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0000017a-15d9-d736-a57f-17ff8d410000Race: U.S. SenateParty: RepublicanPolitical Experience: 1994-1998 – New Hampshire SenatePersonal: Married, one child; lives in HanoverEducation: Dartmouth CollegeCampaign WebsiteIssuesFormer chairman of the Granite State Coalition Against Expanded Gambling, Rubens says his top priority is restoring economic growth and good-paying jobs. He supports a “simpler, flatter” tax code to keep companies from outsourcing jobs and fewer regulations on American businesses.“We need to fix our regulatory structure. We are now the seventeenth most economically free country in the world, we've slipped from third in just thirteen years. We've got to dial back these regulations. I'm proposing that every ten years, all these regulations be sunset. They go back to Congress, Congress looks at them... are they compliant with statute, are they constitutional, are they doing what they are supposed to be doing….”Rubens supports repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with ideas that “harness market forces” and increase consumer choice. That includes the interstate sale of insurance, allowing “young invincibles” to purchase a low-cost catastrophic policy and expanding health savings accounts.“I'm not in favor of mandating people to buy a product or service, and that includes health insurance. So we need to restructure the insurance marketplace so that people are incentivized to buy insurance. How do you do that? You let the free market - you let insurers and hospital and health providers, whether they be insurers or not or networks of hospitals and care providers - provide products and services that people want to buy.”Rubens is highly critical of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and Syria, which he calls “crazy, haphazard” and has not made America safer. He believes the American military needs a long-term strategy to strengthen its intelligence-gathering and cyber-warfare capabilities.“So if there are cases when ISIS and other organizations are threatening American national security, we can use surgical mechanisms to eliminate these specific threats when on-the-ground and other means of intelligence discloses such threats, where ever they may originate from in the world.”

Jim Rubens Officially Enters Senate Race Against Jeanne Shaheen

Sam Evans-Brown
/
NHPR

Former state senator, and Hanover resident Jim Rubens officially announced he will run for the Republican nomination to face Jeanne Shaheen in next year’s U.S. Senate election. He’s the first to enter the race.

Rubens has an eclectic platform that could be hard to sell to some Republican voters. He says he prioritizes reducing the federal deficit and repealing and replacing Obamacare, but is pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage. He also advocates cutting the payroll tax in order to institute a carbon tax.

But he downplays any suggestions that he is not a serious challenger saying he’s used to tough fights. As head of the Granite State Coalition Against Casino Gambling, he says “against David versus Goliath odds, I have worked with democrats and republicans and defeated the casino gambling industry for nine straight years running.”

Ruben’s stiffest competition may come early, when he has to sell Republican primary voters on the need to address man-made climate change. He does not yet face any official opposition, but conservative activist and social conservative Karen Testerman is considering a run.

A poll out Tuesday from Public Policy Polling suggests more than seventy percent of voters have never heard of Testerman or Rubens.

Sam Evans-Brown has been working for New Hampshire Public Radio since 2010, when he began as a freelancer. He shifted gears in 2016 and began producing Outside/In, a podcast and radio show about “the natural world and how we use it.” His work has won him several awards, including two regional Edward R. Murrow awards, one national Murrow, and the Overseas Press Club of America's award for best environmental reporting in any medium. He studied Politics and Spanish at Bates College, and before reporting was variously employed as a Spanish teacher, farmer, bicycle mechanic, ski coach, research assistant, a wilderness trip leader and a technical supporter.
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