Press release from the Reform Party:
The Reform Party of the United States of America is rebuilding their organization. Founded in 1995, the party found mainstream success when Ross Perot obtained eight percent of the popular vote in the 1996 presidential election and Jesse Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota in 1998. Disaster struck in 2000 when Pat Buchanan followers led a takeover of the party, leading to a loss of ballot access and a decade of in-fighting that decimated party membership.
Over the past decade, the party has pulled itself together. The Reform Party has twenty four active affiliates, four of which were added to the organization during the 2012 convention. The position of the party was strengthened when Kevin Kennedy on the board of Belleville, NJ became publically affiliated and Bob Acker won a seat on a local utilities board in Colorado.
In January of 2012, the Reform Party Executive Committee began by chartering a new Communications Committee, chaired by Nicholas Hensley of North Carolina. The committee maintains internal communications and public relations and is composed of professionals with a background in modern marketing techniques.
The committee launched a new website with help of webmasters JD West and Cleave Drummond. This website replaced a page that dated back to the late 1990s. Additions included a press section that is regularly updated with press releases approved by a three member oversight board. “This is a big step forward for the party, which hasn’t released any press announcements in recent memory,” said Hensley.
Their web presence is anchored by the use of social media sites. Daily maintenance of these once abandoned pages has seen in an explosion in followers and activity. “We’ve nearly tripled our Facebook following and doubled our twitter followers. We’ve got new Linkedin, Tumblr and Google+ pages,” said Hensley.
Since 2013 is an off year for federal elections, the committee has turned to infrastructure building and content creation while state and local affiliates run candidates for local offices. “We have a lot of projects we’re working on,” Hensley said “We’re working on press releases, a press kit, an organizer kit with fliers, business cards and all the materials an on-the-ground organizer will need.”
The Reform Party is working to put itself in a better position to win offices during the mid-term, when they hope to reemerge as a viable alternative to Democrats and Republicans.
The Reform Party’s website can be found at www.reformparty.org and can be contacted by email at [email protected].
For Further Information contact:
David Collison
Phone: 832-236-5549
Email: [email protected]
In response to a query as to what they are doing about ballot access, Nicholas Hensley wrote:
There is a ballot access committee. It’s brand new. It’s still being staffed. Once they give me the information, I will gladly write something about that. We’re going to try to get enough ballot access to be able to win the electoral college.
I know there’s stuff going on in Utah. I know we’re looking into Vermont and will have boots on the ground there before 2014. Nevada is going to begin their push soon. There was an attempt in Hawaii before the general election that feel apart, and we are trying again. North Carolina is putting an organization together at the moment and will be putting together plans in the next couple of months.
The news release was specifically about the communications committee and updates about what their doing. Its purpose wasn’t to cover that angle or focus on anything else. It’s going to be involved in a lot of these things, but until we know specifics we aren’t going to talk about them.
About the concerns this time around, let me address those.
Kansas has been renegade for years, and their more aligned with the Constitution Party then the Reform Party. Mississippi was taken over by an outside group and it will probably lead to a court battle. Louisiana’s petition (from what I’ve been told) got to the appropriate governing body a day late because of a hurricane or tropical storm.
I’ve always dreamed of the Reform Party acting as the major third party. There should’ve been a way where third parties (Reform, Constitution, Green and Libertarian) would’ve agreed to use the Reform Party as the party but the Libertarian, Green and Constitution parties as micro-parties; for example, following what the Tea Party tried to do in the GOP.
Clay @ 7
Yawn.
Burp.
Andre could have done better but the reform party failed at ballot access only two states even tried petitioning
Miro,
Not sure how much you have seen it from the campaign end rather than just the blogging end. I’ve done both, and I can assure you that a campaign that is on the ballot in one state and ends up with a few hundred votes is not exactly some organization with staff that is juggling media interview requests and trying to fit in the best ones into a busy campaign schedule.
Yawn.
t4
Only partly.
Granted he was running a low-key campaign, that in no way makes me think I’m entitled to an interview with him of any sort.
At the end of the day, it was his Presidential campaign and he could decide who he wanted to speak or not speak to.
I hope you’re being sarcastic. Hard to tell with text comments sometimes.
I have to agree with Miro about Barnett.
Wikinews had a Reform Party presidential forum last year that included Barnett, Wells, and Steele. The only reason Barnett participated was because Steele demanded it and I believe he inundated Barnett’s campaign (however large that was) with calls and messages.
I tried to contact him a few times afterwards but his e-mail always returned an error message.
However, in 2011, Barnett did participate in a live debate with Milnes. I haven’t seen the video (if one even exists) but it would be interesting to watch.
I would like to take this moment to point out that the Reform Party, while mobilizing social media, made themselves very much unavailable for contact in 2012. To me, it’s a weak spot they can easily fix going into 2013.
At the time, I was a contributor to the electoral encyclopedia “OurCampaigns”. The activities of the Libertarian Party, the Boston Tea Party, the Reform Party, and a number of state races became personal pet projects of mine, and I followed them and did what I could to keep them all accurate and up-to-date. I even went so far as to interview a number of candidates for both the site and local circles. Most were pretty receptive about them, one- Andre Barnett, was not.
Now, I’m just a little local politio living out in the Boonies of MA, so I’m not upset that Barnett’s staff shot me down for an interview, but one thing I was concerned about was how they didn’t make his Convention win very public.
Following the Reform Convention, I inquired to the Reform Party’s National Committee numerous times, over e-mail and through social media, what the delegate totals were. At first, they said they would get back to me, but time went by and they never did. Upon pressing further so as to keep the encyclopedia accurate, they just stopped responding to me entirely.
I know it culminated into at least one FL contributor going so far as to write to their SoS to have Barnett’s name removed from the FL ballot on the grounds that both the Reform Party and the Barnett campaign’s lack of Convention results clashed with Florida’s strict opinions regarding open and fair National Convention results.
These kinds of things normally shouldn’t matter, but we’re discussing a small political party that’s open to being impacted by small things. I hope the Reform Party can reform itself in this off year to be more transparent, just so they can avoid any such issues in the future.
Pat Buchanan’s followers did not “take over” the Reform Party. Perot invited Buchanan to seek the RP nomination and then stabbed him in the back. Does whoever wrote this release actually believe the LP would have been better off if it had nominated John Hagelin, the candidate of Transcendental Meditation?