The dust has settled after last week’s state primary, and now we know who the Democratic and Republican candidates – along with some independents and Libertarians — will be for the state election Nov. 8.
Some of the results were expected; hardly anyone thought Gov. Chris Sununu and U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan would lose their respective Republican and Democratic primaries, and they won by wide margins.
But the primary also saw Democratic voters in Peterborough and Sharon unseat state Rep. Ivy Vann in favor of 19-year-old Jonah Wheeler in Hillsborough County District 33. The margin between Vann and Wheeler was 73 votes, and the margin between Vann and fellow incumbent Peter Leishman, who earned the second spot on the ballot, was just 33 votes.
Wheeler’s victory is particularly interesting. Wheeler said he thinks high school students voting for the first time carried him to victory, and Leishman wrote in a letter to the editor that in his years of running and standing at the polls, he has never seen so many young people turn out to vote. We need a next generation of leaders and applaud Wheeler’s candidacy and success in getting first-time voters to the polls.
Our democracy gives us rights that we must never take for granted and requires that we all take responsibility for preserving the freedoms we enjoy. Participation, as candidates and as voters, is fundamental to preserving our democracy. Voting is something every one of us can do.
We believe that everybody, young and old, should vote in this election and every other. However, we know a lot of people don’t. For example, in Dublin, there were 233 Democratic and 223 Republican voters during the primary out of 1,197 on the checklist. In Wilton, out of a checklist of 2,641 voters at the beginning of the day, 778 residents cast votes, 325 for the Democrats and 453 for the Republicans.
We’re looking to learn more about people’s voting habits prior to the election, so we’re asking two simple questions: Do you vote? Why or why not?
Please send your answers to us in 50 words or less at news@ledgertranscript.com, along with your name, age and where you’re from. Some answers will be used in a future issue of the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.