The AP reports the Constitution Party Chuck Baldwin-Darrell Castle ticket has qualified for the ballot in Kentucky, while another AP story reports the Green Cynthia McKinney-Rosa Clemente ticket has qualified in Utah.
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The Utah Greens are more than three, but like here in my home state of South Carolina, they are few indeed. I think that is part of the reason Cynthia McKinney gave for running in the first place, to help establish and grow the party.
In South Carolina Nader supporters reached out to the South Carolina Green Party leadership for help in his successful ballot access drive by petition. This will be his third time on the ballot here, and he could have used the same 10,000 signatures he gathered to create a state party of whatever name he wanted. Instead there will be no structure, no ballot line, and no organization post election day here in South Carolina.
I don’t know that he used paid signature gatherers, not that I mind, but he did not use any volunteers I have heard from either.
I was one of the initial co-chairs of the Nader campaign in WA state. He was running a stupid campaign where he did not want to spend more than $5000, so he would have to file financial disclosure stuff. We couldn’t even speak to him or his people directly, Russel Mokhiber was the go between. It was crazy, but we did surprisingly well in WA. Which built toward ’00. The problem with ’00 was that it was just a Green campaign, where as in ’96 we chose to run him as an independent, becasue the campaign coalition was very broad. Greens, indie lefties, even a few Perotistas. I think WA was the only state where we actually had a campaign office, and the bumperstickers, buttons and yard signs we developed endxed up being used all oveer the country. It was a very dynamic campaign in WA. In ‘oo this did not happen.
I’ll say it again; this campaign, the Nader ’08 campaign should have been the ’96 campaign, if it were, the political world in the US would be way different right now.
All that said, personally, I would have loved to see a McKinney/Nader ticket in ’08, running as independent peace and justice candidates, working toward building a new, broader-based multi-tendency progressive/Left party. But, that’s just me daydreaming.
It’s really hard to say, Peter.
Nader didn’t really “run” in 1996. He barely raised money, barely campaigned and was essentially a glorified draft candidate for the GP.
Nader 2000 was him going all-out at the end of a stronger “pro-third party” attitude in this country that went through the 90s with the Perot and Ventura candidacies.
Post-election, alot of his supporters bought into the nasty Dem propaganda campaign andit translated into anti-third party attitudes in general and anti-Nader attitudes in particular.
I bet petitioners from ALL third parties hear the word “spoiler” alot more now than they did prior to 2000.
Also adding to the lower vote total in 2004 for Nader was the fact that he was sued off of a number of ballots and failed to get on the CA ballot – where he normally gets about 25% of his votes and money. Without the lawsuits and the anti-Nader attacks by Dems after 2000, I think he could have spent far more money on actually campaigning and polled perhaps as many as a 800,000 to a million votes, even with the “Anybody But Bush” mentality.
I think up to a million votes is a possibility this time around, given the renewed ballot access and the fact that he’s raising more money than 2004 and is polling higher.
So much of a third party candidate’s potential is entirely out of their hands. So much depends on the political backdrop, the big issues at the time, the attitude toward third party candidates and so many other X-factors.
Unlike the two major parties, we little guys can’t manufacture our own “big issues” and expect the press and the pundits to ride our wave. We have to react to the reality around us.
The only party I can think of that can give you an accurate idea of their “average” base is the LP, simply because it’s been around for over third years, running national candidates for president over eras both open to and hostile to third party candidacies.
I wonder if Nader’s decline since ’00 doesn’t have to do with him supposedly “spoiling” Florida for Gore.
Old Whig- Did the problem with Castle get fixed in KY? Is he going to appear on the ballot?
They put all their eggs in Nader’s basket, and he dumped them.
O.W.
What happened to the Greens? In 2000, they got 2.7% of the vote and they’ve just been going downhill since then.
473367:
Yes, outdone by Nader. He has no party infrastructure like the Greens do, but he will be on more ballots, raise more money, and will get more votes than McKinney. I would call that outdoing the Greens.
My apologies if my saying given up offended. Until today, I didn’t see any change in the ‘signatures gathered’ table on Ballot Access News and it seemed to me like they weren’t even going to try. I see now they have 200 in Vermont and they should easily be able to get the needed 1000 in a week.
Mike,
This debate is going to get silly and I’d like to call a truce on making outlandish statements about campaigns we really don’t have first-hand knowledge of. Saying that Ralph Nader has no national organization and no volunteer petitioners is obviously an exaggeration on my part, but so is saying that the Green Party has “given up” on ballot access, which is the statement I was responding to. So maybe we can agree that no one should be making wild generalizations about anyone.
As for Ralph v. Cynthia or Ralph v. Greens arguments, I’m not going there either. I didn’t blame Ralph for anything – he’s got as much right to run for President as anyone, and his experience and organizing skills allow him to do a pretty good job at it. That doesn’t mean that the Green Party – which consists of 50 struggling, embattled, eternally squabbling state parties that somehow come together to unify behind a candidate on the first ballot and get onto 30+ state ballots with only a tenth, or maybe a twentieth, of the resources other parties/candidates have – has given up. That’s my point. This thread was about Baldwin and McKinney winning more ballots and when good news about third parties turned into the failure of the Green Party, I spoke up. That’s all.
That’s just silly, 473.
The Nader campaign has a great volunteer base, more staff and plenty of organization in a number of states.
In most ballot access states, Nader has used volunteers and it isn’t name recognition and mailing lists that gets people to sign. Only in states with prohibitive ballot access laws has he used paid signature gatherers.
The Greens in my state barely were able to successfully get the 1,000 signatures they needed to get McKinney on the ballot.
He started out at zero ballot lines and has fought his way onto over 40 of them. The Greens started out at 21 and have only added ten to that number.
Even Rosa Clemente has commented on how disaorganized and “not ready” the Greens are this year.
Ralph is actually campaigning and has been since he announced. McKinney has only really seemed to put real effort in after winning the nomination. Before that, she was barely trying.
And McKinney has just as much name recognition as Bob Barr. There’s no reason she shouldn’t at least be able to raise the money that he does. Hell, she has more name recognition than Baldwin does, but he’s on more ballot lines right now. And he has even less money than she does.
And Nader does have downticket allies in several states like CA, DE and others. He’s also working to expand the Peace and Freedom Party into multiple states and has committed to growing them through 2010. And he has offices in at least four states.
I’m just a little bit tired of the Greens making excuses for themselves and grumbling about Ralph Nader.
If they have so much more volunteer base and structure and organization than Nader, I can’t see why they can’t outdo him on ballot access. Instead of rationalizing, why not step it up and prove me wrong?
“Given up?” “Outdone by Nader?” It’s the exact opposite! Ralph Nader has no organization other than his DC staff and gets on more ballot lines due to his name recognition and forty years of adding names to his mailing list. This allows him to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars that he spends on professional signature collectors to get him on ballots where he has no party, no organization, no office, no downticket allies, etc. This is great for Ralph, but it doesn’t mean that the Green Party has given up on anything. It will be on at least 30 ballots having used almost no paid petitioners at all. It will also be running 300 candidates for federal, local, and state office this November, 298 more than the Nader campaign.
By my count, The Greens were going to end up with 33 (including DC, but not NC) as Vermont is an easy ballot line.
It looks to me like the Greens have pretty much given up on ballot access. Right now they are looking at 31 states plus DC(32 if the N. Carolina lawsuit pans out). They will be outdone once again by Nader.
I see, thanks for the story.
The Desert Greens are the tiny one.
They were created after the 2004 election, when the larger faction broke with party affiliation rules and put Ralph Nader on the ballot rather than David Cobb, because of the latter’s “safe state strategy”.
Now, the GPUS was certainly within its right to retaliate by calling for a disaffiliation vote of the GNC for the Utah party. They didn’t.
No such vote happened.
Instead, they simply created a second party made up of a tiny group of Cobb supporters (I’ve only seen evidence that three of them exist) and “transferred” the affiliation from the larger group to the tiny one. This tiny group called itself “the Desert Greens”.
This was intolerable. If they wanted to affiliate the tiny group, they should have first disaffiliated the larger one and had the GNC actually vote on it.
The larger faction, while they certainly ran far more viable campaigns than the tiny one, seemed to get caught up in their battles with their smaller counterpart and eventually lost their ballot line.
The tiny faction still exists, mostly online, but couldn’t even muster the troops to get 1,000 valid signatures for McKinney and had to call for outside help.
What remains of the larger group is backing the Nader/Gonzalez ticket this year.
So, really if you want to be real, there isn’t ANY Green Party in Utah, but there’s a tiny group that call itself one and is recognized by the GPUS.
Mike Gillis,
Which one was which? The Deseret Greens were the active ones,right?
There was technically, one and a half Green Parties in Utah. The larger one and the three person party recognized by the GPUS.
The larger one ran a few good candidates (the smaller one existed mostly online and on paper), but they both spent far more time fighting each other than they did acting like political parties.
And in the end, there really isn’t much of any Green presence in UT now, sadly. I think most of the McKinney supporters who petitioned her onto the ballot were from out of state rather than UT Greens.
Hmm, don’t know abt socialists, but there are a lot of environmentalists, and the GP in UT has been active for many years (actually, weren’t there two competing GPs in that state for awhile?)
But, we can be certain that there are plenty of Know-Nothing nativists and bible thumping reactionaries in Kentucky, Pastor Chuck should be well recieved.
I cant imagine their are that many socialists or black nationalists in Utah…