Conlin running for Congress to shift paradigm, take money out of politics

Former Dover state Rep. Bill Conlin is running for the Democratic primary nomination to Congress, and his campaign is as much for other candidates as it is for the constituents he'd represent.

Conlin represented Dover in the Statehouse from 2022 to 2024, and learned valuable lessons during his time there. A political person by nature, he’d been involved in the arena for a decade. Now, Conlin says it's time for a paradigm shift.

“I’m not accepting any money for my campaign, and I’m doing it for a specific reason,” Conlin told The Laconia Daily Sun in an interview last month. “I’ve been around campaigns for 10 years, I am 100% confident that that money that comes in through campaigns, the things that are influencing all our decisions in Washington, and Concord, all of that money that comes in has absolutely no bearing on who wins and who loses.

“It really is all ground-game,” he said. “It really is all grassroots.”

For Conlin, money is a key corrupting influence in American politics: politicians are, he said, essentially beholden to their donors, or at the very least, they believe themselves to be. 

“The money is taking that power, the money wants that power solely to use against us, and then profit from our misery,” he said. “Those were really a lot of the problems that we have in our society, is that money is preventing us from solving that problem, because someone can make a profit on that problem.” 

Conlin is running for the open seat in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, and he believes it's particularly winnable, and its voters ready for his message. The grassroots system there is strong, he said, and if he can get his message across, he believes he’s got a good shot at the primary nomination.

What money buys in an election, Conlin said, is essentially advertisements, signs and campaign literature, none of which influence, but all of which remind.

“We saw this in this recent election, in this one special election district up here that [President Donald Trump] won by 9 points in 2024 — it wound up going to the Democrat,” he said. “I was in Wolfeboro, a week before the election, sea of red everywhere. Red signs everywhere, about 50 to 1, but really all that did was for every one blue sign that said, ‘This is the guy you like, this is who you’re voting for,’ there were 50 signs that said, ‘This is the guy you hate and you’re never going to vote for him.’

“That’s all it does, all it does is remind,” he said. “The votes don’t come from there, they come from us, they come from you and I.”

Whether or not Conlin wins appears unimportant to him. He said his campaign is needed in this moment, culturally, and his primary goal is to educate candidates and voters alike. 

“We are in a situation right now in which people feel really powerless, and they feel like they have no control, and all of this is about showing people [they’re] all the power there ever was. You have that power, more importantly, you have that control,” he said. “All of that control comes through this vote — you can give it toward something like this campaign that wishes to prove, and we will prove to ourselves, should we get through and win in September. And then we’ll have the opportunity to prove literally to every person in America that this is right: that money isn’t doing anything to get these people elected, and we should hold our politicians to a higher standard because of it.”

Conlin communicates a distinctly populist streak — he was excited by Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who ran for the Democratic primary nomination in the 2016 election for president — and believes voters in both parties have a lot more in common than they have differences.

He described himself as a “lifelong blue-collar worker,” and said he knows countless members of the MAGA coalition. For Conlin, those voters are reachable, he said, even by a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. 

“I am surrounded by people who are MAGA people, and they are good people, and they have concerns and they have issues — all of them are valid,” Conlin said. “They feel like they don’t have any power at all, they gave all of their power to [President Trump], they’re now feeling like that was a huge mistake. 

“This is a campaign that resonates with so many people. It’s not the importance of winning, it’s the importance of validating what they already understand: that money is hurting them, that money really isn’t the source of that power, they’re that power,” he said. “They have it, they control it, they can change their world, we just have to all get going in the same direction.”

A key reason behind the belief: the common man cares first and foremost about two things, cost of living and opportunity, and healthcare. Conlin pointed to broad popularity, across the political spectrum among voters, of policies like Medicare For All. 

“Our president has been giving an absolute master course in terms of how power actually works in Washington. He has a complete stranglehold over his party, because what does he have? He has people, and people are the sole source of power in Washington,” Conlin said. “If you come with an army, they pay attention to you, and that’s what he did.”