Concentrate Your Forces: The Free State Project Bet on One State and 400 House Seats

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Robert Greene’s twenty-third law says to pick one target and put everything there. In 2003 a libertarian movement picked New Hampshire, where a House seat stands for about 3,400 people. Some 6,000 movers later, the record shows what concentration buys and what it provokes.

In the summer of 2003, more than 2,500 people mailed in notarized ballots with photo ID to decide where they would move. Ten states were on the ballot. Voters ranked all ten, and an outside firm counted the ballots under a Condorcet method, which picks the state that beats every other state head to head. On Oct. 1, 2003, the Free State Project announced the winner: New Hampshire. Its own history says the plan was “a coordinated migration to a single, small state,” with no one obligated to move until 20,000 people had signed on.

Robert Greene’s twenty-third law is concentrate your forces. Power spread thin, he argues, is power wasted. Find the point where your strength counts most and put everything there. Depth beats breadth. A small force aimed at one target can beat a larger one scattered across many.

The Free State Project is the cleanest test of that law in New Hampshire’s modern record, and its real target was smaller than the state. It was the House of Representatives: 400 seats in a state of 1.4 million people, the largest lower chamber in the country. Concentrated there, a movement whose movers number a fraction of its signers built a working presence in the Legislature and claimed its majority leader. Concentration also made the movement easy to find, and in Grafton, Croydon and Belknap County the people it moved among organized to push back.

One state, one chamber

The idea started with an essay. Jason Sorens wrote it in July 2001 for an online journal, The Libertarian Enterprise, according to the project’s own history. The pitch was simple: libertarians had spent decades spread across fifty states, outvoted everywhere. If enough of them lived in one place, they could matter there. The signature drive began on that promise, and the 2003 vote came after the list passed 5,000 names.

Why New Hampshire? The project’s organizers told New Hampshire Public Radio in 2013 that they picked it partly for its low tax burden and partly for its large House, which gives residents easy access to politics. The second reason is the one Greene would recognize. New Hampshire’s constitution fixes the size of the House in a range no other state comes near.

Run the numbers and the choice explains itself. The 2020 census counted 1,377,529 people in New Hampshire. Divided among 400 House seats, that is one representative for about 3,444 residents. Vermont, with 150 seats, has one for about 4,287. Maine has one for about 9,022. Massachusetts, with 160 seats, has one for nearly 44,000. In Texas a House seat stands for about 194,000 people, and in California an Assembly seat stands for about 494,000.

The same article adds a rule that sharpens the effect. When the Legislature redraws the map every ten years, “no town, ward or place shall be divided.” Districts are built from whole towns. A newcomer who settles in a small town joins a fixed, known electorate whose boundaries do not move when the map is redrawn. For a movement deciding where to put its people, that is a map that holds still.

That ratio is the concentration Greene describes. A thousand committed voters would vanish into a single Texas House district of about 194,000 people. In New Hampshire, where a seat stands for about 3,444 residents, a few hundred like-minded voters settled in the same towns are a real share of a district’s electorate. The project did not need to change the minds of a whole state. It needed to fill a few small districts with people who already agreed with it.

The count

The project’s numbers have always been easier to state than to check, and the record shows a gap between those who signed and those who came. By 2008 the project had about 8,000 signers, The Dartmouth reported. In April 2013 the project’s president, Carla Gericke, told NHPR that nearly 14,000 people had pledged to move and roughly 1,100 had done it. She put the mission plainly: “our only mission, our charter, is to get people to sign and move here.”

The signature list reached 20,000 in early February 2016, which was the trigger the 2003 plan had promised. At that point close to 2,000 people had moved, The Dartmouth reported. By August 2022, the Associated Press counted fewer than 6,500 arrivals. In March 2026, project leaders told NHPR the number was around 6,000. The Nation, in June 2026, cited an estimate of 6,000 to 10,000. None of these is an audited count. The project’s own figures are what most outlets repeat.

By any of those counts, the movers make up less than one percent of the state. That is the point. Concentration does not need a majority of the population. It needs enough people in the places where small numbers decide things.

Greene’s law has a second half that the project also followed: once you find the rich vein, stay with it. The project stayed with one state. It has recruited for New Hampshire for more than two decades, and it held to the 20,000-signer trigger it set in 2003 until the list reached it in 2016, even as the count climbed slowly.

From movers to members

The first Free Stater elected to the Legislature was Joel Winters, in 2006, The Dartmouth reported, and three more followed in 2008. The AP’s 2022 count started from 2008 and found about 45 Free Staters elected since, with more than 20 then serving in a Legislature of 424 members. The two sources start the clock in different years, and Granite State Report found no official tally to settle it. The AP also reported that the project counted the House majority leader as one of its own.

In 2026, both NHPR and The Nation identified the House majority leader as Jason Osborne. The Nation reported that he moved to New Hampshire from Ohio in 2010. At the New Hampshire Liberty Forum in Concord that March, a gathering NHPR described as a kind of convention for the project, Osborne urged libertarians to work inside a coalition rather than cast protest votes. A protest vote, he said, “has never repealed a single law.” His case, as NHPR summarized it, was that a well-organized coalition voting for imperfect candidates had achieved results.

That line is Law 23 in the movement’s own words. A protest vote spreads a small group’s strength across a statewide race it cannot win. A coalition vote puts that strength where it changes a result. The New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, an advocacy group that grades legislators against its own libertarian standard, rated 166 of the 400 House members at 85 percent or higher, The Nation reported. That is a measure of agreement with the Alliance, not a count of Free Staters, and The Nation said so. Still, it shows how far the ideas reached past the few thousand people who moved to carry them.

A fair objection

Concentration has a cost Greene does not dwell on: a force gathered in one place is easy to see, and the people who live there can gather too. New Hampshire’s record shows that three times.

The first was Grafton. About 50 members of the project moved to the small Grafton County town, NPR reported in 2014. They wanted to cut the town’s budget of $1 million by 30 percent over three years and pull the town out of its school district. At the deliberative session that year, about 100 people packed the firehouse, debate over how to run the meeting broke down, the moderator lost control and police removed a man.

The second was Croydon. In March 2022, as Part Nineteen of this series reported, a Selectboard member named Ian Underwood moved a floor amendment that cut the school budget from about $1.7 million to $800,000. Thirty-four voters were in the room, and the cut passed 20 to 14. Underwood had moved to town in 2007 as part of the Free State Project, though he told NHPR the cut was his own doing, not the movement’s. Residents petitioned for a special meeting that May, and 379 ballots came in. The vote to restore the budget was 377 to 2.

The third was Belknap County. In the summer of 2022, a fight over the county-owned Gunstock ski area closed the mountain for two weeks after its top managers quit. Then-Gov. Chris Sununu singled out three Republican legislators with oversight of the resort, Gregg Hough, Michael Sylvia and Norm Silber, and called for their replacement. The New Hampshire Bulletin reported that Sylvia was a member of the Free State Project. A political action committee formed to defeat candidates it tied to the project, and in the September primary all three incumbents lost. Linda Fowler, a professor emerita of government at Dartmouth, told the AP that the Free Staters “are now a negative influence on the state’s politics.”

Organized opposition has outlasted Gunstock. The Nation reported in 2026 that a nonprofit called Granite State Matters, run by Jeanne Dietsch, hosts meetings about three times a month to push back against the project. The same concentration that made a few thousand movers count also made them a target that voters could name.

And the raw arithmetic cuts against the project too. About 6,000 movers against a 20,000-signer goal means most of the people who promised to come never did. Greene’s law assumes you control your forces. A movement made of volunteers who can change their minds does not.

The verdict

Greene’s twenty-third law holds in New Hampshire, and the Free State Project proves it from both directions. The founders chose one target, a House where a seat stands for about 3,444 people, and the payoff was out of all proportion to their numbers. A movement that moved perhaps 6,000 people into a state of 1.4 million gained a lasting presence in its Legislature and claimed its majority leader. Spread across fifty states, those same people would have counted for almost nothing.

The record also shows the limit. Where the project or its members pressed hardest, in single towns and a single county delegation, the people already there noticed, organized and voted. Croydon reversed its budget cut 377 to 2. Belknap County voters ousted the legislators Sununu targeted. Concentration wins ground. Holding it takes consent from the neighbors.

The law also fits the series so far. Part Twenty-Two found the weaker side at Seabrook winning by giving up a fight it could not win. Part Twenty-One found con artists winning by seeming smaller than their marks. The Free State Project is a third version of the same arithmetic: a small group cannot win everywhere, so it picks the one place where small numbers are enough.

That lesson belongs to anyone who wants to move New Hampshire, whatever their politics. The State House in Concord has 400 seats, and every one of them is close enough to the voters to be won by a few hundred people who show up. That is the opening the Free State Project saw in 2003. It is open to everyone else, too.

Next: Law 24, on playing the perfect courtier, tested against the New Hampshire record.

Fact check

Editor’s note: Commentary and analysis, not legal advice. The Free State Project’s founding and vote rest on the project’s own published history, attributed as such. Mover and signer counts come from news reports that mostly repeat the project’s figures; none is an audited count. The Liberty Alliance ratings measure agreement with an advocacy group’s standard, not membership. The GSR Power Index is editorial, not data. Granite State Report did not request comment from the Free State Project, Rep. Jason Osborne, Granite State Matters or the legislators named for this piece; any of them may write to the address above and a response will be added with its date.