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Powerful Voices | Courage For New Hampshire CD-02 with Paige Beauchemin
New Hampshire state rep and registered nurse Paige Beauchemin tells Nick Paro why she is running a no-PAC, no-dark-money “working person’s campaign” for NH-02 — built on Medicare for All, ending Citizens United, and relational organizing.
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.
People, Organizations, and Terms
People:
Paige Beauchemin — Registered nurse, three-term New Hampshire state representative, and Courage for Democracy Democratic candidate for New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District; the guest.
Nick Paro — Host (Banner and Backbone Media); solo on this episode, pressing on disability access, marginalized-versus-universal framing, and independent-media strategy.
Nieta Greene — Disability-rights advocate and Substack community member feeding questions in the chat; Nick credits her perspective and offers to connect her with Beauchemin.
Graham Platner — Maine Senate primary candidate Nick references from the prior night’s results; he notes reservations about Platner’s past but defers to Maine voters.
Organizations / Programs:
Courage for Democracy — Pro-democracy candidate coalition Beauchemin runs with; the network she says is jointly figuring out how to run working-class, non-establishment campaigns.
Disability and Neurodiversity Caucus — New Hampshire body Beauchemin attends and presents with to stay connected to the disability community.
#NHtok — Loose New Hampshire progressive network on TikTok (plus a 600–800-person Discord) that grew from a handful of creators to tens of thousands of followers in a year; Beauchemin’s substitute for paid reach.
Terms / Concepts:
Relational organizing — Training supporters to talk to people they already have relationships with instead of cold-calling strangers; lower-cost, higher-trust, and central to Beauchemin’s “working person’s campaign.”
Working person’s campaign — Beauchemin’s model of running without a donor file or large paid staff: self-made signs and zines, business door-knocking, warm calling, and maker sessions that double as community-building.
Power, prosperity, and peace — Beauchemin’s three-part platform frame: ending Citizens United and banning congressional stock trading (power); Medicare for All, housing, and livable wages (prosperity); and security at home and abroad (peace).
Deal-breakers vs. purity tests — Beauchemin’s distinction for coalition-building: trans rights, opposing genocide, and ending indefinite detention are non-negotiable “deal-breakers,” while issues like guns stay open for negotiation.
Laken Riley Act — Immigration-enforcement law Beauchemin cites as one of her incumbent opponent’s early votes and a reason she entered the race.
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