Jon Kiper knows that when voters look at the ballot on Tuesday, they probably won’t recognize his name.

He's held local office in his Seacoast town of 9,000 but he's not on people’s televisions in attack advertisements like his competitors. Unless they are regulars at Johnny Boston’s in Newmarket, his restaurant, they might not recognize his gray hair and thick black mustache.

But he’s hoping when Democrats look at the alternatives – Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington or former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig – they’ll be sick of the same old scripts, public bickering and personal spending (the list goes on) in both campaigns and cast a vote his way.

In the final debate Friday night before voters head to the polls on September 10, Warmington and Craig followed the playbooks of their campaigns to date.

Warmington said she has the experience needed as the highest-ranking Democrat in the state, defying her Republican counterparts on the Executive Council to defend reproductive rights, address climate change and advocate for affordable housing.

“I often say that I’m the only one on the Executive Council who can actually say the words ‘climate’ and ‘change’ in the same sentence,” she said.

Craig said her experience in Manchester, where she supported the state’s largest Planned Parenthood and developed a $400 million annual budget, will serve her at the  state level.

To Craig, Warmington’s background as a lobbyist for Purdue Pharma, the maker of deadly and addictive OxyContin, was a personal choice that should be criticized. To Warmington, Craig’s leadership in Manchester led Democrats to lose city leadership after she left office.

But they’ll agree that a Democrat in office is a better alternative than Republican front-runner Kelly Ayotte.

Kiper is the antithesis of his two Democratic challengers, whose name recognition comes from established political carers.

Kiper is a guitar-playing, former-independent (until Trump), first-time candidate, who admittedly was not sure if he would run as a third-party candidate until moments before he entered the race.

He is proud to say he doesn’t have the established-party backing his competitors do.

That’s the point.

“I’m with all sorts of people all day long, Democrats, Republicans, anarchists, libertarians, socialists,” he said in an interview with the Monitor. “I really have an understanding of what the average New Hampshire resident is struggling with in a way that they just don’t because they just are in their Democratic circles and their circles of rich people.”

He also doesn’t mince words.

To him it’s “stupid” that the state Democratic party would support Warmington, knowing that she lobbying on behalf of the company that manufactured the opioid epidemic in the early 2000s. He doesn’t know why party leaders have backed Craig, knowing that Manchester is where “all the terrible things in New Hampshire happen.”

As Craig and Warmington march towards primary day turning attack advertisements previously focused on their Republican competitors on each other, Kiper is quietly waiting in the wings to build the start of his alternative political career.

Ahead of his first election, he’s also already looking to his next. He plans to run for governor again in 2026.

“Whether I’m the incumbent or not, I’m running again,” he said.

That’s not to say Kiper is launching a campaign for the corner office with high political aspirations. In all honesty, he can’t afford to spend his time in Concord as one of 400 state representatives, earning a $100-a-year salary.

With that, the top post was his only option.

If he’s not successful, he’s convinced the issues he’s running on – the housing crisis, the need to legalize marijuana and school funding – will still be on the table in two years.

To him, success in office comes from the incremental change a governor can make, not the plans his counterparts have compiled – like net-zero emissions in the state by 2040 or banning the sale of assault weapons – which he views as lofty.

Instead, Kiper is focused on “short-term gains,” like state-wide composting or building tiny homes with the help of students at vocational schools.

That doesn’t mean he shies away from larger debates, though.

At Friday’s debate at New England College, Kiper broke from Warmington and Craig opposing “the pledge” – a campaign tradition in New Hampshire, where candidates vow to veto a sales or income tax if elected.

As a restaurant owner, Kiper said he pays a sales and income tax for his business in the meals and room tax and business enterprise tax.

“Frankly that’s a slap in the face to every restaurant owner in this state. When people say there is no sales or income tax, those things exist. They provide income for the state. The state could not function without them,” he said. “There are only three ways to fund the schools, income tax, sales tax, property tax.”

In office, he wouldn’t shy away from other taxes either. To solve the state’s spending shortages, in public education in particular, Kiper sees a clear cash cow: second homes, many of which he presumes are owned by out-of-state residents.

“The best type of tax is the one that you don’t have to pay,” he said.

Policy aside, though, his plea to voters is that he’s far from politics.

He fears Warmington’s lobbying past will drive voters to Ayotte. They’ll see videos of tents on the street in Manchester and look away from Craig’s candidacy.

He hopes to attract the type of voter that he once was – an independent looking for a relatable candidate.

“What I can offer to you is that I do not have decades of political baggage,” he said. “I’ve got good ideas that the young people of this state are going to show up and vote for. If you look at the last eight years, that is what the Democrats have failed to do and I worry that we have not learned our lesson yet.”