MAGA Report Cards — New Hampshire

Kelly Ayotte Says She Disagrees With Trump's Canada Tariffs. She Refused to Sign the Letter New England's Other Governors Sent.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:10:00 +0000

Bohanan Farm in Hopkinton has been in operation since 1907. Five generations. Today it runs more than 120 dairy cows and 180 acres of corn, and bottles about 128,000 fluid ounces of milk a day as Contoocook Creamery.

Jamie Robertson can trace most of what it costs to run that farm back to Canada — the grain, the fertilizer for the cornfields, the diesel in the tractors and delivery trucks.

On August 19, a 50% tariff on a range of Canadian goods takes effect.

"If we can't cover our costs, it's not going to be a good picture," Robertson told the Concord Monitor.

Kelly Ayotte's response, as governor of the state this farm sits in:

"As I have said before, I disagree with tariffs on Canada because they simply are not good for New Hampshire."

She added that she will "continue to urge the administration to resolve this dispute with one of our state's largest trading partners as quickly as possible."

Urging. That is the whole plan.

The part that should make a dairy farmer furious

Here is what the White House says these tariffs are for.

Trump signed three proclamations on July 20 under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 — an authority no president had used in at least 70 years. The White House fact sheet says Canada discriminates against U.S. exports in three sectors: motor vehicles, alcoholic beverages, and dairy.

From the fact sheet itself:

"As part of its complicated and protectionist dairy system, Canada established tariff-rate quotas on U.S. cheese that are much more restrictive than the tariff-rate quotas imposed on similar imports of cheese into Canada from the EU."

So: a policy sold as standing up for American dairy farmers is about to raise the price of grain and fertilizer for an American dairy farm in Hopkinton, New Hampshire.

The tariffs cover roughly $20 billion in imports and hit goods that were previously protected under the USMCA — the trade agreement Trump himself signed in his first term. Energy, potash, fish, and critical minerals are exempt. Grain and fertilizer are not.

Robertson has already been squeezing what he can. The creamery switched from glass bottles to plastic to hold costs down. There is not much left to trim before the milk price moves or the farm doesn't work.

"I disagree" is not a policy

Give Ayotte this much: unlike many Republicans, she has not pretended the tariffs are good. She said in April 2025 that Canada is New Hampshire's number two trading partner and the tariffs were "not helping." She took a trade mission to Canada in the summer of 2025.

But every time saying so would have cost her something with Trump, she has passed.

When New England's other governors sent a joint letter to Canada's eastern premiers, Ayotte refused to sign it — and skipped the meeting with their Canadian counterparts, sending a representative instead. The Globe's characterization of her posture was that she was "holding her breath and hoping for the best."
Asked about a state gas tax suspension to give people immediate relief at the pump, she said in May she'd continue to monitor gas prices and did not embrace the idea.
When she criticized the earlier 25% tariffs, she paired it with saying she "appreciated the concerns" Trump had about the border.

A governor has real tools. She can join other states in a formal position. She can suspend a state tax. She can put money into the state Department of Agriculture. She can say plainly that a specific policy by a specific president is hurting a specific farm and demand it stop.

What she has chosen instead is a sentence that expresses disagreement and commits to nothing — delivered about a policy that takes effect in under two weeks.

What the farmer actually asked for

Robertson wasn't asking anyone to save him with a bailout. He asked the state to stop hollowing out the things that keep farms viable:

"We just can't keep cutting and cutting those things out. We've got to keep some infrastructure to be able to keep farms rolling."

He named the state Department of Agriculture and the university system — extension services, research, the unglamorous public backbone under a working farm.

That is a request aimed squarely at a governor's budget. It is answerable. Ayotte has not answered it.

This is the pattern

New Hampshire has already paid for the tariffs in ways that have nothing to do with a dairy barn. Canadian travel to the state is down about 30% according to state officials, gutting tourism towns like North Conway. A toy company in Keene faced a 145% tax on every toy it imports from China, with its CEO saying they had to "cut your overhead… do something to survive."

Ayotte's approach to Trump has been consistent across issues, not just this one. When the administration announced federal monitors at the polls in Manchester and Nashua, she said she'd "welcome anyone" — in the same press conference where she vowed to fight the DNC over New Hampshire's primary. She is willing to pick fights. She picks them with people who aren't Trump.

And she is not alone in treating the cost of living as a communications problem. This week the House Majority Whip went on television and claimed eggs cost 78 cents and milk was under $2, when the government's own data put them at $2.14 and $4.32.

At least Ayotte concedes the tariffs are bad. She has simply decided that saying so is the entire job.

The math on August 19

In under two weeks, the cost of grain and fertilizer at a farm that has operated since 1907 goes up, because the President decided Canada is unfair to American cheese.

The governor of New Hampshire disagrees with this. She has said so. She will continue to urge.

Jamie Robertson will pay it.

Source

Contoocook Creamery faces fuel cost hikes, concerned about tariffs — Concord Monitor, August 3, 2026. Additional reporting from the Union Leader and Granite Post. Photo: Concord Monitor.

Ayotte Cheered New Hampshire's Purdue Payout. As Attorney General, She Left Us Out of the Case.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:32:00 +0000

In May 2026, New Hampshire finally got paid. The state's share of the national Purdue Pharma settlement came to $29.5 million, part of a $7.4 billion deal that also bars the Sackler family from ever selling opioids in this country again.

Governor Kelly Ayotte put out a statement:

"The opioid crisis has devastated families in our state, and I thank the Attorney General's Office in New Hampshire and AGs across the country who have worked tirelessly to hold Purdue Pharma accountable for their role in poisoning our communities."

It's a good statement. Here's the problem with it.

Nineteen years ago, Kelly Ayotte was the Attorney General of New Hampshire. Other attorneys general went after Purdue Pharma. She didn't.

2007: the states sued, and New Hampshire sat it out

In May 2007, Purdue and three of its executives pleaded guilty in federal court to misleading doctors and patients about OxyContin — the claim that the pill gave 12 hours of pain relief and was therefore safer and less addictive than the competition. The company paid $600 million.

The states brought their own case. Twenty-six of them, plus Washington, D.C., reached a consent judgment with Purdue that year — a court order barring the company from making misleading claims about addiction and abuse in its OxyContin marketing.

New Hampshire was not one of them. As the Concord Monitor's editorial board later put it, New Hampshire was, "under then-Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, the only New England state not to participate in the suit."

Nobody has ever really explained why. Writing about it years afterward, the Monitor said the reason "could not be determined on deadline."

The other New England states took the money and spent it fighting addiction. New Hampshire got nothing. Purdue paid the participating states $19.5 million, and MeidasTouch estimated New Hampshire left between $720,000 and $950,000 on the table.

Under a later attorney general, New Hampshire eventually did sue Purdue — in 2017, a full decade after the rest of New England, and after the state had spent years being one of the hardest-hit places in America. New Hampshire then fought the Sacklers' bankruptcy deal as too soft. That fight is the one that produced the check Ayotte just praised. She wasn't part of it. She was on the other side of the decision that started it.

Then she went to Washington and took the industry's money

Ayotte won a U.S. Senate seat in 2010. The drug companies noticed.

From 2009 to 2015, she took $138,650 from members of the Pain Care Forum and their allies — more than any other New Hampshire politician, and nearly $100,000 more than Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the next closest. Out of $664,399 that pharmaceutical companies and their lobbying groups poured into New Hampshire politics, more than a fifth of it went to one person.

So what is the Pain Care Forum? It's not a household name, and that was the point. The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity spent 2016 pulling it apart. What they found:

It's a coalition of drugmakers, trade groups, and industry-funded nonprofits with no office and no website.
It was co-founded — and its monthly meetings run — by Purdue Pharma's own Washington lobbyist.
Between 2006 and 2015, its participants spent more than $740 million on lobbying and more than $140 million on political campaigns.
Groups pushing for limits on painkillers spent about $4 million over the same period. The industry outspent them roughly 200 to 1.

That's the money Ayotte led New Hampshire in collecting. From the network run by the company she declined to sue.

The speech and the checks

On January 27, 2016, Ayotte testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the crisis back home. Her statement for the record is genuinely moving:

"In New Hampshire, the number of drug overdose deaths is staggering: In 2014, there were over 320 drug overdose deaths."

She went on to say those statistics were "more than just numbers" — they were family members and friends, in every community in the state. Then she laid out what she wanted done about it: tougher fentanyl trafficking penalties, more Narcan for first responders, drug take-back programs, and passage of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act.

Every one of those remedies points at the street supply or at treatment capacity. None of them points at the companies that built the market.

Now look at the calendar around that speech. MeidasTouch reported that a PAC supporting Ayotte accepted $1,041.67 from Mortimer Sackler on January 26 — the day before she testified. A week after, on February 2, it took $2,083.33 from Jonathan Sackler. In September 2016 she collected another $4,483.32 from opioid manufacturers and distributors, the same month she accepted an award for her leadership fighting the opioid crisis. Across her Senate career, the tally from opioid makers, distributors, their owners and employees came to at least $83,000.

She gave the speech. She cashed the checks. She never went after the source.

Today she's squeezing the thing that actually pays for treatment

Ayotte is Governor now, and she likes to talk about this issue. In March 2025 she put out a release touting New Hampshire as "a model for the nation" on overdose deaths.

But ask who actually pays for addiction treatment in New Hampshire, and the answer isn't Operation Granite Shield. It's Medicaid. The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute is blunt about it: Medicaid is "the single-largest payer for SUD treatment" both nationally and here, covering roughly half of all substance use disorder spending in the state — about $57.8 million in 2024 alone.

And Medicaid is exactly what Ayotte has been cutting.

Her budget added Medicaid premiums of $90 a month for a household of three, plus a renewed push for work requirements.
Her budget plan raised pharmacy copays from $1–$2 to $4 for the lowest-income recipients.
Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" is projected to cost 34,646 Granite Staters their health insurance, 20,846 of them cut from Medicaid. Ayotte said there were "aspects of it, of course, that I disagree with" — and then her administration set about implementing it rather than fighting it.

NHFPI lays out where that leads. It cites research estimating that 156,000 people nationwide could lose access to medication-assisted treatment because of the new federal law — and that this alone would mean roughly 1,000 more opioid deaths every year. KFF projects federal Medicaid spending in New Hampshire will fall by $2.3 billion, about 15 percent, over the next decade.

If you are a Granite Stater in recovery, a $4 copay and a paperwork requirement are not abstractions. They are the difference between picking up your prescription and not.

The pattern

Put it in order and it's the same choice, three times.

In 2007, she could have joined the other states and made Purdue pay. She didn't.

In the Senate, she could have gone after the industry that manufactured the epidemic. Instead she took more of its money than any other politician in the state, and pointed her legislation at traffickers.

As Governor, she could protect the Medicaid coverage that pays for half of New Hampshire's addiction treatment. Instead she's adding premiums and copays to it.

The $29.5 million is real, and it will help. But it arrived in spite of the decision Ayotte made when she was the one holding the pen — and it arrives just as she's cutting the program that keeps people in treatment after the settlement money runs out.

Thanking the lawyers is easy. Being one of them was the job she had.

Source

Reporting from the Concord Monitor on New Hampshire's $29.5 million Purdue Pharma settlement, and the Monitor's 2016 coverage of OxyContin and pharmaceutical money in New Hampshire politics. Photo: Purdue Pharma headquarters, AP Photo / Douglas Healey.

Trump Is Sending Federal Monitors Into Manchester and Nashua Polls. Kelly Ayotte Says Come On In.

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:10:00 +0000

Trump administration officials are set to monitor polling places in Manchester and Nashua this fall — New Hampshire's two largest cities.

At a press briefing after the Executive Council meeting in Nashua on Wednesday, July 29, Gov. Kelly Ayotte was asked about it. Here is her answer:

"I would welcome anyone that wants to come to New Hampshire and see how we do elections. I think we do them well. And so, if they want to come and observe how we do elections here in New Hampshire I think they will see that we conduct our elections in a fair, transparent way."

Anyone. Including the Justice Department of a president who has spent six years insisting American elections are stolen.

The obvious question she didn't answer

Nobody asked whether New Hampshire runs clean elections. Everyone agrees it does — that's Ayotte's whole point, and she's right about it.

The question is why the federal government is sending people to watch.

Former Executive Councilor Andru Volinsky raised it in an InDepthNH opinion piece published that same day: "With depleted resources, you might think the Trump DOJ would focus its efforts to protect voting in places where there have been problems before. You'd be wrong in that belief."

That's the part Ayotte glided past. If New Hampshire's elections are, by her own account, fair and transparent and well run — then there is no election-integrity reason to station federal officials in its polling places. Something else is going on, and the governor of the state declined to ask what.

Volinsky's read was blunter: "Trump is sending his thugs to interfere with our primary and general elections this year in an effort to prevent Democrats from taking Congress and, just maybe, the US Senate." You don't have to accept his framing to notice that of all the places in New Hampshire, the two chosen are its two biggest cities — in a year when control of Congress is on the line.

The contradiction inside the same press conference

Here's the thing that makes this more than a shrug.

In the same briefing, Ayotte was fired up about a different outside body trying to influence New Hampshire's elections. The DNC had just picked South Carolina to go first in the Democratic presidential primary, bumping New Hampshire.

She was, in her words, "beyond disappointed" and "very upset." She talked about the tools the Secretary of State has in state law. She said:

"I think we have the tools to beat this back and New Hampshire is going to be first."

Beat this back. That's the language she used — about a political party's scheduling decision.

One press conference, two outside institutions, two completely different reactions:

Who wants a say in NH elections	Ayotte's response
The Democratic National Committee, on primary dates	"Beat this back." We have the tools. I'm very upset.
The Trump Justice Department, inside polling places	"I would welcome anyone."

One of those is a party calendar. The other is federal officials standing where people cast ballots. She's fighting the first and welcoming the second.

Her Democratic opponent, former Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington, put it this way: "How New Hampshire conducts its elections is up to Granite State election officials, not Donald Trump or his Department of Justice… It's time New Hampshire had a governor who has the backbone to stand up to Trump and gross federal overreach."

She has already made it harder to vote here

Warmington's other line — that Ayotte "has only made it harder for Granite Staters to vote" — is not campaign spin. It's her signing record.

In August 2025, Ayotte signed Senate Bill 218, which requires absentee voters registering by affidavit to submit documents proving citizenship, age, domicile, and identity. The New Hampshire Bulletin covered it at the time.

That extended to absentee voters the same documentary rules that already applied in person under a 2024 law — rules that made New Hampshire's voter registration the strictest in the country.

We know what those rules do, because New Hampshire ran the experiment. In the spring 2025 town meeting season, at least 96 people were turned away from the polls because they couldn't produce a passport or birth certificate, according to a tally by the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights.

Ninety-six qualified voters. In town elections. Turned away.

Disability rights advocates warned that pushing the same requirements onto absentee ballots would hit their community hardest. "Our office is concerned about legislation that would make it more difficult," said Karen Rosenberg of the Disability Rights Center New Hampshire. "I hope that people will figure out work arounds and ways to get what they need to vote, but I think it's going to be very challenging."

To be fair to Ayotte, she signed a good bill the same week — House Bill 67, requiring accessible voting machines in all New Hampshire elections, including purely local ones. That was a genuine bipartisan win, and she vetoed an attempt to carve exemptions out of it. Credit where it's due.

But the pattern is hard to miss. The barriers get higher. And when the federal government announces it's putting people inside Manchester and Nashua polling places, the governor's answer is that they're welcome.

What she could have said

She had an easy option available, and it wasn't partisan.

She could have said: New Hampshire runs its own elections. Our Secretary of State handles it. Observers are welcome under our rules, and our rules only, and I'll be watching to make sure nobody interferes with a Granite Stater trying to vote.

That's a states-rights answer. It's the same answer she gave the DNC, in a stronger voice.

She didn't give it. Not because she doesn't know how — she made exactly that argument about the primary calendar, in the same room, on the same day.

Source

Paula Tracy, "Ayotte Said She Welcomes Trump Administration Observation Of NH Elections", InDepthNH via Patch, July 30, 2026. Photo: Paula Tracy.