Three pieces in nine days, and not one of them asked a Granite Stater.

Between 12 and 20 August 2026 this question was written about three times in the New Hampshire press. More coverage than it has had in a while, and all three had something in common.

3 September 2026

What ran

  • InDepthNH, 12 August: LOL or Not, New Hampshire Secession is Back.
  • The Eagle Tribune, 15 August: NH secession movement is back.
  • InDepthNH, 20 August: Proposal for NH to Secede from the United States Praised, But Mostly Condemned.

All three are linked in full on the press page, alongside the eleven outlets that have covered this. We link the ones that were rude about it too. A campaign that only linked its good notices would be worth exactly what you would expect.

The thing all three did

Each asked whether the movement is serious, how many people are behind it, and whether it could ever happen. Those are fair questions and we answer them at length.

None of them asked New Hampshire.

No complaint about reporters is intended. The one thing nobody has done in the two and a half centuries since Exeter is put the question to the people who would live with the answer. Every estimate of how much support this has, including ours, is a poll rather than a count, and a poll is not a vote.

What is on the record

The record, as opposed to the estimates, is short.

  • 10 March 2022. The New Hampshire House debated independence in open session and put every member's name to a recorded vote. It lost 323 to 13. No other state legislature in modern America has done that. The full record, the roll call and the floor debate are on the CACR 32 page.
  • August 2022. A resident of Atkinson asked the Ballot Law Commission to disqualify fourteen candidates from standing for re-election for having sponsored or declined to kill that amendment. All five commissioners threw it out. Nobody argued that Granite Staters would vote to stay.
  • February 2024. The House rejected a constitutional amendment that would have acted if the federal debt reached $40 trillion, and a bill to study the question, both without debate. The debt crossed $40 trillion in August 2026. Both measures are here.

And one figure that surprised us

The usual objection is that a state this size lives on federal money. In federal fiscal year 2023 the federal government collected $21.98 billion from New Hampshire and spent $22.01 billion in it: a dollar back for every dollar sent, 47th of fifty states, against a national average of $4,099 per person to the good.

That does not make anybody better off outside the union and this campaign has not claimed it does. What it disposes of is the argument that the question need not be asked because the answer is obvious. The ledger is here.

The ask has not changed

Not independence by acclamation, and not independence decided by us. A referendum, authorized by the General Court, answered by New Hampshire. If the answer is no, that settles it for a generation and this campaign ends in an afternoon.

So the next piece written about this would be worth more if it asked somebody in Claremont or Rochester rather than asking us.

Add your name What changes and what does not

Sources

  • The three August 2026 pieces, linked in full on the press page.
  • The 2022 floor vote, the debate and the ballot commission complaint: CACR 32, with InDepthNH and NHPR cited there.
  • The 2024 measures and the debt crossing: CACR 20 and HB 1130, with the live Treasury figure.
  • The federal balance of payments: Rockefeller Institute of Government, August 2025, federal fiscal year 2023, set out here.

If anything on this page is wrong, tell us at hello@nhexitnow.org and we will correct it and say that we did.