An inquiry (primarily) for still independent/undecided voters
With less than a week remaining until the voting stations are opened, and America picks up the lesser among two evils ... the next Antichrist ... the guy who will shortly preside until the impending Mayan apocalypse, here is a question that has been torturing this blonde head recently... not letting me sleep at night, constantly wondering. So far I
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2.) It's just the local culture. We're a very libertarian state, overall, and we've had an influx of libertarian individuals and ideology over the past decade or so since the Free State Project decided to shine a beacon to both legitimate libertarians and crazy tax-dodging conspiracy theorists and invite them to invade our too-permeable democratic structures. NH, a state of some 1.8 million people, has the third biggest legislature in the English-speaking world, behind the US Congress and the Indian parliament.
That makes it simultaneously the most and least representative state in the world. Most, because each representative has a very small constituency, and thus each constituent has a greater proportionate share of that representative's time and energy; lease, because each representative is basically powerless. A friend's mom was elected to our legislature, swapped her party affiliation to "Christian," and started campaigning for prayer in schools, banning abortion, and amending the Constitution to bar gay marriage. The thing is, basically no one noticed. We're the same state that introduced the infamous Magna Carta bill, because this sort of shit is just what happens when you only need to convince 500 people to put your name down.
3.) Probably not. More and more people are coming around to an anti-Pledge stance, and starting to see the point of better investment (note that local purists blame this on infiltration by our liberal southern neighbor, Massachusetts). Maggie Hassan, the current Democratic candidate for governor, was once an anti-Pledge Senate Majority Leader -- though she's converted to Pledge orthodoxy for this race. I had a whole post in the works about this, and how the Pledge distorts our local Overton window. I should finish it and post it.
Anyway. Not irredeemable, but definitely difficult. People are short-sighted, and Republicans are promising lower taxes (with no clear means of paying for them). Democrats are not, because Democrats realize that if we're going to be a state full of old people (which is looking more and more likely, as the young leave the state in droves) then we need better infrastructure, good health care, etc. If we're going to keep young families here, we need to invest in schools and bring decent jobs - which means bringing good businesses here, which means investment in our broadband infrastructure, getting the North Country on its feet so that it's not dragging the rest of the state down budget-wise, getting good schools for those young families' children to attend, and generally expanding services.
At this point, though, none of that is likely to happen. I'm wagering we'll go red this time around, and the coattails will carry the Republicans to a greater majority in the House. They want to do austerity, basically, when we've put off some key investments for way too long to begin with. It's just going to shift the costs to towns, who will never pass tax increases because of our heavily decentralized "town meeting" style of governance.
It's... a mess.
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