New Hampshire Politics · Libertarian Party

New Hampshire’s Libertarians Just Got Thrown Out of the Libertarian Party

Call it the party that disowned itself: chair Jeremy Kauffman went to the national convention, called the assembled Libertarians “loser apes,” lost his bid to lead them, and got thrown out of the building — then watched the committee vote 15–2 to throw all of New Hampshire out with him. The bill comes due on the 2026 ballot.

By Dexter Dow · Granite State Report · May 28, 2026

On Memorial Day weekend in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the chairman of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire stood in front of the very people he was asking to elect him and called them freaks and “loser apes.” By Monday, the newly seated Libertarian National Committee had voted to make the entire New Hampshire affiliate someone else’s problem.

The committee voted 15–2, with one abstention, to disaffiliate the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire from the national organization. The vote landed on May 25, hours after Kauffman wrapped up a failed campaign for national chair built on a single promise: to dissolve the committee he was asking to lead. He did not get the chairmanship. He got escorted off the convention floor instead.

For anyone who has watched New Hampshire’s libertarian scene over the last few years, none of this arrived as a surprise. It arrived as a deadline.

That was the courtship. According to InDepthNH.org, Kauffman went on to tell the room they were “congenitally anti-everything,” vowed to “cleanse the party of you losers,” and worked a story about taking his college ultimate Frisbee team to nationals into a speech otherwise dedicated to insulting the people in front of him. He was ejected after he finished.

What the national party actually said

The official language was drier than the speech that provoked it. Evan McMahon — the Indiana state chair elected at the same convention to run the national party — framed the split as the end of a long fuse rather than a single bad afternoon.

The disaffiliation motion accused the New Hampshire affiliate of having “crudely and repeatedly” undermined the party’s own candidates and of holding “numerous anti-libertarian positions” at the national level. It did not enumerate the grievances line by line. It did not need to. The record had been accumulating in public for years.

The endorsement the bylaws forbid

Strip away the spectacle and one violation is mechanically unambiguous: in 2024, the New Hampshire affiliate endorsed Donald Trump for president. Libertarian Party bylaws bar state affiliates from endorsing non-Libertarian candidates — full stop. New Hampshire did it anyway, and did it, according to InDepthNH.org, while disparaging the party’s own 2024 nominee, Chase Oliver, with homophobic slurs.

An affiliate is free to think the national ticket is hopeless. It is not free to wear the party’s name while campaigning for the other team. That is the part of this story that needs no interpretation, no context, and no charitable reading. It is a rule, and it was broken on purpose.

The record behind the resolution

Kauffman’s signature accomplishment as chair was building a large social-media following for the New Hampshire party’s accounts. That following is also the evidence against him. Reporting from InDepthNH.org describes years of content steeped in racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia, including a post blaming Jewish people for the September 11 attacks — a message counted among the formal charges.

The convention itself supplied a fresh exhibit. As Kauffman was being shown the door, fellow New Hampshire Libertarian Andrew Allgood was captured on the convention floor giving a Nazi salute, then arrested for allegedly assaulting a woman. This is the delegation that arrived to argue New Hampshire is the last true home of liberty.

And it is not confined to the internet. On April 4, Manchester police were called to the Elm Street Market Basket, where, according to the police account relayed by InDepthNH.org and NHPR, Kauffman responded to a parking-lot fender-bender by launching into a racist tirade — telling a Black bystander from Jamaica to “go back to Africa” and screaming insults until, witnesses said, his two young sons pulled him into the store. He faces criminal charges.

None of this is new behavior being newly punished. Kauffman was expelled from the Free State Project — the movement that has spent two decades recruiting libertarians to relocate to New Hampshire — back in 2023, for refusing to stop posting the same kind of material on that organization’s accounts. The national party simply took longer to reach the conclusion the Free State Project reached three years ago.

What it costs New Hampshire

Disaffiliation is not a press release. It has teeth, and they bite the rank-and-file harder than they bite Kauffman.

Kauffman’s public posture is that the expulsion proves his point — that, as he put it to InDepthNH.org, New Hampshire is “the only hope for liberty.” It is a tidy bit of jiu-jitsu: reframe getting fired as getting promoted. But the people who actually want to run for office in this state under a recognized party label do not get to fundraise their way out of a ballot-access problem with a defiant tweet.

The faction that wants out from under him

Here is the wrinkle that makes this more than a clown-show obituary. A source tells InDepthNH.org that an effort is already underway to stand up a new, Kauffman-free Libertarian party in New Hampshire — one that could seek national recognition in his place. Plenty of Granite State libertarians have spent years embarrassed by the man speaking in their name. Disaffiliation, paradoxically, frees them to start over.

The stakes are bigger than one loudmouth

This matters because New Hampshire is not an ordinary outpost for this movement. The Free State Project has drawn roughly 6,000 movers over 25 years, and the result is a State House bloc with real influence over housing, education, and tax policy. New Hampshire is, by population share, one of the most libertarian places in the country.

Here is the uncomfortable truth the disaffiliation exposes: that influence has never really run through the Libertarian Party ballot line. It runs through the Republican majority, where Free State–aligned figures like House Majority Leader Jason Osborne shape actual legislation. The LPNH label was always more flag than vehicle. Which is exactly why losing it stings symbolically more than it costs structurally — and why the brand fight is really a fight over who gets to claim the movement’s name.

So the question of who wears the Libertarian label here is not a fringe squabble. It is a fight over the political identity attached to a genuine and growing bloc of Granite State voters — and over whether that brand stands for a coherent philosophy or for whatever its loudest chairman shouts into a microphone on a holiday weekend.

Note on the count: Outlets reported the disaffiliation as a 15–2 vote; Independent Political Report’s live coverage added one abstention (15–2–1). Reporting indicates the motion needed a three-fourths supermajority of the full committee to pass, a threshold the vote cleared.