GOP Senate Hopeful Who Blasted Yacht Club Event Served On Yacht Club Board

Massachusetts State Rep. Dan Winslow (R), one of three candidates for his party’s nomination in the upcoming special election to fill Secretary of State John Kerry’s Senate seat, won a GOP straw poll Saturday. He then ended the event on a hypocritical note: After giving his speech to the party faithfuls, Winslow tried to disassociate himself from the event’s location, the Danversport Yacht Club. “I am not a tea and crumpets Republican,” he said:

“They gave us three minutes to speak today; three minutes is longer than I ever wanted to spend in a yacht club,” Winslow said. “I am not a tea and crumpets Republican. I am here because there are activists here. I am running a grassroots campaign.”

Winslow’s professed enmity toward yacht clubs is apparently newly found: as recently as 2011, the candidate disclosed that he served on the board of directors for the Pamet Harbor Yacht & Tennis Club. Both Danversport and Pamet Harbor could well benefit from HD1965, Winslow’s proposed bill to repeal the sales tax on the sale of boats built or rebuilt in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

As ThinkProgress reported last month, Winslow’s attempts to spin himself as “from the middle class” are not matched by reality. A ThinkProgress review of Winslow’s financial disclosure filings showed he owns two homes and earns more than $160,000 annually.