The Socialist Party will be holding its national convention this weekend, October 16-18, in Milwaukee, WI. Details here.
Featured speaker will be Angela Walker, who is seeking the party’s nomination for vice president. Full list of prospective presidential and vice presidential candidates below:
For President:
Frank S. Annunziata (New York)
Timothy S. Black (California)
Christina Branstator (Michigan)
Sol Eure (North Carolina)
Elijah D. Manley (Florida)
Emidio “Mimi” Soltysik (California)
Dean Capone of Florida had been seeking the party’s presidential nomination, but has withdrawn.
For Vice President:
Timothy S. Black (California)
Christina Branstator (Michigan)
Sol Eure (North Carolina)
Angela Nicole Walker (Wisconsin)
Michael Anthony Welch (Virginia)
Steven White (Michigan)
If anyone is there, what are their ballot access plans?
Richard Winger says that Soltysik is the frontrunner for Prez, and Walker for VP. Convention is underway, presidential ticket chosen tomorrow.
Green W o Adjectives:
Well, what about we libertarians who think taxation is theft? Do Greens assume that once in power, they will be able to rape the taxpayers?
Maybe, a bit.
That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but you are basically correct.
As with all minor parties, their principles don’t even make the list of “impediment(s) to their success.”
As IPR readers know well, in many ways, its damn near illegal to be anything other than a D or R.
I don’t think their principles are the biggest impediment to their success.
The principles of the SPUSA were revised recently but remain quite admirable.
http://www.socialistparty-usa.net/principles.html
Theoretically, the SPUSA is distinct from the other “socialist” parties that get coverage on IPR in that SPUSA is a democratic socialist, non-Leninist organization.
Based on my readings in history, I have tremendous respect for the historical and moral legacy of the SPA.
The SPUSA seems to have been founded in 1973 to reignite the old SPA’s tradition of political independence, but it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere in terms of mass support.
Sawant is with a party that has socialist in its name, Sanders is widely known to be a socialist and readily answers to it when asked. The problem that the Socialist Party USA has is less with its ideology or its name and more with its poor organization.
@Winger 9:02 “The last time a party nominee of a party other than Democratic or Republican was elected… in the US Senate was 1970”
Joe Lieberman was elected to the Senate as the nominee of Connecticut for Lieberman in 2006.
All of Bernie Sander’s electoral victories have come when he used the ballot label “independent”. The last time a party nominee of a party other than Democratic or Republican was elected to the US House was in 1949, when Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was elected from New York city in a special election as the Liberal Party nominee. He defeated the Democratic and Republican and American Labor Party nominees with 50.7% of the vote. The last time in the US Senate was 1970, when Conservative Party nominee James Buckley won in New York.
It is odd. I’ve heard it said that WW1 and Wilson smashed the Socialists and they never quite recovered. Add the Red Scares and that really poisoned them in mainstream America. I don’t know how accurate this is, It’s never really been a major topic for me.
Though something I find odd is how many Socialist parties are really some form of Communist orthodoxy. Like Sawent is a member of the Socialist Alternative party, which is apparently a Trotskyist offshoot? And other Socialists parties seem to be Communist in all but name. But then you have the other parties that are Socialist but not Communist, and I know there are some with one label who hate those of the other… it gets very confusing. I think that’s one reason why none of them have really taken off. Along with the factional infighting, the word Socialist itself can mean so many different things and positions, while say Libertarian at least in a third party context does not.
True, but is that cause or effect?
An excellent point.
@Andy: It probably doesn’t help that there are several other parties that have the word “Socialist” or “Socialism” in their names. If the Libertarian Party had to compete with a Libertarian Workers Party, a Libertarian Equality Party, and a Party of Libertarianism and Liberation, I’m sure they would be much worse off than they presently are.
Whenever I post my chart showing that the House only has Republicans and Democrats in it (compared to other national legislatures), somebody invariably chimes in that (Senator) Bernie Sanders should be shown as a non-Dem, and they’ll often claim he is a member of the “Socialist Party.” A lot of people are surprised that Socialists aren’t actually one of the major alt-parties (L/G/C), don’t have nationwide ballot access, etc., and that Bernie Sanders (and Sawant, for that matter) has nothing to do with them.
They are, perhaps uniquely among American minor parties, often assumed to be much bigger based on their name recognition and past history, than they actually are. They’re more like the Prohibition Party- once a big deal and the largest third party, but now just a rump cadre of hardliners doing little more than keeping the name alive. Maybe not quite that dead, but closer to that than the Greens or C.P. or Libertarians.
Still, with self-described socialists Bernie Sanders and Kshama Sawant going mainstream, you’d think a party called the Socialist Party could drum up more support.
Now that I think about it, maybe what I’d heard was last Socialist and accidentally got that confused with last third-party. As always, Richard is quick with the precise facts. I will defend Milwaukee’s reputation to count as a “major city” in a way Reading, PA and Bridgeport, CT do not, though. đŸ˜‰
It was also because of the Socialists that nonpartisan elections were instituted in Milwaukee. That started in 1914, during the term of a Democrat-Republican Fusion mayor sandwiched in between two Socialists. The fusionists though they would do better without ballot labels, in nonpartisan elections, With a brief exceptions though, Socialists still controlled the Mayor’s office from then until Ziedler left in 1960.
One could say the last major city to have a third party mayor was New York city. In 1969 John V. Lindsay ran on the Liberal Party line, and had no other line, yet he still won.
There were other cities that were still electing Socialist Party nominees to city office after World War II, including Reading Pennsylvania and Bridgeport Connecticut. And those cities had partisan city elections, whereas Milwaukee had nonpartisan city elections.
I’m tempted to stop by, but then I remembered I find my own party’s conventions barely tolerable, so I’m probably not paying $20 to hang out with three dozen Socialists crammed into a converted storefront downtown. But if I change my mind on that and end up wandering that way, I’ll report here on what I find.
I will add some historical perspective: Milwaukee was probably the strongest bastion of the Socialists back in their heyday. It was the last major American city to have a third-party mayor, with Socialist Frank Zeidler from 1948 to 1960. Before that, in the early 20th C., the “Sewer Socialists” made Milwaukee into the largest, and perhaps only, bastion of the Socialist Party as the dominant governing party. They also served in a coalition-like arrangement, as the Milwaukee branch of what was branded statewide as the Progressive Party, under Fighting Bob LaFollette. For a while there, the statewide Republicans and Democrats even ran fusion tickets against the Socialist/Progressive coalition.
When the old Socialist Party of America was refounded in its modern form as Socialist Party USA in 1973, it was Frank Zeidler who led the charge, serving as their longtime national chair and 1976 presidential nominee. As recently as 2000, they had a candidate get 19% for Mayor of Milwaukee (in a nonpartisan top-two primary). Milwaukee hosted the first SPUSA convention, and has hosted several others since then.
Kind of a shame they couldn’t find a better venue (you can see a pic in the link). There’s no shortage of reasonably cheap and better ones in the city, even for something that size. But I think most of their members in Milwaukee have since wandered over to the Greens, or maybe some in the new Working Families affiliate. That’s serving as a vehicle for the liberal wing of the Democrats to challenge some of the more moderate Dems for (nonpartisan) city and county offices. So the left-wing alt-party scene isn’t just the Socialists in Milwaukee anymore.
“What is the difference between a Socialist and a Democrat?” The question that Debbie Wasserman Schultz could not, or would not, answer.
Mimi Soltysik stands a good chance of being the presidential nominee, as he has been an activist and candidate, and is involved in an important lawsuit against the top two system in California that prohibits the Socialist ballot label in the primary.