Why I've Blogged

I've found that for a candidate for any political office, blogging is good for four things

1. Getting your message out in a non-traditional way
2. Finding potential supporters if you say the right things or talk the right way.
3. Relieving stress
4. Pissing everybody off and/or giving your opponents fodder to use against you.

Before I started the goal to write 100 columns in 100 days (Garth, don't worry, i'll slap them up on the NHYD site after the election, i'm just a little tight for time right now), #4 was a really big concern for me. It still is, but in the end, it isn't as big as the fifth reason i've found.

The stories I tell are unlikely to be told by anyone else, but they need to be told, and they need to be told by more people from their own experiences.

Let's be perfectly honest, the attention for individual New Hampshire House races is microscopically small.

Even though the people who are elected to the House affect our lives in incredible ways, very few people bother to learn who they are or care what they do or even know which ones represent them.

The national, and probably even the state news outlets, do not care what happens in Hillsborough 19. Probably nobody working for either presidential campaign will ask what the results were. Even the winners are still small fish, the closest a state legislator will get to the oval office due to their position is the White House Gift Shop.

Yet, it matters. Talking to mothers who compare schools to spaghetti sauce, wrangling future constituents' sheep, asking if it's spelled "Registrar" or "Register", and the scores of other things I have not been able to write about due to a lack of time getting out and talking to voters.

The stories of these and many others are not being told, and I hope more than anything I can bring these silenced voices a megaphone. It's at the heart of why I've run.

I hope my efforts have at least given a bit more volume to those voices if not a megaphone just yet.

This is my 93rd Tale From The Bottom Of The Ticket. I hope you all look forward to the next seven, hopefully they won't be the last.