ALBANY COUNTY — The Albany County GOP elected a new chairman last month: Jim McGaughan, of Bethlehem, who is coming from a three-and-a-half year stint as the chairman of the Republican committee there. 

McGaughan told The Enterprise this week that he got involved in politics after sensing that the area is “in decline,” and decided he could contribute to a solution. 

He says that his goal for the party countywide is to activate like-minded residents who don’t bother voting in the Democrat-run county, along with getting people who typically vote for other parties on board with GOP candidates. 

 “We’re looking to kind of rebuild the party; rebuild the grassroots efforts; communicate with our voters and prospective voters, maybe people that are registered as NOPs or Democrats or something else other than Republicans, but that are like-minded; and also trying to get people that maybe have tuned out and given up and haven’t voted in a long time back and engaged,” McGaughan said. 

He said he feels that his sense of decline is widespread and is why he sees many people leaving the area (though the United States Census shows population increasing for both Albany County and the Capital Region at large, despite population losses statewide).

“We want everybody to have a higher quality of life and have a belief that tomorrow is going to be better than today, and I think that [belief] doesn’t exist right now,” McGaughan said. “There’s a lot of migration from this area of New York in general. A lot of people are leaving for a variety of reasons — crime, high taxes. They just don’t see things going in the right direction.” 

McGaughan said that his family came to the area in the 1850s during the Irish potato famine and that he loves the area enough that “rather than kind of run away, I’d like to have the debates and have the discussion and hopefully find the right answers for this area to head in a better direction.” 

Reversing a long trend of Democrats dominating politics across the county, the GOP, over the past eight years, has made significant inroads, particularly in the rural Hilltowns, where most town boards saw a red wave beginning with Donald Trump’s run in 2016, which has mostly sustained itself. This is despite the fact that more  Hilltown voters are enrolled as Democrats than as Republicans, with a growing number of independents.

The county GOP committee’s previous chairman, Randy Bashwinger, is the highway superintendent in Berne, where he had also been the Berne Republican committee chairman for a time.

McGaughan said he hopes to make similar conversions in more populated and Democratically-entrenched parts of the county, but acknowledged that it may take some time.

“In the Hilltowns there’s something called the law of small numbers,” he said. “There’s less voters, so if you can sway a smaller block, you can sway it red or blue. The grassroots stuff on the Hill is very, very impactful.”

McGaughan said that communication still has a key role in the bigger areas, even if “that kind of change doesn’t happen overnight.” 

“Last year, in Bethlehem, we knocked on over 7,000 doors and we talked to a lot of voters … [saying] ‘Here’s our platform, here’s what we stand for, this is what we believe, this is why it’s important,’ and I think that’s the kind of thing that can sway one way or the other.