PRESS RELEASE
ICYMI: Cinde Warmington Joins WMUR’s "Conversation with The Candidate"
MANCHESTER, NH — In Case You Missed It, Democratic nominee for governor Cinde Warmington joined WMUR for the station’s "Conversation with the Candidate" series. This marks Cinde’s second televised town hall, following her participation in the New England College town hall series.
During the town hall, Cinde answered questions from voters on a range of topics — from data centers to housing — and shared her vision for delivering a better, more affordable New Hampshire that works for working people.
Read excerpts below and watch the full segment here.
On How Cinde Can Win This November
We're staying focused on the issues that are most important to Granite Staters. Again, the cost of housing is crushing working families. It's also making it difficult for small businesses to thrive in our state. We need to be tackling these problems head-on. That is what I will do as governor.
Kelly Ayotte has failed the state of New Hampshire. She has failed to address the most pressing problems of the day, and that is the ability to just make ends meet, the ability to just get by. It's getting harder and harder for Granite Staters.
On Cinde’s Support for a Data Center Moratorium and Community Bill of Rights
I have been calling for a moratorium for months. These data centers not only drive up the cost of electricity, they also consume massive amounts of water and cause noise pollution that is disruptive to both wildlife and humans. We need to make sure we put guardrails around these, to make sure that local communities have input and that we are protecting the way of life that we have come to enjoy here in New Hampshire.
Kelly Ayotte has only recently come around to suggesting that we do something about data centers. But she has had two years. There was a bill in the legislature that would have put these guardrails to provide local communities with input. [...] She provided no leadership on that. [...] The bill she signed for off-grid power was the bill that the data centers wanted.
[...] I would sign an executive order on Day One, putting a moratorium on these data centers, and then work with the legislature to make sure that we put in the kind of guardrails we need to decide whether we want these in our state, and where.
On Tackling the Housing Crisis
Housing is the most critical issue that we need to address on Day One. And as governor, I will be 100% focused on tackling this problem head on.
We know that we had a Housing Champions program in this state that was working well. In fact, it was responsible for approximately half of the housing starts that we had in the state last year. Kelly Ayotte defunded that program. We need to put the funding back into that program. Affordable housing in particular we need. And for every dollar that we put into the affordable housing fund, we can leverage that for three federal dollars. We have been leaving millions of dollars on the table.
But also really critically — and really important in the rental market as well — is this buying up by private equity of housing all across our state. All sorts of housing, and we need to make sure that we are putting guardrails around private equity buying up housing.
On Ayotte’s Failure to Stand up to Trump’s Tariffs
I was out visiting a farm in Contoocook recently and had this farmer describe to me how damaging these tariffs have been to their business. The cost of fertilizer, sky high, of diesel fuel, the glass bottles that they use to put milk in — all of their supplies are sky high because of these reckless tariffs that Donald Trump has put in place.
[...] We need to make sure that we are taking on this issue and that we are joining with our neighboring states to reach out to Canada, to rebuild that relationship the best we can, while we are dealing with the recklessness and the chaos that is coming out of the Trump administration.
On Ongoing Abuse at the Sununu Center
[...] On the Executive Council, I was a very strong advocate for the closure of this facility — getting these young people into a treatment model rather than this corrections model. It is just appalling that Kelly Ayotte has allowed this abuse to go on. It has been going on for decades, [...] and still today we have abuse going on in that facility, and she is blaming the kids.
What needs to happen there is we need to expedite the completion of the Hampstead facility. We need to make sure we are funding the Office of the Child Advocate, which Kelly Ayotte defunded. We need to make sure that we are funding the therapists that are needed at that facility, and we need to make sure that everyone — everyone that works with these kids — has trauma-informed training. All of those are necessary. None of those have been done under Kelly Ayotte.
On Cinde’s Commitment to Vetoing An Income or Sales Tax
I am taking the pledge. And that is not for political reasons. I am taking the pledge because I do not believe a broad based tax — a sales or income tax — is the right way to go in our state. I mean, what we have here [...] is a concentration of wealth in a very small, very, very small percentage of people in our state.
And we are constantly seeing, through this administration, mechanisms that continue to transfer wealth up to the wealthy. Those education vouchers are simply the worst example I have ever seen of a transfer of wealth up.