Aimee Valeras was one of the first few dozen people waiting out the door to Concord’s Christa McAuliffe School in Ward 5 before the polls opened on Tuesday morning. The line, running along the sidewalk on Rumford Street, nearly went all the way back to Pleasant Street.
Valeras had her two dogs, Adora and Atticus, in tow while waiting for her husband, Andy, to cast his vote. As a mother of three children and a social worker, she said education and healthcare are issues driving her vote.
“We work at a community health center and we’re seeing people are really struggling to afford daily life and healthcare and feeding themselves and their families,” Valeras said.
She said she hopes to see changes in the second half of the President Donald Trump’s second half of his term. She casted her vote to be the “voice of the people that I work with.”
Jacob Brown recently moved Concord this January and is now looking to find different housing in the area. He said costs have made the process hard.
“It was kind of difficult to find a place to live that was affordable, and now that we’re trying to move again, it’s been difficult to find affordable housing,” he said.
Some of the candidates, like Chris Pappas and Cinde Warmington, could make some changes on that front, he said.
“There are some policies Kelly [Ayotte] has put in place that I just don’t think have been super effective,” he said.
As of 8 a.m., only one hour after the polls opened, the count of votes for Ward 5 sat at 264, the most Moderator Amy Vorenberg has seen this early on in the day.
“In my years of doing this, I’ve never seen [this] in all the elections I’ve done,” she said. “That was a lot, and it’s been steady since then.”
This story will be updated throughout the day. See all of our midterm election coverage at https://www.concordmonitor.com/midterm-2026-elections/.