Ex-Dem lobbyist for company that promoted addictive opioid clears key gubernatorial hurdle

her legal work tied to Purdue Pharma. This isn’t ancient gossip. It’s a reminder of who was cashing checks while a company pushed a product that wrecked families from the Merrimack Valley to the North Country and everywhere else.

Warmington’s defenders will say she was doing her job, representing a client, working inside the rules. Fine. But politics isn’t a bar exam. If you want to run the state, you don’t get to hide behind the idea that “legal” automatically means “clean.” When your résumé includes helping a firm like Purdue navigate the world while it was selling pain pills like they were harmless, voters get to ask what you were willing to overlook, and for how much.

The bigger issue is what Democrats are signaling by waving her through anyway. They’ll spend the general election talking about corporate greed and public health, then ask Granite Staters to trust a nominee who made her name in the orbit of one of the most infamous corporate scandals in modern American life. That’s not “opposition research.” That’s a real question about judgment, priorities, and whether the lessons of the opioid years were learned or just repackaged into talking points.

Republicans shouldn’t treat this as a cheap gotcha. They should keep it simple and keep it local: Who was on which side when communities were getting buried? What did she do, specifically, and what did she argue for? And if her answer is basically “everyone did it,” that’s the problem. New Hampshire doesn’t need another governor who talks tough on harm after the checks have cleared.