'Disappointing’: State senate candidate alarmed about potentially racist GOP mailers
When New Hampshire State Senate candidate Ben Ming’s daughter showed him a political mailer her friend received that misspelled her dad’s name as “Bing,” the current state representative chalked it up to a potential “silly mistake.”
Mailer from the New Hampshire Republican State Committee that misspelled "Ming" as "Bing" (shared with Raw Story by New Hampshire resident)
Then came another mailer with “a picture of me with a yellowish tint on it, and being Asian American, that, to me, is pretty obvious,” Ming said.
Mailer from the New Hampshire Republican State Committee that misspelled "Ming" as "Bing" (shared with Raw Story by New Hampshire resident)
A third mailer accusing Ming of working to “import illegal migrants to New Hampshire” showed another photo of Ming and “a picture of some East Asian looking people that looked kind of sad,” he said.
Mailer from the New Hampshire Republican State Committee showing "some East Asian looking people that looked kind of sad," said Ben Ming (shared with Raw Story by New Hampshire resident)
“I got to the point where I started worrying about what it would be like for these mailers to reach the doorsteps of voters in Nashua, where there are fairly large AAPI communities, Latino communities,” Ming told Raw Story in a phone interview, referencing the acronym for Asian American and Pacific Islander.
The mailers were paid for by the New Hampshire Republican State Committee and note that the advertisement “has not been authorized by any candidate.” Ming’s opponent, Republican Kevin Avard, the incumbent for the New Hampshire State Senate, representing District 12, could not immediately be reached by Raw Story.
When reached by Raw Story by phone, Chris Ager, chairman of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, immediately denied any potentially racist content in mailers sent by the committee.
“There’s no racist content in anything. My grandparents are from the Philippines. My West Point roommate was Black. My next-door neighbors were Black pastors,” Ager said. “The racist thing is such an old, ridiculous claim by the Democrats. Frankly, I'm tired of it.”
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Raw Story described the concerns that Ming raised about the fliers and sent photos of the mailers to Ager via email.
“The things you just described, they don't ring a bell with me. None of them ring a bell with me,” Ager said.
Upon reviewing the photos, Ager said in an email, “Looks like an inadvertent misspelling in the one mailer. Everything else highlighted seems fabricated and petty. We want to stick to issues and why Republican policies are better for the people of NH, not faux outrage.”
Ager pointed out that one of the fliers included the image of an “MS-13 gang member." Mara Salvatrucha 13, or MS-13, is a gang formed by Salvadoran immigrants, some trained in guerilla warfare and military weaponry, that "came to the United States in order to escape the civil war in their home country," according to a profile by the U.S. Department of Justice.
“That's a legitimate issue to talk about, gang members coming over, doing violence against Americans. That's absolutely legitimate. That's not racist,” Ager said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported the arrests of four M-13 gang members who illegally entered the United States in August 2021.
Ager pointed out that Lily Tang Williams, who grew up in China, is the Republican nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in New Hampshire's 2nd congressional district. Ager emphasized that his “grandparents are from Asia, from the Philippines. My grandfather couldn't even speak English.”
The national GOP honored Ager as a “crucial #AAPI voice in the Republican Party” in a May 2022 X post.
“Come on, I'm not going to be approving anything that looks anything even close to being racist. Not going to happen,” Ager said.
Three of four mailers shared with Raw Story list Ager as chairman on the advertisements.
Mailer from the New Hampshire Republican State Committee noting Chris Ager as chairman (shared with Raw Story by New Hampshire resident)
“That truly is disappointing that he couldn't draw the line there,” Ming said.
Ming, who lost his 2020 race for New Hampshire House of Representatives but won in 2022, said he experienced no racism in the 2022 election but language from Republican party state leadership calling the COVID-19 pandemic "Kung flu" and "the China virus" had "real-world effects that I felt just like walking around and just the way people treated me."
Ming called the latest mailers "disappointing, but not surprising."
"I think these are all scare tactics they have. The Republican Party has nothing to run on except fear and that's not what I'm going to do," Ming said. "I'm going to run on the solutions that will bring about the best and most effective change for the people that live in New Hampshire, so that's focusing on specifically lowering costs and protecting access to reproductive health care and supporting local schools."
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