His platform centers on fixing what he sees as the “fundamental problem” in New Hampshire: “We don’t have enough money.” He wants to bring back the interest and dividends tax, slashed by Republicans a few years ago, and build other revenue streams by taxing second homes and establishing a recreational cannabis industry in the state.
He also wants to shift education funding to come more from state coffers rather than local property taxes. Democrats have long argued that the current funding structure puts lower-income communities and their students at a disadvantage.
“Housing, property taxes and education funding are really the same issue,” Kiper said, “because you can’t solve the housing crisis if the property taxes are really high, and the property taxes are really high because of how we fund the schools.”
Also central to his criticisms of New Hampshire politics is the volunteer Legislature. State lawmakers earn just $100 each year, plus mileage reimbursements — a structure that Kiper said edges out working-class people like himself. In his last campaign, he said he was running for governor in part because he couldn’t afford to be a state representative.
“Most of those people, while they’re good people working really hard,” Kiper said, “they’re wealthy, they’re retired, they’re really disconnected from the average problems of people like me and probably the average Independent voter that’s younger, that’s working a lot.”
Kiper filed a lawsuit last year, drafted with help from AI, arguing that the nearly non-existent pay creates a wealth-based barrier to serving in public office. A Merrimack County judge dismissed the case.
He’s perhaps the most online candidate in the governor’s race, taking to Tiktok, YouTube and other platforms to spread his message.
He’s made some headway in the #NHTok corner of the internet, a home for Granite State progressives like Carter Hammond, a carpenter from Peterborough who posts interviews and commentary about local politics online.
Kiper’s message of a “Community First Party” strikes a chord for Hammond.
“In a lot of ways, he says and works on things that a lot of people in the state have been wishing that people would openly discuss for years and years, but that doesn’t necessarily line up with a lot of the more traditional political interests with either party,” Hammond said. “I understand his impulse to create the Community First Party.”
Furthermore, in a state where candidates campaign on opposing taxes, Hammond appreciates that Kiper is offering solutions.
“Typically, their response is ‘no new taxes,’ and they’ll tell you what they won’t do. Jon’s actually trying to say, ‘Here’s what we will do,'” Hammond said. “I think that’s something that’s really respectable.”
‘Vessel for voter discontent’
Kiper said he wouldn’t be running for office if his property taxes were a “reasonable” amount and if he could afford to keep his restaurant open.
“It seemed that, literally, it would be easier to run for governor and try to fix the system than to continue operating on such a broken system,” Kiper said. “As insane as that sounds, that literally was my logic.”
His chances of winning or even meaningfully shifting the conversation are slim, Scala said.
Running as an Independent is a roundabout way of doing it, Scala said. He pointed to the more “direct” approach of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist who made inroads for his cause by running as a Democrat in New York City.
The best-case scenario for Kiper now, Scala said, is to capitalize on broader dissatisfaction with incumbents across the country.
“It’s a stretch, but could you imagine an Independent like Kiper appealing to people who say, ‘I don’t like either of the majority party candidates. Let me go with something else,'” Scala said, “where he becomes sort of a none-of-the-above candidate, becomes this vessel for voter discontent.”
