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The four Bedford town officials responsible for keeping 190 mishandled ballots a secret for nearly a year were defiant in the face of a “no confidence” vote Wednesday night, insisting they did the right thing by leaving town councilors and the public in the dark.

Town Manager Rick Sawyer, Town Clerk Sally Kellar, Town Moderator William Klein, and Assistant Town Moderator Brian Shaughnessy all narrowly survived a 4-3 vote on the “no-confidence” resolution.

The vote was the conclusion of a contentious hearing during which Shaughnessy acknowledged he — and not the Secretary of State’s or Attorney General’s Office — was the source of the legal strategy not to inform the town council of the uncounted ballots from the 2020 general election. The year-long delay and bureaucratic secrecy have been seized upon by supporters of former President Donald  Trump’s unfounded “stolen election” conspiracy as proof that the 2020 election results are suspect.

Wednesday night’s meeting was the first time town officials or town councilors had discussed the ballot fiasco in public. Only Klein and Shaughnessy were on hand to answer questions. Town Clerk Sally Kellar was attending an out-of-town event and chose not to participate remotely.

Town Councilor Kelleigh Murphy did participate via telephone, but the distance didn’t prevent her from making her anger felt inside Town Hall.

“You had a duty to tell the council. It is absolutely deplorable that this information was kept from us. I don’t think anyone who knew about it at the time and kept it secret should be involved in town government,” Murphy said. “I feel very strongly about that.”

Everyone agreed the mishandling of 190 absentee ballots was a simple mistake. A tray of uncounted ballots was erroneously placed among ballots that had been counted. The anger, from elected officials and the public, was in response to the decision of both state and local officials to keep the mistake a secret until just weeks ago.

The already-troubling story took a bizarre turn when Kellar and Klein mailed a letter last month claiming the Attorney General’s Office ordered them to hide the mistake from the public.

The Attorney General’s Office responded with a letter of its own contradicting the claim and putting the burden back on Bedford’s town officials.

“Bedford election officials raised concerns with this notification and asked (us) not to notify voters,” the Attorney General’s general counsel Anne Edwards told NHJournal. “I would never say that about an elected official lied,” Edwards said of the letter from Keller and Klein. “We felt it was important to issue a clarification because we were concerned about the accuracy of some of the statements.”

But Wednesday night, Shaugnessy admitted he was the source of the strategy of silence, not state officials.

“Our decision that was made at the beginning [November 2020] was that until the Attorney General’s Office investigates and speaks to us, we shouldn’t be talking to anyone. The Attorney General’s investigation is a criminal investigation. Sally and Bill could be subject to criminal penalties, including a felony. I didn’t think it was a good idea for them to talk to anybody.”

But, Murphy responded, Shaughnessy isn’t the town attorney. “Did you consult with the town attorney or just give out haphazard legal advice?”

“I gave out haphazard legal advice,” Shaughnessy replied. “I did not check with the town attorney.”

Shaughnessy also didn’t explain what possible felony the town Clerk or Moderator could have committed by telling voters about the uncounted ballots, a claim several New Hampshire attorneys found laughable.

Councilor Denise Ricciardi, who also serves as a state Senator and whose election was subject to a recount that would have involved the mishandled ballots, asked Shaughnessy where the Secretary of State or Attorney General got the authority to order the town’s elected officials to keep the ballot screw-up a secret. “Is there a law or a statute?”

After a long pause, Shaughnessy acknowledged: “I am not aware of any law or statute that allows them to order people to keep things quiet.”

In the end, both Klein and Shaunessy were defiant, stating flatly that they don’t answer to the council and are free to deny them information about elections if they choose.

“We believe we did the right thing,” Klein said. “We report to the Secretary of State. We do not report to the Town Council.”

After that, it became clear there would be a no-confidence vote called by Murphy.

“The town council is the town governing body. Rick Sawyer had a duty to let the council know what was going on,” Murphy said. “I understand why people lose faith in government. This never should have happened. It is completely unacceptable.”

Both Murphy and councilor  Bill Duschatko expressed their disappointment with the defiant stance of the town officials, who continued to insist they did nothing wrong.

“There is no remorse there,”  Bill Duschatko said. “It’s just another day of doing business.”

Bill Duschatko, Murphy, and Ricciardi cast the three votes in favor of the “no confidence” resolution. Councilors Bill Carter, Lori Radke, Sue Thomas and Chairman David Gilbert voted against it.

Ray Chadwick of the Bedford Republican Committee was on hand. The committee has called for a full investigation and, he told NHJournal, Wednesday night’s hearing fell far short of that. “We still need a full and thorough accounting of what happened. We did not get one tonight,” Chadwick said.

EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this article misidentified one of the members of the town council who voted against the “no confidence” resolution as Melissa Stephens. It was Bill Carter. We regret the error.

More than a year after the ballots of 190 Bedford voters were erroneously left uncounted, Bedford will hold its first public hearing on the “ballot fiasco” during this Wednesday night’s town council meeting. The existence of the ballots was kept secret by Bedford town officials, including Town Clerk Sally Kellar, Town Moderator William Klein, and other town officials.

NHJournal was the first media outlet to report on the ballot mishandling, nearly a year after the 190 absentee ballots went uncounted on Election Day 2020.

The public notice for this Wednesday’s Bedford Town Council meeting includes the line: “Discussion of November 2020 election ballot matter.” No other information is included. The public is welcome to attend and ask questions.

Town officials declined to respond to requests for comment from NHJournal, as they have largely done since the story first broke. However, state Sen. Denise Ricciardi, who also serves on the council, did release a brief statement.

“I am very happy to see this issue is going to be addressed in public. As a public servant and elected official, transparency has always been very important to me,” Ricciardi said. “I’m glad this is on the agenda because answers are needed. I just want the truth — why was this kept from both the public and the town council for a year?”

While there is general agreement on what happened to the ballots during the 2020 general election — a tray of uncounted absentee ballots was mistakenly placed among those already counted — it’s the behavior of town officials after the error was discovered that has angered many Bedford residents. It has also fed suspicions among some Granite Staters who are already concerned about ballot security.

Rather than publicly acknowledging the mistake at the time, Town Manager Kellar and Moderator Klein chose to reach out to the secretary of state’s office, which then contacted the Attorney General’s Office. Town officials, including Deputy Clerk Gloria MacVane, Town Manager Rick Sawyer, and Assistant Moderator Brian Shaughnessy, kept the disenfranchising of Bedford voters a secret even as the secretary of state was conducting a recount of the local state Senate race the following week.

Secretary of State Bill Gardner told NHJournal he was unaware of the ballots during the recount as well.

In a letter mailed to the disenfranchised voters on October 30, Kellar and Klein blamed their secrecy on the Attorney General’s Office.

“The attorney general requested some information from us and we submitted it on November 19, 2020. We were told not to discuss this with anyone, not even the town council, because it was a pending investigation,” they claimed.

The Attorney General’s Office responded by saying that claim was untrue, and that it first learned town officials were blaming the office for the secrecy from NHJournal.

“Our Office learned of your October 28 letter concerning uncounted absentee ballots through [NHJournal’s coverage] on Saturday, October 30,” Anne M. Edwards, the attorney general’s general counsel said in a letter to town officials. “We are concerned, in particular, by three statements in your letter: 1) that the Attorney General’s Office instructed you not to tell anyone, including the Bedford Town Council, about the 190 uncounted absentee ballots; 2) that you made numerous attempts to obtain a resolution from our Office; and 3) that our October 21 closure letter was essentially the first explanation from us as to the necessary remediation plan.

“These statements are inaccurate,” Edwards wrote.

Bedford town officials have insisted to NHJournal the Attorney General’s Office was behind the delay, while that office has communications showing it was pressuring the town to make the information public. Both sides agree the process largely came to a halt in the lead up to the September 7, 2021 special election to fill a state House seat vacancy.

The winner of that special election, Rep. Catherine Rombeau, joined fellow Bedford Democrat Rep. Sue Mullen in a statement calling for a full investigation.

“We are perplexed by the length of time it took to conduct the investigation and conflicting accounts from local officials, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, and the New Hampshire secretary of state’s office,” the Democrats said. “We call for a thorough and transparent explanation of the timeline of events, decisions made throughout this process, and communications between these three groups. It is of utmost importance for Bedford voters to know these facts.”

The Bedford Republican Committee echoed those sentiments.

“The integrity of our elections, and the reliable processing of ballots, is critical to maintaining the allegiance of citizens to our system of government. It is of utmost importance, then, that we respect the efforts of these 190 voters to participate in the election. They and the public deserve a thorough investigation and determination of why their votes were not counted and were kept secret for nearly a year,” the committee said in a statement.

Meanwhile, nobody has answered the question many citizens have asked: Why didn’t some elected official at the state or local level simply make the error public? While the Attorney General’s Office as a policy doesn’t comment regarding ongoing investigations, no law or policy prevented either former Attorney General Gordon MacDonald or current Attorney General John Formella from telling the public about the matter

And even if the Attorney General’s Office did ask town officials to keep the information secret, the elected officials chosen by the voters of Bedford were not legally bound by that request.

“I just feel so angry,” said Shannon McGinley, whose two sons were among the 190 disenfranchised voters. “I understand accidents happen. But it seems that someone is lying and that there was a cover-up. And that really makes me mad.”

A year after the election that swept President Donald Trump out of office and New Hampshire Republicans into power, some 190 ballots cast by Bedford voters remain uncounted, NHJournal has learned.

The misplaced absentee ballots, which were discovered just days after the November 3, 2020 election, were kept secret from Town Council and the voters impacted for a year.

Town officials claim in a letter sent to the disenfranchised voters they kept the blunder secret under orders from the state Attorney General’s office, then headed by AG Gordon MacDonald.

The AG’s office disputes that claim.

“In reviewing this matter, this Office concludes that these 190 absentee ballots would not have impacted the outcome of any of the races on the ballot in Bedford during the 2020 general election,” Myles Matteson of the Attorney General’s office wrote Bedford town officials in a letter dated October 21, 2021. A copy of that letter is being sent to the 190 or so residents who cast votes last November by Bedford Town Clerk Sally Kellar and Town Moderator William Klein.

Those ballots remain unopened and uncounted.

According to Matteson, the existence of the uncast absentee ballots was discovered soon after the election.

“Deputy Clerk [Gloria] Mac Vane was reconciling the number of ballots distributed with the number of ballots cast. During this process, she discovered that there was a difference of approximately 190 fewer ballots cast than the number distributed. The amount of absentee ballots recorded received was 7,917. The total number of absentee ballots recorded cast was 7,727,” Matteson wrote.

“On November 8, 2020, Deputy Clerk MacVane attributed the cause of this discrepancy to a mistake made during the processing of absentee ballots on election day [sic].”

Because the ballots were kept secret, they were also kept out of the Bedford recount in the state Senate District 9 race between then-incumbent Jeanne Dietsch and newly-elected Republican Denise Ricciardi. That recount was held on November 1o, after the uncast ballots were discovered.

Dietsch called off the recount when the results began to benefit Ricciardi. Ricciardi’s official victory as reported by the Secretary of State’s office was 17,920 to 17,511, but that doesn’t include changes discovered in the uncompleted recount.

Why weren’t the ballots simply counted on November 8? Why was their existence kept secret? Why weren’t they used in the recount?

Kellar and Klein point the finger at the Secretary of State and Attorney General.

“When we discovered [the uncast ballots], we immediately reported it to the New Hampshire Secretary of State,” they wrote in their letter to the impacted Bedford voters. “We were advised to keep these ballots secure and to wait further instructions before taking any further action. The following week, we were informed that the matter had been referred to the NH Attorney General’s office for investigation. The Attorney General requested some information from us and we submitted it on November 19, 2020.

“We were told not to discuss this with anyone, not even the town council because it was a pending investigation,” Kellar and Klein said.

Officials in the AG’s office say they never instructed the town to keep the incident secret from either the Town Council or the general public.

This story is unfolding with the ongoing debate over the legitimacy of the 2020 election in the background. Political insiders with knowledge of the events speculate that decisions made by the Attorney General’s Office may have been influenced by events in Windham when voting machine error caused a significant error in the first results reported. Supporters of Trump’s frequently-repeated (and frequently debunked) claims the election was stolen due to widespread election fraud have used the Windham incident to support their calls for a statewide election audit in New Hampshire.

“The Attorney General’s Office saw this unfolding and they didn’t want to add fuel to the fire,” one source suggested.

MacDonald is currently serving as Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

NOTE: This story has been updated to include new information revealed by the Attorney General’s office, and later confirmed by town officials.

Three months ago this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren looked like the 2020 frontrunner so many Democrats dreamed she could be. After months of languishing in the New Hampshire polls — a must-win state for the Massachusetts senator — she had roared back to the top of the pack. She was leading in Iowa, too, five points ahead of second-place Joe Biden. She had even managed to raise more money than Bernie Sanders in the previous quarter.

Today? Warren is fading — and fast.

The former frontrunner is in fourth place in both Iowa and New Hampshire. In the Granite State, her support has fallen by a jaw-dropping 50 percent. In a sure sign that the campaign is struggling, the Warren camp is celebrating the endorsement of former HUD Secretary Julian Castro as a big win.

The Washington Post referred to it as a “timely boost.” The New York Times says the endorsement “could help Ms. Warren reignite excitement at a critical moment.”

But in the last New Hampshire poll taken before he dropped out, Castro was polling at 0 percent.

How did Warren, a one-time Democratic rock star who seems to fit her party’s 2020 mood so well, wind up trailing a relatively unknown Midwestern mayor in her own New Hampshire back yard?

Some campaigns struggle with message. That’s Sen. Cory Booker, who’s offering an optimistic vision of unity and partisan reconciliation to a Democratic base that’s ready to rumble with the Republicans.

Some campaigns have structural problems: Not enough money, too little name ID, no natural political base. Would governors like John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee have made good nominees? We’ll never know.

And then there are the campaigns facing the most daunting obstacle of all: Their own candidate. (See “O’Rourke, Beto.”)

The first two problems can be fixed. The last one can’t.  And every day the evidence builds that the Liz Warren campaign’s biggest problem, is Liz Warren.

“She got an authenticity problem,” one DC political operative told NHJournal. “It’s the one thing about her that’s real.”

The authenticity issue appeared again this week when Warren amended her views on the U.S. military strike that killed Iranian Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani, after blowback from progressives. Her first reaction was to declare Soleimani a “murderer responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans.”

Within 24 hours she was calling him a “senior government official,” who had been “assassinated,” and she repeatedly refused to concede that Soleimani is a terrorist. (He was declared the leader of a terrorist organization by both the Bush and Obama administrations.) Rather than celebrating his demise, Warren was suggesting that Soleimani only died because Trump is facing impeachment.

“Wow. We went from ‘murderer’ to ‘wag the dog’ in the space of a few days,” quipped CNN’s liberal commentator Chris Cillizza.

Why the shift? Because progressives like Sanders were denouncing the Trump administration’s action as illegitimate, and were uncomfortable with criticism of Soleimani that might support Trump’s case.

“Given where she is in the race, Warren simply could not withstand that sort of criticism from the left,” Cillizza wrote.

The Soleimani story is small potatoes. But it’s part of a growing list — her claims of Native American heritage, her debunked story about being fired over a pregnancy, her misleading statements about her children attending public school and her backtracking on Medicare For All — that suggests Warren is willing to say whatever it takes to get elected.

“She started off as a candidate with a strong message: ‘I want to fight for you, I’m going to take on corruption.’ She sounded like someone who knew exactly what she wanted to do,” Democratic strategist Joel Payne told NHJournal.

“Now she sounds like a candidate who’s still looking for a message, and that’s not good.”

Some Democrats disagree. “I don’t think the Native American thing or these other stories are hurting her. I think she’s got an explanation for all of them,” said Bob Shrum, director of USC’s Center for the Political Future and a veteran of multiple presidential primaries. “I think it’s one thing: Medicare For All.”

That’s a common explanation for Warren’s weakness. Democrats and pundits point to the release of Warren’s poorly-received $52 trillion healthcare plan as the moment her campaign began to founder. “It’s not true that New Hampshire Democrats don’t like Warren,” one senior Democratic Granite State source told NHJournal. “They just hate her Medicare For All plan.”

But even the Medicare issue highlights Warren’s authenticity problem. One reason she was forced to release the politically-damaging specifics of her plan was because she’d spent weeks refusing to say whether her proposal would require a middle-class tax hike. She gave so many obviously evasive answers that late-night TV host Stephen Colbert begged her on the air to find a better response.

Warren supporters are quick to suggest that she’s the victim of misogyny, that conversations about authenticity and likeability are just code words for being uncomfortable with a woman nominee. But that hardly makes sense in New Hampshire, where three of the four Democrats in the congressional delegation are women, the two previous governors were women and where Hillary Clinton won both the 2008 primary and the 2016 general election.

These are voters who are more than willing to vote for a woman. At the moment, however, they appear reluctant to vote for Liz Warren.

And that’s a ‘candidate’ problem.

To some observers, Joe Biden’s climate proposal announced in New Hampshire on Tuesday is a rebuttal to previous reports that he would seek the “middle ground” on climate policy. Instead, Biden’s $5 trillion plan for tax hikes, tariffs, and government enforcement mechanisms is now the “middle ground” in the current climate debate inside a Democratic Party that has shifted well to the Left.

Progressives sense the momentum they’ve seized on the climate issue. Just hours after Biden released his plan, the activist group Sunrise Movement sent out an email taking credit for Biden’s decision to abandon his moderate stance on climate. “The Movement leads, Biden follows,” the email began.

“Last month, when Joe Biden’s advisers said he would find a ‘middle ground’ on climate policy, we made clear that was unacceptable.

“We sparked national outrage and this morning we saw that pay off: Biden put out a comprehensive climate plan that calls for a ‘Clean Energy Revolution’… Journalists are also now reporting that Joe Biden will sign the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge.”

Biden’s published policy is certainly more aggressive than his campaign rhetoric. Among other things, “The Biden Plan For A Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice” calls for:

• A 100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050
• $1.7 trillion in new federal spending
• Tax hikes on businesses and corporations
• ‘Tariffs’ on foreign countries who don’t take sufficient action on climate
• Some form of “price or tax on carbon dioxide pollution” by 2025 to raise energy costs.

“In some ways, Mr. Biden’s plan goes even further than the Green New Deal,” according to the New York Times.

Not to be outdone, on the same day Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed $2 trillion dollars in direct spending for her “Green Apollo Program” and “Green Marshall Plan.”

Meanwhile, former congressman Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.) has called for $5 trillion over 10 years to combat climate change, and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has a $9 trillion plan to cut emissions.

Environmental activists in New Hampshire certainly like what they’re seeing. ECHO Action NH has been pushing candidates at the state and national level to reject contributions from Big Oil. “Any candidate who is unwilling to extract themselves from their relationship with the fossil fuel industry will not meet our high level of expectations for climate action candidates,” Stephanie Scherr, the group’s executive director, tells NHJournal. “ECHO Action has been meeting with presidential candidates regularly. We have been pleased with our conversations with many candidates whose messages are in line with our own.”

Embracing Green New Deal politics promoted by groups like ECHO Action (Biden calls the GND  “a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face”) may appeal to affluent, suburban liberals, but working-class Democrats are starting to pick up on the inevitable impact these policies would have on labor unions.

Which raises the question: Why?

Why has Biden, who has worked so hard and had so much success as the moderate alternative in the progressive-dominated 2020 field, allowed himself to be pushed so far left on climate policy?

Coming to New Hampshire to announce his proposal, for example, is problematic given the state already pays some of the highest energy prices in the country. A kilowatt of electricity is about 60 percent more expensive in the Granite State than the national average.

In addition, a recent NHJournal poll asked New Hampshire voters how much more in utility costs they are willing to pay to achieve climate policy goals. Almost half said they were unwilling to pay even a single penny more, while just 17 percent would  pay $50 or more a month to fight global warming.

Is this really the issue where Biden should plant his far-Left flag?

John Podesta, founder of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, thinks so. His organization recently released a poll showing that climate change is a high-priority issue for Democratic primary voters. “[Our] polling demonstrates that voters will demand that the Democratic nominee make climate action a top priority and key pillar of her or his platform,” Podesta said.

Morning Consult polling April 2019

Perhaps. But Gallup has been polling Americans on their most important issues for years and in May 2019, just 4 percent of voters ranked it as number one. An April Morning Consult poll of Democratic primary voters found just 8 percent said climate policy was their highest priority.

Green energy proposals like Biden’s have high price tags, raise serious questions about their economic impact and threaten every homeowner with higher energy bills.  In exchange, they motive what appears to be a small segment of the overall electorate, one that’s already solidly in the Democratic camp.

Biden may have let himself be pushed into a corner.

Forget “Pocahontas,” President Trump. The nickname most likely to upend Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential hopes?

“Rachel Dolezal.”

Senator Warren got stuck with it in the worst possible way: Live, on national radio, with millions of African-Americans listening and, presumably, laughing. It wasn’t a political hit from a partisan opponent; it was an observation from a morning-drive talk host who appeared genuinely puzzled by Warren’s story of why she kept calling herself an American Indian well into her fifties.

Friday morning the Massachusetts senator appeared on the Breakfast Club, a popular radio show heard on stations across the country.  One of the hosts, Charlamagne tha God (“I bust Stupid Dope Moves and Bomb Atomically”) has more than two million Twitter followers. The rest of the crew, DJ Envy and Angela Yee, add another 1.6 million or so. Not surprisingly, Democratic candidates for president who need support among black voters are desperate to do the show: Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg have all made appearances.

What makes the show work, and what worked against Warren, is that it’s three smart-but-typical people having the same conversations normal people have, as opposed to a stilted political roundtable where for far too many journalists, the real audience is other journalists.

And so Charlemagne the God (CTG) asked the questions about Warren’s problematic Native American claims that regular Americans wonder about but, not elite journalists.

“Why did you do that?” he wanted to know, specifically referring to Warren repeatedly declaring herself an “American Indian” (her words) in official documents throughout her career, including while a Harvard professor.

“It’s what I believed,” Warren answered. “It’s what I learned from my family.”

And then the roundhouse kick: “When did you find out you weren’t?”

Warren sat stunned. She stumbled. She never answered the question, instead offered a telling non sequitur: “I’m not a person of color.”

The puzzled look on CTG’s face said it all. Of course Elizabeth Warren isn’t a “person of color.” Who would look at her and think she was? “When did you find out that you weren’t” is really just another way of asking “What made you think you were?”

This has always been the unanswerable question for Warren, a white woman who grew up in the suburbs and, by her own admission, never lived a single moment of her life as a Native American.  Whatever the American Indian experience is, it isn’t hers.

As much as she tries to focus on the red herring of heritage and family lore, the real question is what made Elizabeth Warren ever think– for the purposes of official identity, legal documents, and professional status–that she was a person of color? And if she knew what everyone else knew (that she wasn’t), why did she keep claiming it?

There are millions of white Americans who’ve been told they have a black or Hispanic or Native American somewhere in their family tree, or who ping higher than 20 percent in a racial minority category on a ’23 and Me’ test.  But unlike Liz Warren, they’ve never filled out a form claiming minority status.

Which led CTG to his devastating verdict: “You’re kind of like the original Rachel Dolezal, a little bit.”

Trump’s “Pocahontas” line is merely a lame joke. (Actually, it’s not even that. The real joke is the “Fauxcahontas” nickname she earned during her first Senate campaign.) “Rachel Dolezal,” on the other hand, is a description. It’s an indictment of Warren’s difficult-to-defend behavior regarding her identity.

In a political moment when voters crave authenticity, Elizabeth Warren may or may not be able to pass herself off as a Native American. But she has no hope of passing herself off as authentic.

Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld told a politically-savvy New Hampshire audience that he is forming an exploratory committee to challenge President Trump in the 2020 GOP primary to rescue the party from “Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Our President is simply too unstable to carry out the duties of the highest executive office,” Weld told the Politics and Eggs breakfast in Bedford, NH—a must-stop on the presidential campaign trail through the Granite State. “They say the President has captured the Republican party in Washington. As the president might say: ‘Sad.’ But even sadder is that many Republicans exhibit all the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with their captor.”

For Weld, who last held elected office in 1997, riding to the rescue of the GOP is an unexpected role.  His most recent foray into American politics was as the Libertarian Party’s nominee for vice president, and he has long been at odds with the party’s conservative base.  In fact, Weld often notes that the Gary Johnson/Bill Weld ticket in 2016 took votes by a three-to-one margin from otherwise GOP voters. “A Libertarian vote was a protest vote or change vote in 2016. Those votes were going to go to Donald J. Trump not Hillary Clinton,” Weld said.

But Weld has returned to the GOP  because, he argues, Trump has put the country “in grave peril.”

Weld began his remarks to the crowd of New England business people and political insiders with a withering critique of President Trump, calling him a “schoolyard bully” who “virtually spat upon the idea that we should have freedom of the press,” and who “goes out of his way to insult and even humiliate ore democratic allies.”

“The situation is not yet hopeless,” Weld said, “but we do need a mid-course correction. We need to install leaders who know that character counts.

“As we move towards 2020 election we must uphold difference between the open heart, open mind and open handedness of patriotism versus the hard heart, closed mind and clenched fist of nativism and nationalism,” Weld said.

Weld laid out a series of his own policy proposals that were commonly heard in GOP circles in the 1990s but are rarely advocated today: a 19 percent flat income tax, baseline budgeting for the federal government and individual retirement accounts for “millennials who may never receive the benefits of Social Security.”  But it wasn’t Weld’s policy proposals that generated the massive media attention his speech received. It was the premise of a primary challenge against President Trump.

Weld repeatedly suggested that other candidates might enter the 2020 race, both as third-party candidates and as Republicans, which he clearly saw as a positive development.  When asked if his entrance into the GOP primary “would make the dam break,” Weld answered “If I get traction and cracks begin to appear, you may see a gold rush.”

This possibility—that Weld’s candidacy will open the door to a more traditional Republican challenger– may pose Weld’s most significant danger to Trump.  Trump’s poll numbers, both nationally and in key early primary states like New Hampshire, have actually risen in recent months.  Emerson College’s Director of Polling Spencer Kimball tells InsideSources that “We were just in the field in Iowa testing Trump vs. [Ohio Gov. John] Kasich and Trump was up 90-10 percent. It’s not going to be any easier there for Bill Weld.”

And in New Hampshire, which border’s Weld’s home state of Massachusetts, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is 82 percent, and his approval among all Granite State voters has risen from 36 percent a year ago to 43 percent today in the latest NHIOP poll. When asked if they would encourage Trump to run for re-election in 2020, 77 percent of New Hampshire Republicans said yes.

Which may explain why multiple Republican strategists told InsideSources that they see little if any path forward for Weld in the Republican primary (“He misses on some of the attributes I think are needed to run a successful national effort,” New Hampshire-based GOP consultant Dave Carney tells InsideSources.)

Pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson of Echelon Insights says “Bill Weld is fighting an uphill battle on two fronts. First is that President Trump remains quite popular within the party, and rank-and-file Republican voters do not want to see a primary battle that could impair President Trump in a general election against a Democrat.

“Second is that Weld’s particular brand of Republicanism is now very rare in the party. Lots of voters in America are socially and fiscally progressive or are socially and fiscally conservative. But among those who ‘mix it up’ a bit, you find more people who are fiscally progressive but socially conservative – the opposite of a sort of ‘New England Republican’ formula.”

And even if the GOP base were in the mood to make a change, it’s hard to imagine the Republican Party of 2020 embracing Weld, with his history of pro-abortion and pro-amnesty policies, and his support for liberal politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

“The Republican Party is a big tent, but someone who endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 as the Libertarian Party’s Vice Presidential nominee really needs to think about how welcome he is in the Republican Party,” said Steve Stepanek, chairman of the New Hampshire GOP.

“I don’t expect his campaign to get very far among Republican primary voters.”

Weld announced that he plans to stump across New Hampshire and other states in coming weeks, but emphasized that he has not made a final decision to run.

“If people won’t buy dog food, then I won’t advance,” Weld conceded. “That’s how it is in showbiz. If the dogs won’t eat the dog food, it doesn’t matter how good the promoter is.”

Is your cheeseburger an endangered species?

Reports of the death of America’s beef and dairy industries at the hands of the Green New Deal (GND) may be exaggerated, but both farmers and their Philly steak ‘n cheese eating fans have reason to be concerned about policies embraced by progressive Democrats.

Claims by some opponents of the #GreenNewDeal that it would mean an end of the cattle industry in America are inaccurate—for the simple reason that the GND doesn’t offer any specific policies. The legislation actually filed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) is merely a resolution declaring general goals and directions, not specific laws and regulations. On this issue the resolution  merely calls for “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible.”

However, the FAQ handout from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that originally accompanied the proposal was much more aggressive and, many farmers fear, far more accurate about the GND’s goals.

It demands a “a greenhouse gas free food system,” and bemoans the fact that GND doesn’t call for an end to all GHG emissions because “we aren’t sure we can get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.”

Supporters of AOC, as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is known, argue that this FAQ document was mistakenly released, a work in progress, and doesn’t reflect the immediate goals of the Green New Deal effort. However, what’s undeniable is that cows—and their gaseous emissions—are in the crosshairs of the climate change activists’ agenda.  They have to be.

If advocates of the Green New Deal are serious about getting close to zero emissions, or even a net-zero target using offsets, they have to confront the amount of greenhouse gases coming from livestock. In the US, agriculture is responsible for about 9 percent of our emissions. But according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock worldwide account for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gases. That’s more than the entire transportation sector (14 percent).  Plus, climate activists argue that methane—the gas emitted by cows—is more dangerous than carbon dioxide, trapping up to 28 times more heat.

It’s simply impossible to move forward on the GND agenda without a drastic impact on cattle-intensive industries like beef and dairy.

And so Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) has legislation targeting concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) for the alleged damage they are doing to the climate.  “I want to talk about the impact that CAFOs have on the environment and what we can do to mitigate it,” said Blumenauer. “We shouldn’t be incentivizing them through programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program; we should be forcing them to pay for the damage they cause to the environment and public health.”

Eric Holt-Gimenez says the problem is “industrial overproduction of food—the root cause of agricultural pollution, food waste and greenhouse gas emissions.”  To discourage over-production, he suggests a “guaranteed minimum price for farmers,” essentially an agricultural minimum wage paid by consumers to prop up inefficient, smaller farming operations.

And New Jersey Senator Cory Booker—a #GreenNewDeal supporter and candidate for president– stated flatly that the “devastating impact” of emissions from the meat industry must end.

“The tragic reality is this planet simply can’t sustain billions of people consuming industrially produced animal agriculture because of environmental impact,” Booker, a vegan, told VegNews magazine. “It’s just not possible.”

The media are downplaying the potential impact on the agricultural sector from the Democrats’ newest policy initiative, accusing Republicans of exaggerating the case or conflating idealistic goals with realistic policies. But ranchers and farmers have gotten the message.

“You may think the #GreenNewDeal is some far out nutcase dream, but if you’re involved in agriculture you’d better view it as a threat to your entire way of life,” Texas rancher Casey Kimbrell tweeted.

Sara Place of the National Cattleman’s Beef Association says the Green New Deal “highlights the large divide between people that are interacting with the environment and growing food every day, and those that are concerned about environmental issues, but ignorant.”

And Kansas cattle rancher Brandi Buzzard Frobose has written an open letter to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez explaining that American ranches  “are producing beef in the United States more sustainably and efficiently than ever before – did you know that the U.S. produces nearly 20% of the world’s beef with only 9% of the world’s cattle?

“I beseech you to please have a conversation with your constituents and colleagues that have an agriculture background,” Frobose writes. “Cows are not the problem.”

But Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who represents Queens, New York, doesn’t have a lot of “constituents with an agricultural background.” Neither do many of the congressional co-sponsors of the GND who are from urban districts, like Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Boston and Ted Lieu of Los Angeles.  Ag jobs just aren’t a key part of their constituency.

For the Democrats running for president, however, the math is very different.  Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina all have significant agricultural interests.  According to Katie Olthoff of the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association, Iowa has the seventh largest inventory of cattle in the U.S. and “more feed yards than any other state.”

“We have a lot of relatively small ‘feeder farmers,’ as we call them,” Olthoff says, as opposed to the larger operations environmentalists tend to focus on.

At the Iowa State Dairy Association website, board president Larry Shover quotes a study reporting that Iowa’s 1,200 dairies – and 213,000 dairy cows—have an economic impact of over $4 billion dollars per year.

In New Hampshire, dairy products are a $50 million market and the single largest agricultural commodity in the state.  The dairy tradition is such an embedded part of the Granite State’s story that the industry promotes the “Ice Cream Trail” featuring local dairies and shops from Nashua up to the Great North Woods.

And the official state beverage of South Carolina?  Milk.

Still, virtually every nationally-known 2020 Democratic candidate has endorsed the #GreenNewDeal.  That’s going to present some interesting political calculations for Democrats in a 10-way  (or 15 or even 20-way?) race for their party’s nomination.

Even if the number of farmers in these early states is relatively small (fewer than 2 percent of Americans actually work on a farm), their effects on the economy are felt much more broadly. In addition, as support for the ethanol subsidy in Iowa over the decades shows, many voters have an emotional connection with their state’s farmers that gives their issues an outsized political impact.

“Iowa’s farms are family farms,  and so when Washington talks about America ‘getting out of the cattle business,’ it’s not just a job. It’s a family,” Olthoff told InsideSources.

“About 10 years ago, my husband and I made a huge investment in order to farm years ago. Our dream was to be able to raise our kids on a farm, to live in rural Iowa, to live this lifestyle. When I hear about proposals and regulations that threaten us, I do get emotional,” Olthoff said.

“This isn’t about shutting down an industry. It’s about a way of life.”

Or Biden-Baker (as in MA Gov. Charlie)? Or Beto and Ben Sasse? Or even a Trump-Tulsi Gabbard 2020 campaign? (Sorry, Mike Pence.)

That’s the argument the organization Unite America is making, and they believe a new poll of voters in First-in-the-Nation New Hampshire backs their claim.  According to their data, 61 percent of New Hampshire voters would like to see their party’s nominee reach across the aisle for a running mate.  “We found support among 67% of Democrats, 65% of independents, and 51% of Republicans,” they report.

America’s 2020 Presidential ticket?

The specific question: “How supportive would you be if your preferred presidential candidate chose a running mate of the opposite party to create a ‘Unity ticket’ for president and vice-president that could unite our divided country?”

Unite America’s mission to to lower the level of bipartisan rancor in America which, they believe, is undermining the health of our democracy. Nationally, they claim 43 Unite chapters, plus $3.5 million raised and 8 million votes for their candidates in November’s election. “In 2018, we saw the rise of a new movement in our politics that brought together an intellectual foundation, electoral infrastructure, national awareness, and a community of candidates, activists, and donors,” Unite America says in a statement.

Their poll also found that a majority of New Hampshire voters are open to supporting an independent presidential candidate in 2020 (56%) –– including 42% of Republicans, 58% of Democrats, and 68% of independents. These numbers don’t impress political pros, who know that while people say they’re open to an independent in theory, they tend to go straight back to their partisan corner once the campaign fighting starts.

Former Governors John Hickenlooper (D-CO) and John Kasich (R-OH)

In an op-ed at USA Today, Nick Troiano (former independent congressional candidate from Denver) and  Charles Wheelan (lecturer in public policy at Dartmouth College) write:

“Here’s one plausible scenario: former Republican governor John Kasich of Ohio and former Democratic governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado could both run through their party’s primaries with the intent of selecting the other as vice president should they win — an idea they have already flirted with.”

But is  this scenario truly “plausible?” Unite America’s own poll finds that only 39 percent of Americans feel left out or unrepresented by the current political parties. And, they report, “among those who feel politically homeless include 52% of independents, 44% of Republicans, and 17% of Democrats.” [emphasis added]

To many Republicans, a call for “bipartisanship” sounds more like an attempt to split their party along conservative/moderate lines. If fewer than one in five Democrats are dissatisfied, why would they abandon their party rather than embrace total victory over what they perceive as the party of Trump?

In a year when Democratic primary voters are questioning whether lifelong Democrat Joe Biden is sufficiently partisan,  would it really be a winning strategy in the POTUS primary to even hint that you’re thinking of putting any Republican a heartbeat away from the presidency.

There’s a word for politicians in 2019 who bet their careers on bipartisanship: EX-politicians.

Just ask CNN’s newest pundit, John Kasich.

If you’re watching Fox and Friends tomorrow (Friday) morning, you may see the new ad from  Defending Democracy Together, a Republican advocacy organization founded by Bill Kristol, urging the NHGOP to maintain its neutral stance in any 2020 GOP POTUS primary.

“There has been chatter among New Hampshire Republicans calling for the elimination of the party’s neutrality requirement before presidential primaries, which would allow the state party to endorse President Trump against a potential primary challenger. A discussion is expected at the meeting at the end of the month,” the organization warns.

“We are running a commercial today and Friday during Fox and Friends in the Manchester media market urging the RNC not to rig the primary in Trump’s favor,” the organization said in a statement.

The original supporters of an NHGOP rule change, Rep. Fred Doucette and Windham, NH selectman Bruce Breton, told NHJournal last week they have no plans to present a proposal to change the party bylaws and allow NHGOP officials to publicly endorse candidates in party primaries. They didn’t submit such a change by the state party deadline that passed the first week in January.

Bill Kristol tells NHJournal that’s good news, but Defending Democracy Together is running the ad to bolster the idea of a wide-open primary as pressure from the Trump organization on GOP institutions rises.  He also notes that other states like South Carolina, along with the RNC don’t seem as dedicated to the tradition of open primaries as the Granite State.

“I feel much better about New Hampshire, actually,” Kristol said. “I’m confident the Republicans in New Hampshire–the home of the First In The Nation primary–aren’t going to let themselves be pushed around by Trump apparatchiks.”