Joyce Craig Wins Third Term; Democrats Strengthen Majority on Board of Aldermen
Victoria Sullivan’s Politics of Character Assassination and Vilifying Manchester Are Repudiated — OPINION
MANCHESTER, NH — Mayor Joyce Craig easily won her third term, once again defeating Victoria Sullivan. The Democrats increased their majority on the Board of Mayor and Aldermen, winning 11 of 14 seats.
June Trisciani will be replacing Alderman at Large Daniel P. O’Neil, Mary Sullivan Heath will be representing Ward 7 in place of Ross Terrio, and Erin Kelly will represent Ward 12 instead of Joe Kelly Levasseur toady Keith Hirschmann, who now lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts but still claims a Manchester residency and will continue to plague the Queen City for another two months.
A record five women will serve on the Board of Mayor and Aldermen when it is inaugurated in January.
June Trisciani will be the first woman, and only the fifth person, to serve as alderman at large since the office was created 24 years ago.
Vicious Campaign
Pundits on both sides of the fence and those who straddle it agree that Victoria Sullivan ran the most vicious, degrading campaign in modern Manchester history. Sullivan’s constant running down of the Queen City and the incumbent exceeded the brutal bare-knuckled tactics of Ted Gatsas in his two match-ups with Joyce Craig in 2015 and 2017.
“Landslide Teddy” squeaked out a 64 vote victory in 2015, after two voting machines miracuously broke down in Ward 1, Joyce Craig’s home base. For a type of machine that rarely breaks down and usually is fixed within 10 or 15 minutes tops, to have TWO machines break down and not be fixed for a long period was a kind of miracle, the kind of miracle Gatsas needed to win.
The Election Gods are fickle. And so is Ted Gatsas. Significantly, he did not endorse Sullivan for mayor, which says a lot.
Victoria Sullivan’s 46.8% exceeded the 43% she achieved in 2019, but there was no doubt about it: The Lawrence, Mass. native who has lived all of a baker’s dozen years in Manchester received a drubbing — a genuine ass-whuppin’ — from Joyce Craig.
And she deserved it.
Cat’s Paw
The daughter of middle class parents who married her childhood sweetheart, the former Joyce Hopkins has class. It is something that you are born with.
Victoria Sullivan, for all her seemingly schizoid sweetness and light act that was belied by her vicious campaigning and social media posts, has about as much class as the backside of a battle-worn and worn-out Tom Cat.
She stinks. And she is finished as a politician.
To use the Tom Cat metaphor, it is obvious that Victoria Sullivan was a cat’s paw of the Republican Party. She was an experiment in how far the politics of Trump-class hate for hate’s sake can resonate in the State of New Hampshire.
Buoyed by national and state money that enabled her to widely broadcast her sustained and persistent trashing of the City of Manchester — it’s schools, its public safety personnel, and Mayor Joyce Craig — Victoria Sullivan played by the new Trump Republican Party rules: Tear down and soil your opponent.
Rich Girard, who lost to her in the September primary, would not endorse Sullivan for mayor, at the cost of his future career in Republican politics. He found her to be dishonest and incompetent.
Girard denounced her “slash and burn” political style, which was much in evidence in the post-primary campaign against Mayor Craig.
The Republican Party attacked School Board at Large Member Jim O’Connell as the supporter of “Critical Race Theory” in Manchester schools. Victoria Sullivan, in one of her irritating and obsessive smartphone videos, claimed that CRT was being taught in Queen City schools, though it is not.
Attacking CRT is straight out of the national GOP rulebook, which was rewritten during the Trump presidency to feature race-baiting. It is a strategy that was being used across the entire United States by Republican candidates this November.
This disgusting tacic, based on The Big Lie philosophy of Dr. Josef Goebbels (Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda), failed in Manchester, New Hampshire. And the Queen City is the better for it, and the failure of Victoria Sullivan and other Republicans down the ticket.
However, the damage to Manchester’s reputation — to its public schools, to its teacher and students and parents, to its public safety employees — is very real.
There really is no way Victoria Sullivan can atone for the damage she has done to Manchester. I doubt that, in her self-delusion (“Victoria Sullivan — Mayor of Manchester” say her signs), she can even understand the corrosive effect she has had on the Queen City. Even if she was conscious of the damage, I doubt if she would even try to make up for it.
The bottom line is this:
Victoria Sullivan was defeated in 2021. Mayor Joyce Craig was reelected. And we, the people of Manchester, are better for it.
The whole state of New Hampshire is better for it, as Queen City voters repudiated the politics of slash and burn; rejected the Trumpian/Republican calculus of hate.
Thank you, Mayor Joyce Craig.
