The Free Press
Standing in line at the cafeteria of the New Hampshire statehouse, Jonah Wheeler is dressed in a tweed suit, his dreadlocks pulled back in a ponytail. Tall and lanky, with sharp cheekbones and a knockout smile, the Democrat could easily be a Ralph Lauren model. But, in fact, Wheeler is one of the youngest state representatives in the country. First elected in 2022 at the age of 19, he is now 22—and already making national waves.
That’s because on March 20, he voted in favor of a bill allowing New Hampshire businesses to ban transgender women from female spaces, such as bathrooms, locker rooms, sports teams, and prisons. Before casting his vote, Wheeler declared that “the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party on this issue has left us where we can’t have nuanced discussions. And women are being silenced in this conversation.”
Swift backlash ensued.
Wheeler told me that more than 100 of the 177 Democrats in the chamber walked out in protest. He added that some stayed behind to heckle his decision, with one comparing the bill to bathroom bans faced by black people in the segregated South. (Wheeler is among the less than one percent of New Hampshire state legislators who is black.)
Over the last few weeks, Wheeler said, he’s been called a “Nazi,” a “fascist,” a “transphobe,” and a “puppet of the right.” At an angry town hall, Wheeler’s own high school art teacher said, “I don’t know how you sleep at night.” She added: “I proudly voted for you and I am ashamed at what you have done out in the world.”
The bill will advance to the state senate, and it is expected to be signed by New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Kelly Ayotte.
But Wheeler seemed relaxed as he sat down for lunch and told me how he came to be seen as an enemy by his own party. “There are people out there who don’t want to be labeled as transphobic—and they aren’t. People who believe, ‘live and let live,’ who also believe that women’s spaces should be for women. And that position needed to be said by a Democrat.”
“The party has moved to this place where ‘You have to agree with me or you’re the devil,’ ” he added. “That’s not a winning message.”
Wheeler said the furor over the bathroom bill shows how much Democrats have lost touch with the average voter. “Here they are attacking me as a puppet of the right because I disagree with them on one bill.” But most of his colleagues “know nothing about the reality of the people of the state of New Hampshire and what they’re going through, what it means to not have heat in your house, what it means to lose your electricity on the flick of a dime, at 11:30 in the middle of the week.
“There are very few people who are poor in this caucus, very few people who know what it’s like to be poor.”
Wheeler, on the other hand, knows exactly what it’s like.
Born in Keene, New Hampshire, a one-hour drive from the state capital of Concord, Wheeler and his younger sister were raised by their white single mother, who “was an old-school lefty. She was anti-war. She was pro–organic food. She was pro just being in harmony with the planet we live on.”
Wheeler said his mom once ran a taco truck, which she used to park at the bottom of ski runs—but, in 2008, she lost their home and moved the family into a tent on a commune. After that, they went to Seattle for a brief stay with his grandparents, and Wheeler first met his father—a Gambian immigrant who still lives in the city.
When Wheeler was in grade school, his mom moved the family back to New Hampshire, where they finally settled in a basement rental apartment in the affluent town of Peterborough, where fewer than 1 percent of residents are black.
“That’s kind of the whole story of my childhood,” he said. “We had this very good group of people. . . that kept my mom going and kept us fed.”
At 14, Wheeler volunteered for Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and found himself swept up in the national progressive movement. “When Bernie Sanders got on the stage in 2015 and said, ‘Are you ready for a revolution?’ he was talking about an economic revolution, not a revolution of social values,” he told me.
After he graduated from high school in 2021, Wheeler launched his own campaign for the statehouse. “I had two state representatives. And at the time, I thought to myself, Where are they in the community? I didn’t feel the passion in the legislature that I needed to feel given the challenges the state was facing. And when you see something going wrong, you have a moral obligation to yourself to get it done.”
Wheeler said he didn’t even consider going to college, and that he learned how to give speeches by watching YouTube videos of other politicians. At the podium, he sounds eerily like Barack Obama—with a deep voice and a slow, deliberate delivery. But when I asked if he picked up any tips from Obama, he just laughed.
“Maybe subconsciously,” he said.
Legislators in New Hampshire are paid only $100 a year, which means most members of the state house are either retired or independently wealthy. Wheeler, meanwhile, still lives in the same apartment he has shared with his mom for seven years, and told me he scrapes by with odd jobs like landscaping.
And every Tuesday, he goes to a church community dinner to meet with his constituents, but also because “I could use the free meal.”
When I joined him for dinner at the most recent one, he displayed an Obama-style charisma with the public. “I could listen to him talk for hours and hours and hours,” one elderly woman told me. A Democrat named Cindy gushed as she talked about Wheeler’s recent vote on the bathroom bill. “It shows me he is going to stand up for what he believes in,” she said, “and not just stay within political lines.”
New Hampshire is a firmly purple state, although its citizens have narrowly voted for Democratic presidents since 2004. But the 2024 election was a disaster for the Democrats in the state, as Republicans swept the New Hampshire senate, house, and governor’s mansion.
Donald Trump, Wheeler admitted, “is the greatest showman this country has ever seen.” And the Democrats “play right into his hands. Rather than debate him on the merits of his ideas, they treat him like a demagogue, and that allows him to act like a demagogue.”
And, he said, he isn’t against Trump’s tariffs. “Unlike my Democratic friends, I do agree that the tariffs are a part of a larger strategy to reinvigorate American jobs. I think we’ve allowed ourselves to be completely undercut by other countries for a long time in the name of free trade.”
But he doesn’t trust Trump to follow through on his promise to help blue-collar workers. “The way we measure the economy is through the stock portfolios of the rich. It’s through the GDP, the gross domestic product, how much output we’re having. This doesn’t measure people’s everyday life, and that’s a problem.”
Now Wheeler is working hard to build back his party by focusing on kitchen table proposals designed to help the working class, such as Medicare for All, an increased minimum wage, and higher tax caps on Social Security. This session, he has already co-sponsored 32 bills—Wheeler says that compares to an average of one or two for his colleagues each session. And he’s showing no signs of straying from his independent voting record. He told me he voted against a gun control bill that was “poorly written,” which led state Democrats to kick him off the Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety. He also voted against gender-affirming surgery for minors, and was one of five state Democrats to support a Republican-led “parental bill of rights” law.
As we strolled the hallways of the statehouse, Wheeler admired the portraits of New Hampshire politicians on the walls, and I asked him if he ever dreams of being governor one day—or making it all the way to D.C.
“Every politician has those ambitions, I guess,” he replied, “but you don’t make any money at this place.”
“But,” Wheeler added, as he shot me a cheeky grin, “I do think the house needs a very strong speaker.”
“What do you think?” he asked. “Should I run?”
When Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance, went to The Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C., on March 13 they were hoping, like all parents of three young children, to have a night out. They didn’t expect to get heckled.