The Republican presidential candidate has been on the ground in the Granite State for more than a year, targeting the “protest vote.”

“Fed up with the Republican party?”

Fred Karger offers New Hampshire primary voters what he calls a “moderate” alternative to mainstream Republican candidates for the presidency in a new television advertisement playing in the Granite State.

Fred Karger

The openly gay candidate is painting himself as “the only moderate Republican running for president,” emphasizing his pro-choice stance on abortion rights, his support of legalized same-sex marriage, and his desire to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan “now.” Karger hopes these views — admittedly less conservative than that of his other Republican opponents — will help him woo voters on the fence.

“I realize if people are mad — which they are at the Republican Party, and I think a big chunk of the 42 percent of independents have left the Republican Party because of the tea party and the rightward movement — that I will be that protest vote,” Karger told the Keene Sentinel in December.

Karger will soon be joined in New Hampshire — where he’s staked the majority of his campaigning — by his contemporaries, including former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who took the lead in the Iowa caucuses Tuesday night, Jan. 3, unseating Rick Santorum as Republican frontrunner.

“I want to let New Hampshire voters know that if they are not happy with the other seven Republicans running for president that there is one sensible, moderate candidate in the race,” Karger says in his new television ad.

Karger has been spending his time in New Hampshire going door-to-door trailed by a bagpiper, handing out Frisbees reading, “Fred Who?”, and recently released a memoir discussing his sexual orientation, the Sentinel reported.

Tags: Decision 2012, Fred Karger, GOP, New Hampshire, Politics, Republicans

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