The DSA WatchlistNew Hampshire · Democratic Socialists of America · a Granite Solutions project

Candidates

The scorecard covers people who already hold a seat. This page covers the 454 people running for one who do not hold it yet: everyone in the 2026 New Hampshire House and Senate primaries. Most have cast no votes, so there is no voting record to score. What they have instead is a survey or, for 2 who returned nothing at all, the platform published on their own campaign website. 31 are former members, and are scored on the roll calls they cast in the 2023–2024 term instead of on anything they said. 106 of them are rated DSA Preferred.

These scores are not the scorecard scores

A sitting legislator is scored on what they did: recorded votes on named bills, in the official journal. A candidate here is scored on what they said: answers to a questionnaire. A vote is a record. An answer is a promise. They are two different ballots and two different measurements. The 31 former members on this page are scored on votes, but votes from an earlier term on different bills, so their number is not the scorecard number either.

2 of these came from a campaign website, not the survey

A candidate who returns nothing at all used to get no score and no page, even with a full platform published under their own name. Those candidates are now read off their own site instead. Each such score is marked website in the row, every position quotes the sentence it was read from, and a reading that needs any chain of reasoning to reach an answer is printed on the page and left out of the arithmetic. The two are never mixed in one number. One clear survey answer and the website is ignored entirely.

31 of these are former members, scored on their votes

31 candidates sat in the General Court in the 2023–2024 term, lost or stepped down in November 2024, and are running again. They are scored on the roll calls they cast then. Here a vote beats a sentence, so where a record exists it is the whole score, and anything they said on the survey or on a website is ignored. Each such score is marked record in the row, and the Answered column counts roll calls for them, not answers. It is still not comparable to a sitting member’s scorecard number, because it rests on a different session, different bills, and a different ballot.

Sitting members running again are not on this page

314 of the 406 sitting legislators have filed to run again in 2026. They are not scored on the survey, because they have something stronger than answers: a voting record. Each one is marked on their own page and on their town page, next to the record itself, in the colour of the grade that record earned: Comrade or Fully Socialist In between, or no score Not a Socialist A member with too few votes to score is grey, the same as the middle. Look up the full scorecard or your town.

Most of them said nothing

Citizens Count sends the survey to every candidate for state office and chases them by post, email and telephone. Most never answer. A blank is treated exactly as an absence is treated on a roll call: left out of the arithmetic, never counted as opposition.

Non-incumbent candidates
454
Never answered a survey question
273
Silent on the survey, with no website and no voting record to read either
251
Enough on the record to score
203

28 of the scored rest on fewer than 7 answers and are marked few answers in the table. 2 were read off a campaign website rather than the survey, and are counted in both “never answered a survey question” and “enough on the record to score”. 31 are former members scored on 2023–2024 roll calls; 20 of those never answered the survey either, and are counted in both as well.

The 203 candidates with a score

Scored on 11 of the 21 survey questions. One clear For or Against is enough to be scored, and nobody who answered is left off this list, so the Answered column carries the weight the old cut-off used to. A score resting on fewer than 7 answers is marked few answers in the row. A candidate who answered none of these 11 has no score, because there is nothing to divide. The 31 former members are the exception to all of this: their rows are marked record, their Answered count is roll calls out of the 2023–2024 record ballot, and the few-answers mark does not apply to them.

Showing 203 candidates · 106 rated DSA Preferred

Score distribution

The 203 scored candidates, in ten-point bands.

  • 90-100%71
  • 80-89%35
  • 70-79%14
  • 60-69%5
  • 50-59%3
  • 40-49%1
  • 30-39%5
  • 20-29%5
  • 10-19%27
  • 0-9%37
PartyScoredDSA PreferredMean score
Democrat11910189.6%
Republican77112.4%
Independent/Other7473.9%

The 11 questions, and the answer each one is scored against

The wording is Citizens Count’s, not ours. Every question is tied to a named plank of DSA’s national political program. Seven of the 11 aligned answers are “Against”. Four questions ask about capping, lowering or restricting something, and three ask whether you support a policy DSA opposes. Assuming “For” is always the aligned answer would be wrong on more than half of this ballot.

QuestionIssue areaDSA plankAligned answer
Broad-based income taxShould NH add an income tax on earned income?Raise Taxes to Expand GovernmentEconomic DemocracyFor
Interest and Dividends taxShould New Hampshire reinstate the interest and dividends tax?Raise Taxes to Expand GovernmentEconomic DemocracyFor
Business tax decreaseShould New Hampshire lower business taxes?Raise Taxes to Expand GovernmentEconomic DemocracyAgainst
Fund the Office of the Child AdvocateShould New Hampshire restore funding for the Office of the Child Advocate?Grow the State BudgetEconomic DemocracyFor
School district tax cap mandateShould state law cap how much local school districts can increase their budget each year?Grow the State BudgetEconomic DemocracyAgainst
"Education Freedom Account" programDo you support the “Education Freedom Account” program, which gives students access to the per-pupil share of state school funding to spend on private school or home school expenses?Defend the Public School MonopolyFreedom To FlourishAgainst
Public school open enrollment with limitsShould New Hampshire allow at least 10% of students in each school district to enroll in a different public school, regardless of where they live?Defend the Public School MonopolyFreedom To FlourishAgainst
Majority of public school funding through local property taxesDo you support New Hampshire’s current system of public school funding, with about two-thirds of total funding coming from local property taxes?Defend the Public School MonopolyFreedom To FlourishAgainst
Expand net metering opportunitiesDo you support legislation to expand the net energy metering system capacity cap from 1 MW to 5 MW for all residential and commercial customers in New Hampshire?Green New Deal Energy MandatesGreen New DealFor
Allow segregation based on biological sexShould New Hampshire’s anti-discrimination law allow segregation based on biological sex in some settings, such as bathrooms and locker rooms?Gender Identity Over Biological SexFeminism For AllAgainst
Proof of citizenship for newly registered votersShould New Hampshire require new voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when registering to vote?Loosen Voter Eligibility RulesDemocracy For AllAgainst

10 questions were answered and deliberately not scored

Five of them have no matching plank. The DSA program is a national platform, and where it says nothing on a subject we do not invent a position for it. That is the same rule that keeps every firearms bill off the roll-call scorecard.

The other five are a different case. The DSA program does have a plank on reproductive care, and one on housing, but those questions were dropped anyway. Citizens Count asked four about abortion, so on the original sixteen-question ballot a single subject carried a quarter of every score and decided who was flagged. The zoning question went next: removing zoning barriers is a market-liberal position as often as a left one, so both kinds of candidate answered For and the question separated nobody. Both calls are recorded as scorecard v2 and v3, with the earlier versions left intact.

  • Stricter gun lawsThe DSA political program has no firearms plank. Every gun bill is excluded from the roll-call scorecard for this same reason, and the survey is held to the same rule.
  • Marijuana legalization with home-growing, no salesThe DSA program has no drug-policy plank. It treats addiction as a health issue inside the incarceration plank, which is not a position on legalising sale or possession.
  • Marijuana legalization with private salesNo drug-policy plank. Scoring all three marijuana questions would also have given one topic 3 of 19 questions, the same over-weighting v6 of the roll-call scorecard removed.
  • Marijuana legalization with state-run storesNo drug-policy plank. State-run cannabis stores are public ownership of a retail business, but the Economic Democracy plank is about major corporations and utilities, not about which goods the state should sell.
  • Encourage nuclear developmentThe Green New Deal plank names a fossil-fuel phase-out and publicly owned sustainable energy. It takes no position on nuclear power either way, so we do not guess one.
  • Repeal ban on abortion after 24 weeksRemoved in v2. The four abortion questions were a quarter of a sixteen-question ballot, so one subject decided who was flagged more than any other. They are also the questions on which a candidate is least likely to be telling you anything about the rest of their politics. The score is now about tax, spending, schools, energy and process.
  • Guarantee right to abortion before 24 weeksRemoved in v2. The four abortion questions were a quarter of a sixteen-question ballot, so one subject decided who was flagged more than any other. They are also the questions on which a candidate is least likely to be telling you anything about the rest of their politics. The score is now about tax, spending, schools, energy and process.
  • Ban abortion during 2nd trimesterRemoved in v2. The four abortion questions were a quarter of a sixteen-question ballot, so one subject decided who was flagged more than any other. They are also the questions on which a candidate is least likely to be telling you anything about the rest of their politics. The score is now about tax, spending, schools, energy and process.
  • Ban abortion during 1st trimesterRemoved in v2. The four abortion questions were a quarter of a sixteen-question ballot, so one subject decided who was flagged more than any other. They are also the questions on which a candidate is least likely to be telling you anything about the rest of their politics. The score is now about tax, spending, schools, energy and process.
  • Encourage local zoning changes for housing developmentRemoved in v3. The Housing For All plank is about public housing, tenant rights and treating housing as a right; it takes no position on whether the state should override local zoning. That question also fails to separate anyone: removing zoning barriers is a market-liberal position as often as a left one, so both a socialist and a free-market candidate answer For, for opposite reasons. It was one of twelve questions and the only one in its issue area, so a poor discriminator carried a full share of every score.

The survey also asks nothing at all about immigration enforcement, compulsory union membership, a state minimum wage, the paint fee or the battery fee. 7 of the issue areas on the roll-call ballot cannot be measured from this survey.

Every scored candidate, A to Z

Names in red are rated DSA Preferred.

Source: the Citizens Count 2026 State Candidate Survey. Every answer on this site can be checked against the candidate’s own profile page, which is linked from their page here.

Granite Solutions rating, from published candidate survey answers, candidates’ own campaign websites and former members’ 2023–2024 roll call votes. Not a DSA endorsement. Methodology