Shortly before Nashua’s most recent routine city-wide train wreck, I took some heat for making some inappropriate comments about the surprise death of Ms Gloria Timmons. To “polite society,” I say that any adjective, including INAPPROPRIATE, is in the eyes of the beholder, but there’s something about Ms Gloria that Ward 2 can learn from, which I will get to momentarily.
The reason that Gloria was a squatter in my mind, so much so that I wrote an article on her prior to her death, was that I never voted without having to see her. Let me explain. I always vote in every election. That includes primaries, local elections, and special elections. Sadly, not enough good people can make that claim, especially in Ward 2, where the current and former NRCC chairs have implied agreement in their recent comments, which I will also share in a moment.
There are seven lines at the Charlotte school gymnasium for voters to pick up their ballots. Unlike the cities that close the polls at 7 pm, Nashua has 14 hours of in-person voting. There are nine polling places in Nashua. The My Pillow guy named his autobiography “What are the odds?” What were the odds of running into Gloria at the polls? Excluding totem pole activism outside the electioneering zone and Gloria working as a staff member, I still ran into her more often than I wanted to. While in line to get my ballot in November 2022, I saw her right behind me! (with 2 or 3 people between us). The point I’m making is that Gloria voted in every election, and so does much of her ilk. I don’t know the names of all of them, but having run for office 3 times and having held a totem outside the school even more times, I recognized many of the repeat faces of the NTU useful idiot team.
Moving on from venting about the Ward 2 enemy camp and to a time Senator Giuda joined the dining room table I was sitting at, I remember a comment he made about being effective. I didn’t write it down, word for word, but the message was clear. It’s all about being effective, which is in the form of winning elections. As much as I hate football, Vince Lombardi nailed it when he said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” When was the last time an election was won in Ward 2? (meaning by a good candidate on no other ballot than that of Ward 2) I think McCarthy was a rep around the same time Mrs Newman was elected, which had to be approximately 10 years ago. Alderman Dowd was first elected in 2011.
So, about being effective, I spent some time stewing about Mr Gouthro’s loss to Alderman Dowd. Unlike me, Gouthro had a lot of candidate strength. He’s been inside the chamber many times and has made excellent comments at the mic. He’s an active member of the same Ward 2 church that Alderman Dowd’s dead brother, Karl Jr, was a clergy member of. He fundraised, held a meet-and-greet event, accepted invitations to candidate forums, and said polite things. He had a door-knocking team. He invested in big signs and glossy palm cards. He did so many things better, above and beyond what I did as Dowd’s previous opponent, that I thought it was a recipe for a slam dunk victory. I was absolutely stunned by Mr Gouthro losing by 24 more votes than I did in the previous election!
We’ve been told by Dr Frank and many other members of that 2021 My Pillow symposium that elections are a numbers game, so I decided to look at the numbers from the past 8 city elections, since Alderman Dowd was elected 8 elections ago. Since I refuse to pay for Microsoft Office, I will apologize for my mediocre penmanship, but I wrote them down and took a picture of my findings from the city clerk’s office website page archives. I shared the image with various Ward 2 voters, including Chris Buda, the former NRCC chair, and he said the following yesterday morning:
“Dowd has what looks like a 800 vote floor. One of the biggest problems I noticed about Nashua when looking at voter data on the GOP data center is that the GOP has few 4×4 voters city-wide. We need to convince more people to vote in all races. We need a local election message in our platform.”
Later yesterday evening, an email distribution from the current chair, John Cawthron, arrived in my inbox, and he said the following in his message:
“Just like all of you, I am disappointed by the results. I am, however, very proud of the effort that we all put into this endeavor. The fact is that no matter how much effort we put in, we cannot win, when there is only a 20% (or less) turnout by our fellow Republican voters.”
What both chairs said, independently of one another, is very overlapping, but let’s get back to Gloria. There are no shortages of Glorias, alive and well and voting in Ward 2, the rest of the city, other cities and… (drum roll) …”Anytown, NH”
Why am I echoing what’s already been said by many others? TOWN elections are just a few months away. Follow Senator Giuda’s mantra and be effective. Disrupt your local schoolies’ winning streaks. If traditional campaigning is insufficient, think outside the box and leverage the next property tax bill, which is coming way too soon for most of us.
