Photo of hater sign, courtesy the hater’s facebook.
Of the seven races they were watching, four were wins for the liberty activists, including two democrat incumbents, Tim O’Flaherty and Michael Garcia. In his race for Manchester state rep for Wards 4-7, incumbent democrat Tim O’Flaherty received a solid third place out of five contenders. The first and second placed opponents only got 26% each compared to O’Flaherty’s 24%. O’Flaherty says that local haters spent a fair amount of money to mail flyers to all registered dems, promoting three other candidates. However, O’Flaherty says that what happened to him was nothing compared to the all-out-attack on Michael Garcia.
Michael Garcia (no relation to US Senate candidate Marilinda Garcia) is a Keeniac-moved-to-Nashua, who, like O’Flaherty won his state rep seat originally in 2012 in Nashua’s Ward 7. Local haters were caught by surprise in 2012 and this year mobilized against him with large signs calling the democrat liberty activist who moved several years ago from Florida, a “phony”. Plus, they were distributing an attack flier at the polling site. Despite the desperate push against him, Garcia prevailed, beating the last place contender by 30 votes. Garcia received 16% putting him in third place out of four, with the fourth place person receiving 12%.
The other races that Miscellany Blue were watching included Elizabeth Edwards who received a solid first place finish in Manchester’s Ward 4! She scored 41% of the vote compared to the second place finisher’s 34%. Manchester’s Amanda Bouldin (the founder of Shire Sharing) also made it through in a close race for state rep in Ward 5 where she finished second with 25% – the runner-up had 22%.
In Keene, despite valiant efforts, James “Robin Hood” Cleaveland lost his race for state rep to political newcomer William Pearson, who in a Keene Sentinel interview claimed to be a “real democrat”, whatever that means. Pearson received 102 votes in Keene’s Ward 1 compared to Cleaveland’s 30 votes (23%). The good news out of this race is that turnout in Ward 1 was down from 9% in 2012 to 7% in 2014, meaning that either Cleaveland’s opposition did nothing to try to stop him, or if they did, any efforts they made to try to turn out the vote were total failures.
Also in Keene, Conan Salada was eliminated from the race for the two at-large state rep seats. Despite not campaigning at all, Salada received 140 votes (9%) compared to elected state rep and longtime politician Kris Roberts’ 906 votes (57%) and elected state rep Larry Phillips’ 533 votes (34%). Finally, in Grafton, Tom Ploszaj drew 86 votes (26%) to his opponent’s 246 (74%) in a state rep race.
Thank you to Miscellany Blue for bringing those races to my attention – what wonderful news! Plus, there were even more republican Free State Project participants (at least fifteen) who also made it through the primary and will, with their democrat brothers and sisters bring the message of liberty to the general election on November 4th.
Do you care about liberty in your lifetime? Are liberty-minded people winning elections where you currently are? If not, there are 101 reasons to move to New Hampshire, and their winnable political system is one of them. Please join the Free State Project and make the move ASAP! (As of this writing over 16,000 have joined the FSP and over 1,600 are already here.)
