In the summer of 2022, 13-year-old Anthony Henry often pedaled 25 minutes on his bike through the leafy streets of Derry, New Hampshire. It was a tiring effort for an unlikely destination: his local school board meetings. There, he was determined to rail against mask mandates at his middle school.

At the time, he was three years away from getting his driver’s license and five from launching his first political campaign. “It was really just an exciting time to be involved, to be able to fight for something you believe in,” Henry said. “It kind of taught me that if people can take a middle schooler’s voice seriously, then that’s pretty cool, and that’s kind of why I stuck around.”

Henry is now 18 years old and a Republican candidate for the New Hampshire State House. And he’s not the only teenager vying for political office. There are a handful of college-aged politicians campaigning for the state House this fall, battling with the Republican trifecta currently holding the state—either to uphold it or break it down.

With 400 seats, the New Hampshire House of Representatives is the second-largest lower house in the country, behind only the US House in DC, despite being the 41st most populous state. Each member of New Hampshire’s House represents just 3,304 residents. If the US Congress had that proportion of representation, its House of Representatives would have 99,000 members.

That abundance of seats makes it easier for a wide range of candidates who might struggle elsewhere to win office, from teenagers like Henry to succession-minded libertarian activists descending on New Hampshire from coast to coast. And that ease of access is what drew in a new wave of political actors across the past few decades—a movement that has defined New Hampshire politics since.

In 2001, then–Yale grad student Jason Sorens wrote a letter that sparked a migration. Frustrated by the lack of political power libertarians were able to attain while dispersed coast to coast, he reasoned that if enough of them relocated to the right place, they might have a chance at consolidating power. From there, the plan was simple. Migrate. Run for state and local office. Secede from the United States. Since Sorens launched the “Free State Project,” an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 people have migrated to New Hampshire under its mantle.

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There are no official metrics tracking how many of these so-called Free Staters hold elected office. However, the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, a libertarian advocacy organization, grades lawmakers based on how closely they align with libertarian principles, offering a close estimation of who shares their ideology. According to its rankings, 166 of the state’s 400 representatives receive grades of 85 percent or higher. Jason Osborne, the House majority leader in New Hampshire, is closely linked to the movement, having moved to the Granite State from Ohio in 2010 and has earned a 94.7 score according to the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance.

In the state House, they’ve championed everything from gun rights to school choice to expanding access to investing state coffers in precious metals and cryptocurrency.

One reason why Free Staters are tough to spot is that many people reject the label publicly, simply running as Republicans and attracting partisan votes on the basis of party affiliation. That’s part of their strategy.

“If you believe in libertarian ideas, then the Republican Party is the most effective vehicle to be able to win elections and to be able to actually put those things into practice,” Free State Project executive director Eric Brakey said.

That tactic works, according to Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). “The Free State Project has tended to bat above their weight when it comes to the legislature,” Scala said. “They’ve made inroads into the Republican party at the state legislative level that is greater, I think, than their impact on the state’s population as a whole.”

But the marriage of traditional Republicans with libertarian politics leads to influence that cuts both ways—the New Hampshire Republican Party advances some libertarian interests, like the aggressive push for cryptocurrency access. In the same way, libertarians join their Republican colleagues on culture-war issues like banning transgender people from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender.

“The right to privacy and safety for those who present as their biological sex outweighs the interest of others who present differently from their biological sex to access the shared public spaces of their preference,” The New Hampshire Liberty Alliance wrote in defense of legislation to allow the separation of bathrooms by sex. “As a result, it is a reasonable protection of liberty to allow for the use of shared public spaces to be separated on the basis of biological sex.”

Young Republicans differ on whether the role the Free Staters play in their state is positive. Henry argues for transparency and believes that voters have a right to know whether or not a given candidate is a traditional Republican or a libertarian, saying, “I think if people are going to run as a Republican, even though they’re not, they should be honest about that.”

Even so. Free Staters have fans across the Republican coalition. Take 21-year-old Matthew Brooks. He’s running for state representative too, and he’s not a full-blown libertarian—he supports retaining funding for public schools—but organizing like-minded people to move to the state is what leads him to support the project.

“I think it’s cool that they’re trying to move more liberty-focused people into the state,” Brooks said.

Twenty-two-year-old Republican state representative Sam Farrington is also excited about the migration of out-of-state libertarians into his home, noting that New Hampshire has grown its population by 7.5 percent over the last 15 years through out-migration from other states, particularly Massachusetts.

“People are fleeing from Massachusetts and New York—they’re fleeing from oppressive income taxes and sales taxes, and they’re moving to New Hampshire because our model of governing is to maximize freedom and prosperity,” Farrington said.

As they seek and occupy offices, some young conservatives like Farrington are hoping to similarly “maximize freedom.”

When Farrington walked into the Durham Town Council on March 2, he was armed with a defense for some bold legislation he had proposed in the House. And he was literally armed.

Two months before, Farrington had sponsored HB 1793, which would have lifted the ban on firearms on public college campuses. The so-called “Campus Carry” bill reflected a defining feature of New Hampshire conservatism, according to Scala. “New Hampshire conservatives tend to be very motivated by Second Amendment issues, a lot more motivated than by issues such as abortion, gay marriage, etc.,” he said.

But it also quickly attracted controversy. One petition against the bill has acquired 803 signatures. There was significant backlash on the UNH campus too, Farrington said. “Some people might say I’m the most hated person on campus, but you know, I got a lot of people that support me and cheer me on as well.”

The bill passed the NH House, but that was the last of its success—it died at the end of the legislative session in May. Even so, it represented the impact a young politician can make in New Hampshire. And one Republican said it might have been buttressed by a swell in conservative momentum among youth in recent years.

Mark Rittgers led UNH College Republicans until he graduated this May. After Charlie Kirk was killed, Rittgers said his club saw enrollment double from 60 to 120 members. He credits this “vibe shift” not to a red wave per se but to a normalization of conservatism.

“I feel like every new freshman class, the vibe on campus kind of got more neutral,” Rittgers said. “People are more comfortable [joining College Republicans] now because they realize there are more than they thought there would be.”

That’s the kind of momentum the state Republican Party is encouraging with frequent visits to UNH College Republicans. For example, a host of Republican candidates came out for the College Republicans’ Super Bowl Party, including US Senate candidate Scott Brown. Hollie Noveletsky, a candidate for US Congress in New Hampshire’s first district, brought chili.

“They’re super receptive to us,” Rittgers said. It’s actually kind of insane.”

There was standing room only in the fluorescent-lighted meeting room at Wolfeboro Public Library this past March when Jeanne Dietsch took the microphone. “Hiding in plain sight, amid our beautiful forests, is a highly organized group called the Free State Project,” Dietsch told her audience. “They have worked for 22 years to commandeer our state to be their libertarian homeland.”

Dietsch, a retired tech entrepreneur, runs Granite State Matters, a nonprofit organization aimed at raising awareness about the Free State Project and pushing back against it. She hosts roughly three meetings per month in community centers, libraries, and churches around the state, hoping to wake up residents to the political reality of their state legislature.

“We are really pushing this election to make people aware that ‘Hey, Republicans, look what’s happened to your party. This is not Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party that you’re voting for here,’” Dietsch said.

That element of Granite State Matters’ mission is what drew in Republican Representative Kristine Perez, a retired nurse who was only alerted to the Free Staters simmering within her own party two years into her tenure in the state House.

“I started to learn that we have a tremendous amount of them in the state, and they are not Republicans,” Perez said. “They vote Republican, they say they’re Republicans, but they’re not true Republicans.”

Vehemently opposed to some of the legislation that Free Staters have proposed—like eliminating car inspections, for example—Perez said too many people are unaware of the Free State Project.

Scala agreed, saying that many New Hampshire residents, even frequent voters, do not necessarily know about the Free State Project or its agenda of cultivating a “libertarian homeland” in the state. “I do think you have to be especially politically attentive, to know and be able to recognize Free Staters and to be able to say a bit about who they are and what they stand for,” he said.

And while Dietsch said she’s had success communicating to an audience of retirees like herself through community events, she admits she hasn’t made the same inroads with younger people. “They’re burned out on politics,” she said. “Until it comes to something that’s directly impactful to them, I can’t see how to engage them.”

But 23-year-old Democrat state Representative Alice Wade isn’t burned out, and she has some creative ideas for reaching young people.

She’s worried about the Free State influence on politics in part because she finds them hypocritical. “The more old school libertarianism, which I agree with in some ways, is the sort of live and let live,” Wade, who is trans, said. “But then you have the same libertarians saying, ‘I’m going to police where you go to the bathroom.’” Erica Layon, for instance, both sponsored this year’s bathroom bill and was one of 18 legislators that the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, the libertarian organization, gave an A+ rating.

Twenty-two-year-old Democratic state Representative Jonah Wheeler acknowledges the presence of Free Staters in the legislature, but believes that making Free Staters into a “boogeyman” isn’t a sustainable way to win in the long term. Instead, he believes that Democrats need to provide a positive alternative to their opponents.

“The boogeyman politics, I think, is part of what people are tired of,” Wheeler said. This strategy, he posits, may be capable of engendering a temporary majority, “but those majorities are not long lasting, and they’re not mandates to govern.”

Young politicians are looking ahead to their elections this fall, hoping to either break up Free State and Republican influence or to entrench it further.

Wade said she got involved in politics when she graduated from UNH in 2023 and saw a wave of anti-trans legislation in the state government—to do everything from ban gender-affirming healthcare for minors to requiring schools to inform parents if their children choose to go by different pronouns at school.

“That’s what really clicked for me, of, like, this isn’t something that I can just kind of wave away in my brain as a faraway problem,” Wade said. “This could very soon become a real issue for me in my daily life.”

For the past year, she has accumulated an engaged social-media audience, with 5,000 Instagram followers, and one video that has over 2.7 million views. She posts everything from her testimonies on the House floor to Q&A’s about how to run for office in New Hampshire while heating up frozen samosas.

In all her posts, she hopes to show that politics is “not as scary as it looks.” And she’s been successful in that goal. Her followers have successfully run for their own school boards and even public records offices.

Many of the young politicians running for office this year have similarly effective means of reaching out to voters. Henry, for example, hosts a public TV talk show called America’s Ass with Anthony Henry. Farrington has 6,500 followers on X, and Wheeler has close to 15,000 followers across X and Instagram.

“I have a message I want to send to as many people as possible, and social media makes that easy,” Farrington said.

New Hampshire has a unique political landscape, and the huge state legislature is at its core, according to Scala. “The New Hampshire state legislature is the embodiment of New Hampshire political culture, which centers around accessibility to citizens,” he said. The young people vying for office in New Hampshire are the beneficiaries of that system.

Wheeler won his first election on the precipice of a thunderstorm. He was standing quietly in the gym at the Peterborough Community Center on the second Tuesday in September 2022, listening to the ticker machine count up his fate. Then the moderator read off the results. In a three-way race for two seats, Wheeler had taken first place by only 40 votes. He was headed to the State House. He was 19 years old.

“There wasn’t so much excitement in that immediate moment as there was just relief, relief of the stress of politics over the course of the several months prior,” Wheeler said. “That relief that I wasn’t crazy, that people, you know, were listening to me.”

In the same way, Wheeler knew at the moment of his election, as the storm clouds broke over Mount Monadnock, that it could only have happened in New Hampshire.

“The rain was coming down righteously,” Wheeler said. “It was just like something that whipped across the region in the most magical of ways. And as soon as I stepped out, I said, ‘This right here, that’s New Hampshire.’”