FREAK POWER POLITICS
Thompson returned to his home in Woody
Creek a new man with a new mission: to beat the
bastards at their own game. Thus he began what
is still one the most memorable and strategically
effective anti-campaigns in the history of the U.S:
the Freak Power ticket.
It was the fall of 1969 and the Aspen Mayoral
election was coming up. Thompson was so dis-
gusted by the candidates that he and a group of
local friends ran their own candidate for mayor:
a 29-year-old hippie bike-racer named Joe
Edwards. Their campaign began three weeks be-
fore the election and nearly caused the upheaval
of the small Western town.
This wasn’t a whim or joke. Thompson
noticed voter turnout was low in previous
elections and determined it was mostly 18- to
25-
year olds who were missing. So the theory he
perpetuated was that if any candidate could gar-
ner the young vote, they would have the power
to not necessarily win, but at least change the
outcome of the election.
With only three weeks to organize, Joe Ed-
wards lost the mayoral race by one vote. In real-
ity, Edwards won the original vote by six – but
lost the absentee ballot by seven. As Thompson
wrote at the time, “we scared the living shit out
of the Aspen Power Structure.”
In analysis, the group that really cost the
Freaks the election wasn’t the conservatives but
the old-school liberals who supported the Demo-
cratic candidate. They were so scared of the pos-
sibility of a Freak Power mayor they cannibalized
their own candidate and voted Republican.
The close loss whetted Thompson’s appetite
and the next year the Freak Power Party entered
the political arena with a vengeance. And not
only in Aspen: Freak Power blossomed in Kan-
sas, Berkeley and Los Angeles, where Thomp-
son’s buddy, Acosta, garnered 110,000 votes out
of 2 million cast in the L.A. County sheriff race.
Thompson himself ran for sheriff is Aspen
and his platform was pretty direct: an end to the
selling-off of Aspen. This is an excerpt of from
one of the Freak Power ads:
“
And now we are reaping the whirlwind-big-
city problems too malignant for small-town so-
lutions, Chicago-style traffic in a town without
stoplights, Oakland-style drug busts continually
bungled by simple cowboy cops who see noth-
ing wrong with kicking handcuffed prisoners
in the ribs while the sheriff stands by watching,
seeing nothing wrong with it either.”
The Freak Party campaign was unique and
unsettling. The Party posters bore a red fist
clutching a peyote button. Thompson shaved his
head clean. They proposed changing the name
of Aspen to Fat City to scare off investors. It’s
hard to gauge if people actually believed this.
On the question of drugs, as Thompson wrote,
“
We ran straight at the bastards with an out-
front mescaline platform.” Thompson relented a
bit before the election, saying he would refrain
from taking mescaline while on duty.
In the end Thompson lost the race 1,500 to
1,065.
He delighted in the fact that he won the
city vote, where the Freaks made up 30 percent
of the electorate. But he was trounced in the
county vote, even losing 300 to 90 in his home
precinct of Woody Creek.
LITERAREA
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THEPEORIAN.COM
