Eric Brakey
Hazlitt Policy Analyst
Eric Brakey (Policy Analyst) became a grassroots liberty activist during his senior year of college. In 2012, Eric Brakey served as the Maine State Director of the Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign, organizing the grassroots effort that one reporter called the “biggest political coup in recent Maine history,” winning the state for Ron Paul and electing liberty activists to a majority on the Maine GOP State Committee.
Following the Ron Paul Campaign, Eric Brakey founded the Defense of Liberty PAC to help liberty candidates win election to the Maine State Legislature. In 2014, Eric threw his own hat into the ring and won election to the Maine State Senate, defeating a longtime Democrat incumbent and becoming the youngest State Senator in America at the age of 26. During his two terms of office, Senator Brakey served as the Senate Chairman for the Health and Human Services Committee. Brakey also spearheaded successful efforts through a bipartisan legislature to pass Constitutional Carry, Welfare Reform, Right to Try, the deregulation of medical cannabis, and the legalization of hedgehog ownership.
In 2016, Senator Brakey served as the Maine State Chair for the Rand Paul Presidential Campaign. Senator Brakey also represented Maine as a delegate on the 2016 Republican National Platform Committee. Eric authored many GOP’s platform planks, including abolishing the IRS, auditing the Pentagon, instituting a federal Right to Try law, deregulating nuclear energy, and reasserting a constitutional foreign policy in which only Congress can declare war.
Instead of running for re-election in 2018, Senator Brakey opted to challenge incumbent Angus King for U.S. Senate, earning the Maine Republican nomination for the office. With a strong grassroots campaign featuring dozens of liberty activists knocking doors across all corners of the state, Brakey won a greater share of the vote against the popular incumbent than anyone in state history.
Following the 2018 election, Brakey founded the Free Maine Campaign and organized grassroots pressure campaigns to defeat proposals in the Democrat-majority Maine legislature for “Red Flag” Gun Confiscation Orders and the National Popular Vote.
In 2020, Eric Brakey served as the Republican nominee for Maine Secretary of State.