When New Hampshire abolished the death penalty on Thursday, the reaction to the news—at least nationally—was rather muted. Here was a New England state, after all, whose machinery of death had rusted long ago. “This debate has been largely symbolic, because New Hampshire has neither an active death penalty system nor any executions on the horizon,” The Washington Post reported. “The state has only one person on death row … and last carried out an execution in 1939.”

It is true that New Hampshire never had much use for capital punishment. Since its first use in 1734, New Hampshire has executed only 24 people. But there is greater significance here than it seems. For starters, New Hampshire joins a growing trend. Now, since 2007, seven states have abolished capital punishment by legislative action, and three by judicial decree. (Nebraska abolished it legislatively, but voters subsequently reinstated it in a referendum.) Four other states have a moratorium in place preventing anyone from being executed. This period has been one of the most successful in the modern history of death penalty abolitionism.

And the politics of New Hampshire are not those of, say, Massachusetts. The state—whose official motto, emblazoned on license plates, is “Live Free or Die”—was a Republican stronghold until the early 1990s, and retains a libertarian streak. While the state Senate and House are both controlled by Democrats, they needed votes from across the aisle to reach the two-thirds threshold to override Republican Governor Chris Sununu.

There are thus important lessons from New Hampshire about how abolitionists can be successful across the country—namely, by shifting the grounds of the debate so as not to be painted as soft on crime or out of touch with mainstream American values.

Their success has its roots in a decades-long struggle. In 2000, both houses of the New Hampshire legislature voted to end the death penalty, only to have Democratic Governor Jeanne Shaheen veto the bill; the legislature failed to override her. Shaheen explained her decision by saying, “There are some murders that are so brutal and heinous that the death penalty is the only appropriate penalty.”