Victoria Sullivan Refuses to Debate Rich Girard
Both Republican Candidates Destined to Humiliating Losses— OPINION
MANCHESTER, NH — Victoria Sullivan, the Republican who lost the 2019 mayoral race to Joyce Craig by a landslide, apparently is refusing to debate Republican mayoral candidate Rich Girard, who lost his first bid for mayor in 2001 by a landslide.
Both candidates seem to destined to rack up humiliating losses, Girard in the September primary and Sullivan in the general election in November.
Girard has called on both Craig and Sullivan to debate him. It is highly unlikely that Mayor Craig, the clear front-runner in the three-person field, would agree to a debate before the primary. That leaves Sullivan, who apparently wants no part of Girard either.
Sullivan’s campaign advisor all but called Girard a “liar” a fortnight ago, during a brouhaha over her alleged dissing of French Canadians.
Michel Biunod said, “Just because Rich Girard is desperate and losing, it doesn’t give him the right to lie.”
Last month, the political buzz projected both of the Republican mayoral candidates appearing on Joe Kelly Levasseur’s public access TV show — together , at last! — to stage a sort of impromptu debate. That apparently has fallen through.
Neither Levasseur or former Mayor Ted Gatsas, a Republican, have endorsed Girard of Sullivan. The root of the problem is that neither candidate has a chance in hell of winning.
Victoria Sullivan remains the “favorite” to advance past the September primary to take a similar drubbing from Mayor Joyce Craig in November. She is the favorite for the simple fact that Rich Girard, though more qualified, is simply unlikable.
Lacklustre Lightweight
Queen City political pundits believe that — based on Victoria Sullivan’s lacklustre performance in her 2019 debate with Joyce Craig — the far more-knowledgeable and better-spoken Rich Girard would make mincemeat of her in a debate.
That Victoria Sullivan is a political lightweight, seems to be the consensus among the Inside Queen City Politics cognoscenti.
One seasoned Republican operative told this reporter that Girard would prove tougher on Craig during a debate, but he is unlikely to make it through the primary. He also expressed his dismay over Sullivan’s attitude over the past two years, since her defeat.
Sullivan has been “aping royalty,” acting with the airs that she is mayor, sort of a pocket battleship U.S.S. Donald Trump. She did not put in the hard work over the past two years, of going door to door and meeting the people, making the rounds of every kind and sort of neighborhood event.
According to the source, she apparently believes a fiction that Joyce Craig beat Ted Gatsas and her by 2,000 votes — 2,000 votes that really are somewhat illegitimate, being students and campaign workers that don’t really live in Manchester, or New Hampshire — that is to say, aren’t really residents of the Granite State, under the Manchester City GOP’s reckoning.
But for those almost fraudulent votes….
It is a fiction that similarly circulated among Queen City Republicans after Craig’s defeat of Gatsas in 2017.
Such is what keeps failed politicians in the game.
Believing in the fiction, according to the source, all’s she had/has to do is wait until November 2021, when The People — her people — show up and give her the office that is rightfully hers.
Unfortunately for Victoria Sullivan, the New Hampshire Supreme Court struck down as Republican crafted law that sought to limit the franchise and exclude such people, as the phantom Fifth Column of The 2,000. By a unanimous vote, the Court held that S.B. 3 (2017), which sought to make it harder for college students to register to vote by requiring proof of residency, was unconstitutional as it “unreasonably burdens the right to vote.”
There is much frustration among anti-Craig Republicans and independents that neither of the Republican candidates is of the first-rank. There is a strong feeling that both of these lacklustre candidates are destined to lose, and lose big against Joyce Craig.
Stripped of the Republican-provided tool to challenge the “Fifth Column” of college students who vote Democrat at the ballot box, Victoria Sullivan likely faces another humiliating landslide loss at the hands of Joyce Craig.
