The Massachusetts Forward Party has reorganized under new leadership and is seeking recognition of the Forward line as a political designation in the state, according to information shared by the party’s state lead.
In an email to supporters sent Friday, Forward Party state lead Keoni Aricayos said the Massachusetts organization completed its formal reorganization earlier this year and has already collected the required signatures to qualify the Forward line as a recognized political designation in Massachusetts.
While the party has not yet publicly announced its new state leadership team, Massachusetts has been an active state for the Forward Party and includes several members serving in national leadership roles. These include former Republican Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey, who currently serves as the party’s executive chair, and John Kingston, a former Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in 2018, who now sits on the party’s board of directors.
Under Massachusetts law, a political designation may be recognized once supporters collect at least 50 valid signatures from registered voters and file them with the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Although designation status does not carry the same benefits as full political party recognition, such as automatic ballot access for certain offices, it allows any candidate to appear on the ballot under the Forward Party label.
To later qualify as a recognized political party, the organization must either have a statewide candidate receive at least three percent of the vote in a state election or enroll at least one percent of the state’s registered voters as party members.
The Massachusetts Forward Party has also indicated it plans to hold its first in-person state convention later this summer. While details are still being finalized, the organization has circulated a survey to gauge interest in participation, with responses requested by June 16.
“political designation’ means that the count of your registered voters is made automatically. You could run as a ‘Forward” candidate no matter whether they were a political party, a political designation, or nothing, and you could register as a Forward Party candidate no matter whether or not Forward was a political designation.
My impression is that all of those, except Forward, have many of the same funders and consultants involved, but it’s hard to say because they keep a lot of things behind closed doors. The general policy consensus of all the above seems to be status quo glide path of the managerial welfare state (not radically faster expansion as on the Fabian left, and certainly not cutting back), banker bailouts, Keynesianism, social issues “middle path” between far left and far right – still Sodom and Gomorrah, but slightly less rapid instalment plan than the pride goeth before the fall parade – and extremism in support of the military industrial complex, atlanticist agenda, surveillance state, globalism – basically the status quo ante neocon – neoliberal elite power sharing agreement subsequently disturbed by Trump, MAGA, Euroskeptics, nationalist movements, BRICS, US radical left, etc.
The elites scheming to create a party or presidential candidacy within a major party to return to the prior hegemony still have plenty of institutional support among financial institutions, superwealthy, investments professionals, deep state, establishment media – but they’ve lost effective control of the GOP, US House, a large chunk of Democrats, information flow with social and alternative media, can no longer count on winning either major party presidential nomination or recruit the caliber of candidates they seek to run a third party or independent campaign.
They keep trying, but their schemes keep backfiring. Whether it’s the aforementioned fizzled parties and campaigns, endless rube Goldberg schemes to take down Trump, their campaign against Russia, health scare fauscism, etc, too many people just don’t buy their twisted propaganda view of the world anymore. Their dominance of the global economy also looks to be on its way out.
These are death throes.
Thank you for that detailed reply. I particularly enjoyed your metaphors “If dollars voted” and “to astroturf a potemkin village popular uprising”.
I will say that I had a less cynical view of the Unity tickets, Americans Elect and (after Mark Penn spoke out against the Mueller Report and the Deep State, and after the Democrats started harassing them) of No Labels, than I did of Bloomberg’s campaign and the NeverTrumpers.
A lot of what you said also applies to the Forward Party, such as aiming for federal offices while largely ignoring local offices, though I guess they are not as absolute in this regard as No Labels is. And the Forward Party does seem to be slightly more transparent about the shadowy money behind it, e.g. CCP Yang.
No Labels is more like Americans Elect in 2012. They only want to run a presidential ticket, and then only if prominent big name individuals who have held top positions in government or other fields agree to run with them. They work their way backwards by getting astroturf ballot access in numerous states and hoping candidates come to them. Both times, predictably, none did, at least not the type they were looking for in terms of combination of prominence/resume and establishment centrist views.
The problem they have is that no matter how many people of the sort they imagine as candidates wish someone like themselves would step up and do that, none of them want to be those people. It would come at a heavy price in terms of negative attacks, lost future opportunities and income, losing friends, and so on.
The other problem they have is that their opinions, while centrist, aren’t popular . They are much more popular on wall street, among DC area lobbyists, establishment media opinionators, and in the upper echelons of the military industrial espionage complex than on main street. If dollars voted, they’d have a shot at being a major party. Their views and modus operandi have a lot in common with the aborted Unity 04 and 08, the Evan McMullin fizzled effort to organize NeverTrumpers, and the failed Bloomberg for President primary campaign.
Both Americans Elect and No Labels ended up being scams by millionaire political consultants of billionaire donors who didn’t understand why the opportunity they were being sold was a mirage. Both times, the money flowed in concealed ways, and secretive insider cabals tried very unconvincingly to astroturf a potemkin village popular uprising. The audience didn’t fall for the ploy to join the cast, and aside from padding the pockets of aforementioned millionaires and the chunks filtering down to thousandaire nomadic petition street hustlers, they ended up doing nothing but wasting a lot of media attention and legal procedure.
In both cases, they positively to not want any down ticket candidates to get any benefit from the ballot lines they created , and scramble with different levels of success in different states to get decertified in time to prevent any such thing.
Same playbook, same predictable results. It’s a safe bet they will be back in 4, 8 or 12 years under a different name doing the same thing all over again with the same exact outcome.
The reason why what they consider extremists are taking over the major parties is that their artificially constructed center did not hold – it was always top down opinions by and for elites, and those views were never actually popular. Now that they’ve lost a lot of institutional control over information flow and politics, it’s increasingly less plausible to stage manage them as popular, regardless of how much dark money gets tapped.
The forward party may have roughly similar issue positioning, but does not appear to be an instrument of shadowy elitists who previously operated behind the scenes and exercised effective control of both major parties and most establishment media. No Labels, like Americans Elect, is those folks scrambling to create a new platform after losing that effective control to genuinely populist uprisings, regardless of how right or wrongheaded . It’s an exercise in futility precisely because those views were never popular and are increasingly less so and because the leaders they seek lack the courage to lead, having actually always been figureheads and followers propped up as pretend leaders.
But, it did redistribute a chunk of income downwards, contrary to general net flow of wealth and power concentration through big government – big corporate collusion, the net effect of which is to take from the poor and give to the rich while pretending they’re doing the opposite.
What is the difference between the Forward Party and the No Labels Party? Obviously they are different entities, but they both want to be the big tent centrist party that appeals to Democrats, Republicans and everyone stuck between them. They both want to endorse Democrats and Republicans rather than fielding their own candidates for federal offices. They both fall into the trap of keeping their goals overly vague for fear of losing appeal to anyone. What is the actual difference and why haven’t they merged yet?