Aria DiMezzo, a Republican candidate for sheriff in Cheshire County, New Hampshire
With over 4,200 votes, one New Hampshire nominated a rather unconventional candidate for sheriff. Aria DiMezzo is a self-described Satanist whose campaign slogan disparages the police.
DiMezzo, is a transgender woman in her early 30s, and she has become a minor celebrity in her town — but that minor fame has made her the target of online attacks, vandalism including a homophobic slur spray-painted on her car, and a write-in campaign to weaken her chances.
DiMezzo is the lone Republican candidate for Cheshire County sheriff in September’s primary. She believes most voters blindly checked the box next to her name. She only registered as a Republican at the last second, after concluding her bid to get on the ballot as a Libertarian, her preferred party would have required gathering signatures amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“Anyone who takes a look at me knows pretty much right off the bat that I’m clearly not a Republican,” said DiMezzo. She’s looking to unseat Eli Rivera, a Democrat who has held the job in the county of more than 76,000 since 2012.
Eli Rivera
“I’m just using the party infrastructure to run for office,” she said. “I was 100% upfront about who I am. I never hid any of it. Anyone who bothered to Google me would have found all this stuff about me and they would have seen the anti-cop things that I was posting all over social media.”
DiMezzo hopes to gain voters by supporting their gun rights. However, she is also advocating that the police…police the police. If her deputies don’t want to police the police, she said they can either quit or sit in the office and play video games.
“If the police were these fine upstanding honorable people just investigating crimes where there are victims and were serving and protecting people, I wouldn’t have an issue with that. But that is not what they are doing,” said DiMezzo, whose campaign signs include the phrase “F—- The Police” and the symbol for anarchy emblazoned over a sheriff’s badge standing in for the “A” in “Aria.”
DiMezzo said, as law enforcement, any of her own of her deputies “would be fired on the spot, and perhaps charged with crimes, for any brutality or misconduct.”
DiMezzo moved to New Hampshire from Mississippi back in 2018. It will certainly be an interesting election and there is no doubt she will pull some votes from some pretty strange places!