Will O'Brien Primary Ayotte in 2016?

The fury that some in the conservative-liberty wing of the New Hampshire Republican Party feel about key votes made in the U.S. Senate by New Hampshire’s junior Senator may be coming to a head.

Aaron Day of the New Hampshire Republican Liberty Caucus and Stark360 PAC, started a Draft Bill O’Brien for US Senate page this morning, according to a post on Facebook, potentially fanning the flames of a primary challenge to U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-NH, next year.

Day said he created the page to test the waters and see if there was interest in an O’Brien primary challenge in the wake of Ayotte’s vote on April 23, to confirm Loretta Lynch as U.S. Attorney General.

In a Facebook post on Friday, the day after the Lynch vote, O’Brien likened the support for confirmation as another of many “disappointments on significant issues coming out of Sen. Ayotte’s tenure in elected office,” adding that he believed that Lynch would clearly “promote Obama’s lawlessness,” most specifically, on executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants.

“What is the difference between having a Jeanne Shaheen and Kelly Ayotte in the Senate?,” he openly asked. “The only practical dissimilarity I can see is that Sen. Ayotte shows up at meetings of Republican groups and expects to get Republican votes in return.”

In about 24 hours, O’Brien’s Facebook post had garnered more than 50 likes and 80 comments.

For his part, Day said he had not consulted with O’Brien about the draft site but added that there was a lot of anger within the party concerning this vote and others.

The repeated attacks against Ayotte, as noted and tracked recently by progressive blogger William Tucker on MiscellanyBlue.com, come just months after Ayotte and other Republicans turned on O’Brien, and backed former Speaker Gene Chandler, R-Bartlett. Some, according to both public and private comments, were concerned about O’Brien’s previous tenure as speaker and anxious about the level discourse during House sessions in 2012, which included reprimands against committee chairs and at least one representative – former Manchester Republican state Rep. Steve Vaillancourt – lashing out at O’Brien with a “Seig Heil” salute from the House floor. O’Brien later pushed for – and received – an apology from Vaillancourt.

After the Concord Monitor published a cartoon likening O’Brien to Hitler, asking, “If the Mustache Fits…,” he barred the newspaper’s Statehouse bureau from a press availability about EBT card abuse. O’Brien later called the newspaper “Democratic propagandists” and not a legitimate news source.

The boost by Ayotte and other Republicans for Chandler before after O’Brien won the caucus vote and later, Democrats siding with last minute candidate, state Rep. Shawn Jasper, R-Hudson, kept O’Brien out of the speaker’s chair.

O’Brien did not return an email request for comment about the effort at post time but at this time two years ago, he flirted with a potential Congressional campaign against U.S. Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, D-NH. Kuster was barely a few months into her first term when it was revealed that she was having problems paying her property taxes – while at the same time calling for higher taxes on her constituents.

O’Brien, ultimately, chose not to run, and instead, focused his efforts on winning back the Statehouse for the GOP. That shift proved successful – while Republicans were kept out of statewide offices, they were able to take back control of House District 1 and the House of Representatives from the Democrats and won even more seats in the state Senate than Republicans controlled two years before.

While conservatives have looked at the victories as a sign that they are in a stronger position than 2012 and 2010, in actuality, the late surge of voters for Gov. Maggie Hassan, D-Exeter, and U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, did not trickle down to the lower races, costing Democrats a number of seats, according to election return results in key local races.