Steve Marchand in Conversation with Todd Milliken

Candidate for Carroll District 3 (Moultonborough, Tamworth, Madison), NH House

From: The Steve Marchand Podcast, Oct. 29, 2026

Introduction

(0:12) Steve Marchand: I want to go back to a district that a few days ago we spent some time on with Brian Randolph, who’s another great candidate. His teammate in this endeavor in Carroll District 3 is my friend and an excellent candidate, really fun guy too, Todd Milliken. Todd, thank you so much for taking some time.

(0:30) Todd Milliken: Thank you, Steve. Thanks for all you do.

(0:33) Steve: Well, we’ll dive in. I want folks to get to know you and the district a little bit. I think this is one of the sneaky interesting House districts. When you’ve got 203 of them, there’s plenty of room to be sneaky interesting. This one is about half Moultonborough and the other half is Tamworth and Madison.

A lot of hardcore politicos in the state will hear that a district is half Moultonborough and say it’s not winnable for a Democrat. But there’s a lag effect: Moultonborough is still a red town but moving rapidly towards Democrats, and Tamworth and Madison are already kind of light blue. We spent some time together last Saturday up there. I was in Tamworth and Moultonborough and saw a lot of excitement for voting next Tuesday for the Democratic ticket, and I think that portends some real opportunity.

So that’s the context. Let’s start by talking about yourself. What have you been doing, and what inspired you to do this in 2026?

Todd’s Background

(1:44) Todd Milliken: I’m not quite so wonky on some of those things. I do love learning about them, but it sounds cliché, and it certainly is less about party and more about hoping to affect direction.

I grew up in Conway when my dad had a gas station, Cliff Mobile. My mom did the books. Back when a gas station was a place where someone pumped the gas, washed your windshield, and asked if you wanted the oil checked. It was a great place to grow up. I went to Conway Elm, and then we moved to Madison, where I live now. I went to Kennett High School, and like many of my friends, I got into the construction trades after Kennett. I did some traveling and worked on oil rigs in Colorado, but I settled into the construction trade, met a girl, cleared some land, built a house, started a family, and started going to night school.

At the time I was a self-employed mason. Masonry was the trade that captured my interest the most. Then I was lucky to land a desk job with a local company called Chick Industrial Packaging right here in Silver Lake. It was at a time when a Manhattan businessman had purchased them, and he and the president of the company, Ken Wilson, a good Moultonborough resident, grew the company across the country. I was fortunate to grow with the company. They bought a little bankrupt business unit out in California and moved our young family out there to see if I could turn it around. That was my first turnaround. I managed to get it done and got a general manager of the year award. By then we had 13 business units and got together once a year, which was a nice thing.

Then I took a very happy, graceful exit from that company. I did my own thing for five years in operations consulting, went back to school and finally got my bachelor of science degree in business management. Then I got a call from a Swedish company that had just bought Chick Packaging, which was a North American national company by then. They wanted me to take the North American product line to the rest of their business units, 30 around the world. So I had a global role for 13 years, with two more turnaround efforts. Then I moved back home to New Hampshire, took another great exit, and retired from a very nice Swedish company. Now I’m on the planning board, and here I am running for State House.

Lessons from Business Turnarounds

(4:29) Steve: I want to go back for a second. You mentioned being a young dad with a young family going out to California, and it was the first time you were tasked with trying to turn something around. What was that like? The first time has to be very intimidating.

(4:53) Todd Milliken: Oh yeah. Sometimes I felt like my hair was on fire. It was complicated because it was high-tech packaging. I came from very heavy industrial packaging to the California high-tech packaging world, and it got worse. I took over this little bankrupt company, then the first internet boom busted in the spring of 2001 and the telecommunications equipment customer base dropped. Then in the fall, of course, we had 9/11. So a bad situation got worse, and I was scrambling. I managed to turn it around and we eked out a profit. Everyone patted me on the back, but it took years.

I did three turnaround efforts, including another one in Istanbul, Turkey, and one in South Carolina. The commonality is that you go to a place that has struggled for six, seven, eight years. Your bosses say, “Here are the problems and here’s what you need to do,” and you get on the plane and realize that if they knew how to fix it, they wouldn’t be sending me there. So I learned to look at these things in a new and different way, because if you keep doing what your predecessors did, it’s very unlikely to change anything. Perhaps I got somewhat good at finding the problem others hadn’t identified and then getting a team to work on it. So that was pretty lucky.

The Big Picture: What Needs to Change

(6:41) Steve: It seems like that might be a pretty good skill set for what you’re looking to do here. We’re both natives of this state. We love this state and want to make it even better. “Turnaround” may imply a dumpster fire, which it is not, but where do you see opportunities for improvement, maybe through a fresh perspective, whether it’s property taxes, schools, you name it?

(7:19) Todd Milliken: I like the big picture, Steve, because if we don’t address the big picture, we probably don’t stand much of a chance to fix the little things. One way to get people to work together is to agree on what the problem is. It’s “Milliken for the middle.” I want to bring politics and policies back to the middle for the middle class.

One of the problems is the organized denial of reality. It’s a movement in our country now. One man denying the reality of an election is now a national movement attacking democracy, literally. We have to address that more openly and more aggressively. Next month we’ll probably have ballot boxes seized, and we know the process: chaos, disruption, and then holding on to information or misinformation. We know that’s coming.

It’s a denial of reality that we also see here in New Hampshire, where the Republican Free Staters steer our ship. They’ll tell you government should be voluntarily funded, that taxes should be voluntary. That’s quite dangerous, because it gives social permission to ignore or deny facts. Even worse, loyalty becomes more important than being informed. So we have an entire group of people choosing not to be informed. We’ve got to address that as a team and get it out on the table that we can’t keep going in that direction.

Then we have a social structural problem, at both the national and state level. For decades, our tax preferences, regulatory preferences, and capital preferences have been aimed at the wealthy and large corporations. It’s time those three things were turned toward the middle class.

Let’s make daycare great. Reduce the regulations. Make a one- or two-child in-home daycare a business, because it doesn’t have to be 20 kids. Make capital available to that business. Give tax preference to that business. Now the middle class is making money from daycares, and the other middle class is paying less because it costs less. So take these three things that built the billionaire class, and now we’re building a trillionaire class, and direct them at the middle class.

The social part of that, Steve, is something you can help with. We have to find different ways of talking about things. We have to find it to be okay, even patriotic, for the middle class to fight for these things. Right now it’s patriotic for the wealthy to fight for them, and the middle class is sitting on our heels, saying “you go get them.” We can’t keep doing that.

A Nonpartisan Approach

(10:26) Steve: In a number of conversations I’ve had this week with first-time candidates like yourself, I find it refreshing to hear a perspective informed by private-sector experience, which requires looking at problems in a highly pragmatic way. When we met early this year in Moultonborough, you had about as nonpartisan or bipartisan a vibe in the way you talk about problem solving as anybody I’ve met this cycle that’s running for office.

I live in a very bipartisan home. My wife and I do not always vote for the same candidate. My kids are surprisingly bipartisan too. Young women in their early 20s really look at the person more than the party affiliation. I’m proud of that. I want to get to the place where they feel like they’ll vote for the Democrat almost all the time because we consistently bring the highest quality candidates and problem-solving skills. We earn that vote not because of the letter, but because of the caliber of what we bring to the table. You’ve got to earn it every two years, or else you get lazy.

You talk about these things in very different ways from a lot of other candidates, and in a district like yours I think that’s particularly attractive, because you’re able to access certain kinds of voters in a way that a lot of other candidates are going to struggle with. Have you found that in your travels this year?

(12:23) Todd Milliken: I think I’m well suited to help bring things back to the middle. I grew up in Carroll County, the reddest county in the red state. When I was a young man, I was registered Republican. My wife and I talked about the $25 we donated to John McCain in his first presidential bid. We put a John McCain sign at the end of our driveway. If I were lucky enough to win, I would look for traditional Republicans, John McCain Republicans, to work with, because they’re definitely out there.

Right now, at the national level and at the state level, the Republican leadership has a three-step process. One, cut taxes for the wealthy. Here in the state, they cut $180 million in interest and dividends taxes: phase it out, then cut it. Ninety percent of the benefit goes to the wealthy. Two, when revenues are needed for schools or the red-listed bridges, complain about revenue. Three, pass the cost on to the middle class. There’s no recognition that you cut revenue by $180 million. This is the current direction of the ruling party, one, two, three, and you can’t keep doing that. I know there are institutional or traditional Republicans who know we can’t keep doing that.

There’s no rational person who could argue that the one big beautiful bill they passed is better for ordinary people than the four bills passed in the previous Congress. There’s no rational argument for that. I don’t want to go over those four bills, but they all contributed to ordinary people. And right now there’s a report due every September on the previous year, put out by the Tax Foundation of the United States, that President Trump is not allowing to be released. We could be reading right now about what the big beautiful bill did for ordinary Americans, and if it did good things, it would be released. It’s being held up. So the vapid hollowness of the Republican Party has to be disliked by many traditional Republicans.

The tax cuts in the big beautiful bill for ordinary people expire in 2028. The tax cuts for the wealthy don’t. So it’s time to face reality and get Republicans, like I said, John McCain Republicans, back in the middle with the rest of us, to get to work for ordinary people. Sorry, that was a lot.

Divided Government and Red List Bridges

(15:19) Steve: No, but I think you’re right. That is the big picture. We have to understand the environment in which we’re doing politics and eventually policy. Let’s face it, I think Democrats have a better than 50-50 chance of regaining the New Hampshire House, and a legitimate chance, though I don’t know if it’s quite 50/50, in the state Senate. Right now Governor Ayotte, if we’re being clear-eyed about it, is favored to retain the governor’s seat. Between all those things, there’s a pretty good chance we’re going to have split government in 2027. We’ll see. But the only way meaningful things are going to get done is if people understand the context, which I think you’ve accurately described.

Last Saturday we were talking about the red list bridges, bridges identified as needing replacement or repair. Back in 2017 or 2018 there was a long list of them, hundreds. Because they said they didn’t have the money, they redefined what a red list bridge was. They didn’t do a thing to the bridge. They just made it so the bridge has to be in really rough shape to be on the red list. Problem kind of solved, and I’m like, not at all. That’s not living in the real world. At a certain point we don’t want a tragedy to occur, or massive economic disruption to a small community if they lose their bridge. That’s going to require collaboration and compromise.

I am somewhat optimistic. The last time we had something like this in my memory was when Maggie Hassan was governor in the 2010s. In 2014 she got narrowly reelected, but the Republicans took over both the House and the Senate. For the second two years of her time as governor, she had to deal with the other party being in charge of the legislature, and they had to compromise, and they did on the budget. There was some stuff Maggie didn’t want but had to sign, and some stuff the legislature didn’t want, and they got there and passed it. So I have a cautious optimism that we’re going to get some of the way there, but it starts with a recognition of reality as you’ve defined it.

In the conversations you’re having with constituents and voters, what are the couple of issues they’re most hot to trot on?

Affordability and Health Insurance

(18:16) Todd Milliken: I want to reinforce what you said. People want us to work together. The largest group of registered voters in New Hampshire are independent or undeclared. They do not want either party to imagine ruling without the other party. They want us to imagine ruling together. I completely reinforce your thoughts there, and I have hope for that, because it’s the right thing to do, and almost always in the long term we find the right thing to do.

Affordability, of course, is a huge thing people talk about. Unfortunately, Steve, this is one where I need to ask for your help to change our frames. Whether it’s health insurance, which is what we need to talk about more than health care, the challenge for our young families isn’t that they’re too far from their cardiologist. It’s that they can’t afford health insurance.

Take housing affordability. It’s a formula: the average price of a house, and how many households can afford that house at 30% of their income. It’s about income. Right now, these are facts, the middle class is $40,000 a year below making that formula work out to say housing is affordable again. That $40,000 a year needs to be left in middle-class pockets, and it needs a structural change.

You probably remember that 10 years ago the top 10 hedge fund managers on Wall Street made the equivalent of 100,000 school teacher salaries. Now it’s 300,000. So now in a consumer economy, you’ve got 10 über-consumers and 300,000 barely making it. This is the society we’re building. When you say things are unaffordable, this is why: we need to leave money in the pockets of ordinary people, the middle class. Then these things will become affordable.

Lastly, do me a favor on health care. Every time we talk about health care, every lobbyist in Concord is smiling all the way home, because we’re not talking about health insurance. The issue, Steve, is health insurance. So every time we kick off a conversation, let’s talk about health insurance, because it has a death grip on us. Everything health care does is driven by health insurance. When a politician talks about this initiative or that initiative, say wonderful, but understand that unless it’s funded by the health insurance company, it’s not going to happen.

It’s time we direct the power of government at the health insurance industry and get them to serve us. Right now the health insurance industry serves the health insurance industry. And if you think that’s a battle you can take on your own, if you think the Free Staters have it right and we don’t need government, well, take on that battle without government.

Steve’s Personal Story

(21:36) Steve: You can see, folks, why I like Todd so much. These pre-Election Day conversations are some of the ones I want to continue after Election Day, whether everybody wins, some win, or they don’t all work out, because this is going to require sustained focus and effort. Todd, I love the big picture element you’re bringing. I’m getting texts from people as we do this live that say, “I want more of this guy.” I want to give you double the time, but I have to move on, unfortunately. I’m going to have you back on after Election Day because you’re getting my brain working overtime. And the health care issue, man. I think…

(22:33) Todd Milliken: Health insurance.

(22:35) Steve: What’s that?

(22:36) Todd Milliken: Health insurance.

(22:37) Steve: I’m sorry. See, you’re fixing me up. Health insurance. I lived in a home where insurance was unaffordable, so we dropped it. We had a health crisis when I was a teenager, a heart attack in my family, and we didn’t have the insurance. It ended up creating the biggest financial pain point in my family our entire life.

Thirty years later, I was a 49-year-old who also had a heart attack, like my mom did at the age of 39. But we had quality health insurance through my wife’s employer. I went to the ER after I’d had a couple of heart attacks, because I was starting to connect the dots. If I had not had health insurance and was more worried about how I was going to pay if they discovered it was a big problem, I would not have gone that night. They told me the next morning, when I had four stents put in after finding out I had four arteries that were more than 90% clogged, that I was hours away from having the biggest heart attack, one that would have absolutely killed me.

This is what’s happening in this country. And you’re right, the quality of health care in this country is elite. We are an hour, or an hour and a half depending where you live in New Hampshire, from arguably the world center of quality health care in the greater Boston area. The problem is not the quality of the health care. The problem is the insurance.

Health Insurance and Small Business

(24:07) Todd Milliken: Exactly. Everyone who has good health insurance doesn’t have a problem with health care.

(24:12) Steve: Right.

(24:13) Todd Milliken: You look at millions of Americans who would continue to be active consumers and taxpayers, but who fall off on their health because they don’t have health insurance. Now they’re limping. Now they’re not getting a knee replacement or a hip replacement. They’re not volunteering in retirement. If we were to give more people access to affordable health insurance, we’d have more taxpayers and more consumers. And we’d have more entrepreneurs, because the reason people don’t leave a business to start a business, which is the most American of things and how we create jobs in this country, is health insurance. That is the barrier. It’s risky to start a business to begin with. Then you layer on the loss of employer-based health insurance and it becomes a risk that is too scary to take, and we are hurt as an economy. Not everybody is able to get to their highest and best place in terms of what they can offer to this economy.

To me it’s a pro-entrepreneur message. The Democratic Party could easily be branding itself the party of small business and entrepreneurship, but it’s going to take being muscular about that. And I think the health insurance conversation is at the dead center of it.

(25:44) Steve: Yeah, good. I don’t know how much time we have left. Maybe none. Unfortunately, we probably have to get scooting soon. I need to schedule more time, because every time I’m like, man, I want more. I’m serious, I want you back on shortly.

Somebody we talked to yesterday, Molly McCoy, a wonderful state rep candidate in Hampton, is a small business woman trying to make it happen with her husband, running a restaurant, which is a tough business. And they’re making it. In our conversation we talked about health insurance, and it ended up being the center of that conversation.

(26:23) Todd Milliken: Yeah. A lot of conversations.

Closing

(26:25) Steve: Well, all right. Tell folks, if they want to learn more about you in these waning days of campaign season 2026, how do they do so, Todd?

(26:33) Todd Milliken: The website is ToddMilliken4NH.org, so my name, no spaces, and the number four, then NH.org. A good friend of mine put it together. It may not be very detailed on policy, but join me in the direction of pulling politics back to the middle. Let’s find the correctness in fighting for ordinary people, fighting for the middle class. That’s what I’d like to do.

(27:03) Steve: That’s a great message, and I think it’s part of why I find you a compelling candidate in an increasingly compelling district that I think is going to be receptive to a message like that. So folks, get out next Tuesday. Particularly if you live in Madison or Tamworth or Moultonborough, make sure you vote for Todd and for Brian, another wonderful candidate we had on a few days ago.

We’re going to have all this on the YouTube channel, my Substack, and in audio form on Apple Podcasts and Spotify shortly. I’ll be up late at night, but that’s nothing compared to the work these candidates are doing. I want to thank my friend and my guest Todd Milliken again for taking a little time today.

(27:43) Todd Milliken: Thank you, Steve. And thanks again for all you do.

(27:45) Steve: All right. Thank you, Todd. Thank you all for watching, whether you’re live or recorded. We’re going to be doing this a lot, with plenty of content. Make sure you get out and vote on November 3rd. Thanks again, guys. We’ll see you soon.