Check out Paige’s campaign site here: Paige for New Hampshire
Powerful Voices In Review
Paige Beauchemin — a registered nurse, mother of three, and three-term New Hampshire state representative — joins Nick Paro on Powerful Voices to make the case for her Courage for Democracy run in New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District ahead of the September 8th primary. Beauchemin frames the whole campaign around three words, “power, prosperity, and peace”: power means ending Citizens United, closing tax loopholes, and banning members of Congress from owning stocks; prosperity means Medicare for All, stable housing, and a livable wage; peace means peace at home, peace abroad, and peace of mind. She grounds the platform in biography — raised “in a trailer park, basically,” first in her family to go to college, a nurse who has built mental-health and Black-maternal-health programs since 2010 — and argues that with only three nurses in the entire House and none in the Senate, the people who can translate policy into how it actually “shakes out in practice” are missing from the room. Her opponent, she says, is a one-term incumbent who moved back to the district from Washington, spent between $4 and $5 million, voted for the Laken Riley Act, and “will not recognize genocide”; against that, Beauchemin pitches herself as the working person who refuses corporate PAC and dark money and is “left completely making up the donor gap” herself.
What makes the hour worth a listener’s time is the operational honesty behind the slogans. Because New Hampshire’s donor file costs $35,000 and she won’t buy it, Beauchemin’s team screen-prints its own shirts and signs, writes zines, does “business door-knocking” and “warm calling,” and teaches relational organizing as a low-cost, higher-trust alternative to cold contact — a playbook she says the Courage candidates are “blazing the trail” on so future working-class campaigns can move faster. Nick presses her on the wedge a viewer keeps raising in the chat — whether centering marginalized communities means abandoning everyone else — and Beauchemin answers with a rising-tide frame Nick reframes as “not a pie, a balloon”: solve housing, healthcare, childcare, and wages for the people on the margins and everyone’s floor rises with them. She is candid that she keeps her “pro” framing deliberate (no dwelling on Trump, no anti-Republican branding) because that is how she reaches independents and even a self-described “seventh-generation MAGA” supporter, while drawing hard lines she calls deal-breakers rather than purity tests: no throwing trans people under the bus, no genocide, no caging people for months on end. The conversation closes on how independent media and a growing #NHtok network can substitute reach for money — and on Nick’s standing invitation to bring her back for his disability-focused show, Chronically Illing Out.
Key Takeaways
Visit paigefornh.com to donate, sign up for the email list, or volunteer remotely — almost all campaign work is broken into small remote tasks (calling, social, graphic design, fundraising), the September 8th primary is the deadline, and the campaign takes no corporate PAC or dark money.
Read about Courage for Democracy to understand the working-class campaign model Beauchemin is helping pioneer — relational organizing, livestreamed and bi-weekly Zoom town halls, and cross-state coalition-building — and watch whether the promised relational-organizing zine and town-hall tour actually materialize as the measurable test of the pitch.
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Thank you Dr. Eric Lullove, Courtney M 🇨🇦🏳️🌈, Dana Britt, Lynette, DarBid 🇨🇦, and many others for tuning into my live video with Nick Paro! Join me for my next live video in the app.
