Innis Launches 2016 Bid for Congress

A little more than a year ago, Dan Innis was one of four candidates running in the Republican primary seeking to unseat U.S. Rep. Carol Shea Porter, D-NH.

It was an uphill battle since one of the other four candidates – Frank Guinta, the current representative – had previously served in Congress. In the end, Innis, who gained national attention for being one of a few openly gay Republicans attempting to win a seat in Congress, lost the primary by less than 5,000 votes. Guinta went on to beat Shea Porter easily in the general election.

Since that time, Guinta has been mired by campaign finance allegations that he used his parents’ money back in 2010, according to the Federal Election Commission. He hasn’t been able to raise any money and his re-election poll numbers are staggeringly low, according to some of the Granite State’s politerati. While he hasn’t official launched a re-election bid, Guinta has reportedly been telling supporters he will run again.

This week, Innis announced that he would also be running again, with plans to discuss many of the same issues in 2014 this time around, problems, he said, that have not been solved.

“I care about the future of the country,” Innis said. “It would be real easy not to run, I have a job I love; life is good. (But) I believe that we have got to solve the problems that face us … and we need a different person in Washington.”

The 2016 campaign for the 1st Congressional District is, he noted, becoming another race with the same two people potentially for a fourth time, with the announcement that Carol Shea Porter, who has served in the seat between 2007 to 2011, and again from 2013 to 2015, would be running again; Guinta is in Congress now, and also served between 2011 and 2013.

By “a different person,” Innis said, his background and experience – previously owning The Hotel Portsmouth and Ale House Inn with his husband, Douglas Palardy, working as the dean of the business and economics school at UNH, and coming from a “relatively poor household,” have given him the opportunity to truly understand what is going on with middle-class families in New Hampshire and the economy.

“I understand the struggles family face … I see it everyday,” he said. “We have to leave the country better place and we’re not doing that.”

Innis said tackling the federal budget would be one of the main issues he would like to work on, if elected. He would like to reform the budget process while “thinking strategically about the nation’s finances.” He noted that entitlements would soon be swallowing up nearly all of the revenue being brought into the federal coffers. Innis said he believed that the Congress could preserve Social Security by going through a reform process while also living within its means and tackling the underlining causes of the budgetary mess.

Tax reform – especially the tax code and corporate rates – would also be a major issue he would be focusing on. Simplification, he stated, with flatter rates, would be important to spur economic growth.

“(The code) is tens of thousands of pages … nobody knows what’s in it; nobody knows what to do with it,” he said. “We can fix this tomorrow … it’s not hard.”

Innis noted that Japan had just lowered its corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent which now made the United States one of the highest corporate rates in the industrialized world. He believed that not only would this change invigorate the economy, it would also create middle-class jobs and increase federal revenues.

For individuals, he would focus on a flatter tax than there is now although it probably wouldn’t be a “pure flat tax,” he said.

Another stagnating issue currently held up in Congress is meaningful immigration reform, Innis said. He said he would call for enforcing existing laws and making changes to the process of allowing people to come to America. He noted that he saw the problems first hand at UNH, where the best foreign students would come to the United States for an education but would have to leave because they weren’t allowed to immigrate.

Innis said that next year, he had no doubt that he would be able to win the primary, even with Guinta and another Republican candidate – state Rep. Pam Tucker, R-Greenland – considering campaigns. Last year, he was able to get pretty big endorsements for his campaign. And this time around, the candidate has better name recognition that will enable him to spend less time talking about who he is and, instead, talk about what he wants to do.

“Right out of the gate, it’s a different sort of race (than 2014),” he said. “I have much better support than before … the support has broadened; it’s stronger, and that’s been most encouraging.”