For those who voted in the Democratic primary for New Hampshire’s next governor this week, it probably wasn’t for Jon Kiper.

Most people have never heard of him, much less know his policy positions. He was the underdog: Kiper received just under 10% of the vote on Tuesday, and the only town he won in was his own, where he got 675 of the roughly 1,500 votes cast.

Nonetheless, Kiper feels his campaign for New Hampshire governor was a success. He accomplished his two main goals: Shift policy conversations toward affordable housing and keep Cinde Warmington from clinching the nomination. Now, it’s back to his day-to-day life as a restaurateur in Newmarket.

“That was the outcome that I wanted,” Kiper said in a phone interview the day after he lost his primary race. He was taking a break from boxing up leftover campaign signs and cleaning up after the election party he held at his restaurant, Johnny Boston’s International, the night before.

The highest political office he’s held is on the town council of Newmarket, where he lives in an apartment above his restaurant. He says he can’t afford to be a state representative – New Hampshire’s legislators are the lowest paid in the country, making $100 a year plus mileage – and the idea of being on Executive Council, frankly, bores him. Being governor was his most appealing option.

Bothered by Warmington’s past as a lobbyist for Purdue Pharma, Kiper hoped to make a dent in her supporter base – partly because he didn’t want a former opioid industry lobbyist as his governor, and partly because he thought that background would sink her when going head-to-head with Kelly Ayotte, who easily won the Republican nomination on Tuesday.

Kiper said many people who voted for him were former supporters of Warmington, an executive councilor who lost the Democratic nomination by six points. He received 9.5% of the vote and wanted to siphon off enough of her voters “just to feel like we had made an impact.”

“We definitely did,” Kiper said, “and we were able to steer the conversation. All in all, I’m thrilled with what we did.”

He’s weighing another run in 2026 but said it depends on the outcome of Nov. 5. If Ayotte wins, he’ll probably run to challenge her, Kiper said. If Joyce Craig, the former mayor of Manchester who secured the Democratic nomination, wins, he’ll probably stay out of it. In that case, he’d rather help Craig tackle the policy initiatives he fought for on the campaign trail – things like creating affordable housing and legalizing cannabis.

He’s not sure Craig can beat Ayotte either, simply due to Manchester’s reputation as a city overridden with drug overdoses and homelessness. He thinks the same would be true for the current mayor, Republican Jay Ruais – any mayor gets blamed for the city’s problems, Kiper said. Still, he’ll do everything he can to get Craig elected in November.

“I think she’d make a great governor, but I just think it’s going to be hard to beat that stereotype of how people perceive of Manchester,” he said.

At a Democrats’ unity event in Concord on Thursday, Craig thanked Kiper for bringing a new perspective to the race.

“He was right to draw attention to the critical need for affordable housing and how ridiculous it is that we still haven’t legalized cannabis,” Craig said.

While still undecided on getting back on the horse for 2026, Kiper’s back to flipping burgers for the time being. But his political future isn’t the only one he’s uncertain of – the restaurant business is known to be unstable, and he said he’s never recovered financially from the pandemic. Now that he’s reached the end of the campaign trail, he hopes to get back to work at Johnny Boston’s, catch up on building repairs and play guitar.

He’d also love to work on housing solutions in his own community. He feels the legislature is “not good at social services” and has considered starting a nonprofit. He’s also thought about working with a local church to raise money to open a homeless shelter.

Still, he said, people have already come into his restaurant and offered to start fundraising for a 2026 campaign.

Running as an outlier

Heading into the debate at New England College last week, Kiper had hoped voters would see him as a viable alternative to Warmington, Craig and the Democratic establishment.

He’s a former independent and almost ran as one, and his supporters appreciate his candor and relatability as a working-class Granite Stater.

Allison Nutting-Wong, a state representative from Nashua, voted for Kiper. She said she liked Craig well enough but didn’t like Warmington’s work for Purdue Pharma or her response to the concerns it brought up during the campaign. Nutting-Wong said one of her cousins died from an overdos

After hearing about Kiper from a friend, she met him and immediately resonated with his policy proposals – particularly his model for cannabis legalization, in which he’d establish a hybrid of privatization and state control and funnel revenue from state-run dispensaries toward affordable housing initiatives.

“Everything I felt like I had been spouting out for years, he seemed to understand and support without me telling him all that stuff,” Nutting-Wong said. “Spending eight years in the House, I had seen and seen how often it had failed to get through, so I appreciated a candidate who was very vocal about supporting cannabis.”

She also feels that having been a town councilor, Kiper was knowledgeable about people’s struggles and wasn’t just a random candidate – he knew what the need for housing looked like in his own community and how that affected other towns, she said.

Having only held hyperlocal elected office, Kiper proudly claims his own political naivete – but his inexperience did concern some people who might otherwise have voted for him.

Paige Beauchemin, another state representative in Nashua, held a Craig campaign sign outside her polling place on Tuesday. Though she resonates with Kiper’s message – more strongly, perhaps, than she does with Craig’s – she worried he didn’t have the resume for the job.

“I love him. He probably is most aligned with my values,” Beauchemin said. “I want him in politics somewhere, I just don’t think he’s ready for governorship right now.”

Kiper prefers to keep himself “out of the fray.” He doesn’t want to become jaded or a career politician.

“They get, sort of, almost beaten down by the system to the point where they’re unwilling to experiment and unwilling to try nontraditional approaches to solving problems,” Kiper said.

When asked how he responds to voters who want a more experienced candidate, Kiper referenced Gov. Chris Sununu who, after the WMUR debate, said on the New Hampshire Today radio show that he was impressed by Kiper’s ideas and relatability as a “real person” and urged undecided Democrats to vote for him.

That’s enough for Kiper.

“If he thinks that I can do it, what is anyone else to say anything different?” he said.

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, or send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.