Minor Party and Independent General Election Discussion

[StateBoiler]

Link thanks to BAN. A revitalized Alaskan Independence Party.

https://www.adn.com/politics/2020/10/18/promoting-god-family-and-country-alaskan-independence-party-reorganizes-ahead-of-election/

Before the (useless) second debate by F&E, can anyone in the know tell me about how the Libertarian, Alliance, and Solidarity Party are doing? Since we’ve already discussed the Greens, PSL, and Constitution to the comparative death—I feel like it’s important to discuss what the Libertarians and ASP are heading.

Have the Libertarians tamed their factional infighting after the primary?

Wouldn't call myself a party insider by any means, but I think most are happy with Jorgensen being the candidate. Think a lot are happy she's the first since Badnarik to not be a former Republican politician.

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There was some ASP Twitter drama this past weekend, past members grousing about alleged party purges and extremists going in. Most people aren't aware of it though, and it seems very inside baseball.

I’m wholly unsurprised by this. Still, may you give more details with links.

Long-ass thread here

https://twitter.com/SamRochadotcom/status/1317298226274267137

Well, I suppose we will see if the American Solidarity Party survives this with its current rhetoric. BRTD must be livid right now about this news.

What in the world is the Alliance Party & Co. even doing right now?

I have to give it to the Alaskan Independence Party, they’ve managed to find a niche in Alaskan politics as a regionalist Constitution-like party, in an era where paleocons are ceasing to be. It’s probably one of the most relevant regionalist parties in the United States in the current era.

As far as decent state-only parties, it's them and the Vermont Progressives (with them far ahead of the AIP). I'll give the New York WFP some love when they grow a spine and run their own candidates against safe Democrats that upsets them.

[StateBoiler]

There was some ASP Twitter drama this past weekend, past members grousing about alleged party purges and extremists going in. Most people aren't aware of it though, and it seems very inside baseball.

I’m wholly unsurprised by this. Still, may you give more details with links.

Long-ass thread here

https://twitter.com/SamRochadotcom/status/1317298226274267137

Well, I suppose we will see if the American Solidarity Party survives this with its current rhetoric. BRTD must be livid right now about this news.

I'd read something that they once selected their board with approval voting thinking it'd be a more holistic approach. You can imagine how that went, each side only voted for themselves, more conservatives were present, and they got all the seats. 1 of the conservatives removed himself in the interest of party unity for a moderate to get on the board. They dropped approval voting after that.

[StateBoiler]

The ASP has always seemed like a very grassroots affair, and like many other third parties, are prone to accepting anybody, including those with wild ideas or passions. That said, the entire narrative seems debatable, it sounds like there were feuding Facebook cliques in 2017-2018 and one won out and instead of staying on as a conscientious opposition, a bunch of people jumped ship. Too bad they didn't go back.

I think this is natural in all parties. It's just the smaller the group, the greater the influence some of these hijackers can have. The difference today is we now have Twitter and the internet where all sleights real and imagined can be easily blown out of proportion.

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http://ballot-access.org/2020/10/24/nationwide-voter-registration-data-by-party/

In the 32 jurisdictions that have registration by party, here are the number of registered voters in each party and the number of independents:

Democratic: 47,106,084
Republican: 35,041,482
Independent & Miscellaneous: 33,696,700
Libertarian: 652,261
Green: 240,222
Constitution: 129,556
Working Families: 49,758
Reform: 9,004
Other Parties: 1,814,973

This data uses the most available figures for each jurisdiction. All are as of September or October 2020, except that New York has no data newer than February 2020, and Massachusetts is August 2020.

In February 2020 the numbers were:

Democratic: 45,715,952
Republican: 33,284,020
Independent & Miscellaneous: 33,530,123
Libertarian: 609,234
Green: 246,377
Constitution: 118,088
Working Families: 50,532
Reform: 6,665
Other Parties: 1,712,747

[StateBoiler]

Democrats say they're pro-choice on abortion; Republicans say they're pro-choice in the markets. Fortunately, both sides can agree that they're anti-choice when it comes to political parties. Amazing how red avs who claim to oppose monopolies will so eagerly jump to defend the two biggest monopolies in this country.

Agree 100%. It's a complete shame that every four years we must choose between two candidates who we have virtually no say in the nominations of. There's no need to pretend like the two-party system is in any way a positive one just because we may like certain candidates of either party.

For better or worse, the voters have had an all but complete say in the nominations of both major parties for over 40 years. This is complete nonsense.

Yes. McCain 2008, Romney 2012, Clinton 2016, Trump 2016, and Biden 2020 were clearly the consensus choice of their whole parties and everyone was happy with it. And none of them were abandoned the day after the election ended by voters or the party either.

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Regardless of what their motives are, the chief role the Libertarian Party plays in national politics is making the two-party duopoly (even the current GOP!) look legitimate by comparison, and serving as a constant reminder to the public that third parties are a sick, sad joke.

American third parties are clown shows because 99% of the country is constantly railroaded into choosing between one of two options, and the only remaining 1% are hardcore ideologues who think "compromise" is a four-letter word. If the Libertarian Party were given an actual chance in a fair, ranked-choice voting system, it would quickly move towards the center, attract more voters, and expel the nutjobs who are currently associated with it.

Well, we'll see what happens in Maine the coming decade.

If anything right now we're so ripe for third parties. Not nationally, but on a local race level. There are large areas of this country that one of the two parties is absolutely dead dead dead due to the nationalization of politics. I'm getting involved in Indiana state Libertarian politics coming up, and this election I'm going to do some data-diving.

1.) No Democrat is going to get more support than Joe Biden will this year for president. Indiana has 92 counties. Anywhere Biden receives less than 40%, that county Democratic Party is dead, will never win an election for anything, should disband, and be replaced for 2nd-party status, aided by...
2.) The Democratic nominee for governor in Indiana this year is beyond horrible. This is mostly due to they could not find anyone else for run. That's how you end up with a Mayor of South Bend deciding to run for president because he thought that was the more winnable race. The governor nominee anyway is the most left-wing the party has ever ran, and recent polling has him in the 25-30% range when the previously established floor for weak statewide Democrat is 37%. The Libertarian is running strong here and looks like he'll get more than 10%. But in a political system where people reflexively vote one party and vote straight ticket and all the Democrat votes are only in a handful of counties, he's likely beating the Democrat for 2nd in some counties, which shows the Democrats should be replaced there for main opposition to the Republicans due to those county Democratic parties being complete failures.

You can apply this thinking beyond just Indiana. You can apply this thinking everywhere except big cities from the Midwest over to the Mountain states. That's a LOT of votes right there. (The reverse can be said for the cities, as I go into in my WFP paragraph below). But I'm going to be doing a mega data dive from this November's results, I need to get some historical data to work out when some of the county Democratic party affiliates in Indiana actually succeeded in electing someone, and hand it to some people. Going to be pretty enlightening I feel, I think most know the death of Bayhism has killed the state party but I want to quantify the extent.

But this is why I'm highly critical for example of the Working Families Party of New York getting on their knees and sucking the cock of Cuomo and the state Democratic Party who then backhands them like an abused prostitute. The largest city in the country the Republicans are a complete non-entity: why are you automatically co-endorsing Democrats? Run your own people in the general and you're instantly 2nd-largest party in New York City. If voters want an alternative, you're the next strongest organization.

What kills third parties best? New York Times said it, although they were talking about Russia:

http://ballot-access.org/2020/10/24/new-york-times-says-russia-keeps-candidates-off-the-ballot-with-technicalities/

This New York Times story is about a Russian local election, in which the incumbent Mayor of a small town wanted an easy re-election, but he also wanted the election to look genuine, so he recruited a janitor to run against him. To everyone’s shock, the janitor won.

The story says Russia is a “managed democracy”, where “elections take place on schedule, but the incumbent virtually never loses. To achieve this, the police squelch real political opposition, and election commissions bump promising candidates off the ballot with technicalities.”

When that happens in the United States, the Times in recent years has not expressed any complaint. This year, when miniscule technicalities kept Green Party presidential nominee Howie Hawkins off the ballot in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the Times either ignored the story, or its news coverage was supportive of the candidate’s removal. In Wisconsin, Hawkins was kept off the ballot because his running mate moved during the petition drive and some of their petitions had the old address listed. In Pennsylvania, a form was faxed in to the Elections Office instead of being attached to the petition. This year, the Green Party was also kept off the ballot in Montana for all office, after Democratic officials invented a procedure to ask voters to retract their signatures that did not exist in the election law, and courts then removed the Green Party. The Times did not cover the Montana story.

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Posted this in a thread about third party vote share:

Blankenship is greatly hurt by this even though he's on the 5th-most state ballots at 18 because the only state of those 5 he's on is Florida. In 2016, Darrell Castle was on 24 in contrast.

De La Fuente is going to get a huge jump in his vote count from 4 years ago (~33k votes, .02% for 8th) just from being on the California ballot. The entities backing him is also somewhat organized unlike his singular personal vehicle he had in 2016, so I think getting above 100k votes would not surprise me.

La Riva is going to also get more votes than 4 years ago (74k votes, .05% for 7th) due to increasing the number of ballots she's on from 6 to 15. Likewise think she'll cross 100k.

Hawkins can perform the exact same as Stein and his vote is going to go down due to going from being on 45 state ballots to 30. He's on most all the big states, largest state he's not on the ballot is Pennsylvania.

Pierce is on the ballot in 16 states, but the only big state he's on the ballot in is New York with the Independence Party. I think he's the Rocky De La Fuente of this election. We'll see if he crosses the "De La Fuente Line", the bare minimum number of votes a presidential candidate that tries can get: 33,136 votes.

Kanye West is on 12 states, but they're medium-sized states at largest. If he finishes ahead of anyone already mentioned it's a demonstration of the power of name value/celebrity, because otherwise he should clearly finish 9th as he's the 9th-strongest candidacy and it's a gap to get up to 8th based on his ballot access.

The "race" if you want to be a political nerd is who takes 5th between Blankenship, De La Fuente, La Riva, and if you want to throw in Pierce and West, go ahead, but they're outsiders at best.

But based on 2016:

Jorgensen down
Hawkins down
Blankenship down
La Riva up
De La Fuente up
Carroll up (strongest candidacy outside of those already mentioned)

remove McMullin's vote, and add in Pierce and West, who combined maybe get about a third of McMullin

There were also 699k recorded write-in votes in FEC results that were not officially assigned to anyone, that's greatly dropping.

Anyone see different? I like the idea of "The Race for 5th".

My gut take is Jorgensen 1.7%, Hawkins 0.5% (due to less ballot access), Blankenship, La Riva, and De La Fuente all around 0.1%, and everyone else less than that. I think Blankenship will finish behind La Riva and De La Fuente.

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Yeah as others have said, Pierce talks well, he just doesn't seem to have much actual policy and even if he's unlikely to actually become President, I'd like some of that.

I've heard that he's openly said this is a rehearsal for 2024, and I'm curious to know what his plan is regarding that.

Presumably he wants a crack at the LP primary? They're still the biggest name in third party politics, and he'll probably have the name recognition after this year.

Considering how badly received Amash was when he floated the idea, along with the break between the party and the Paul clan, I don’t think the Libertarian Party wants outsiders who just “use” the party for their own ends. Unlike the former aforementioned celebrities and Gary Johnson—what does Brock pierce bring to the table?

Even within the Libertarian Primary, outsider Vermin Supreme lost in the end to the more moderate insider. I think the Libertarians have grown into developing a selection system with party members.

That makes sense. Sorry, I haven't paid close attention to the LP since Gary Johnson's 2016 primary. I hadn't realised the party had circled the wagons like that.

I guess I don't know where else Pierce can go? Without some party infrastructure, or a run for a local office (he's a Puerto Rico resident, so that throws up some issues), I just don't see how 2024 will be much better for him.

They had 3 "former Republican" nominees in a row, and while I think most liked Gary Johnson (although most everyone thinks he ran a better campaign in 2012 than he did 2016), Bill Weld being the VP nominee was highly controversial and he only barely won it after Johnson pleaded with delegates for him to be the veep at the Convention, which Weld narrowly won. Amash would've been the strongest person they could have nominated, but he was facing headwinds and would've had to at least fight for it. The most anti-Amash candidate vocal against him was Jacob Hornberger, who ended up losing to Jo Jorgensen in part because his style means he pisses a lot of people off. So I think everyone was kind of relieved with Jorgensen as being a good reflection of the party, she was Harry Browne's VP nominee 24 years ago, it's a woman which checks a box for a party that's always been seen as "a party for men", and she's not a former Republican. Think the Amash reaction though shows you can't just show up a couple months before the Convention and automatically get it. Amash was a sitting Representative that voted for Trump's impeachment. Brock Pierce is a candidate that's a complete small fry this election compared to where Jo Jorgensen finishes. He's not going to get any love simply for that unless he puts time, effort (and money) to try to win the party over.

[StateBoiler]

For the Libertarian Party nationally, I've put together a chart of results. Below is the list of states with the last election where their percentage of the vote went down there. This list I'm sure massively changes tomorrow and becomes heavily "Jorgensen 2020".

1992 Marrou: Texas

Marrou '92: 19.7k votes, 0.32%
Browne '96: 20.3k votes, 0.36%
Browne '00: 23.2k votes, 0.36%
Badnarik '04: 38.8k votes, 0.52%
Barr '08: 56.1k votes, 0.69%
Johnson '12: 88.6k votes, 1.11%
Johnson '16: 283.5k votes, 3.15%

2000 Browne:

Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island

2004 Badnarik:

Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming

2008 Barr:

Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia

2012 Johnson:

Michigan-had write-in status only
Oklahoma-no ballot access nor write-in status

For oddities that don't mean anything: the last time the Libertarians picked a presidential candidate whose surname did not begin with B or J was 1992.

[StateBoiler]

Here's an odd one from BAN:

The Socialist Workers Party says in its newspaper, The Militant, that it will sue the Washington Secretary of State is she releases the names and addresses of the party’s nominees for presidential elector to the public. See the story here.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that the party had a right to keep the names of its campaign contributors private, the party had never before asked that the names of any of its candidates be kept private. And the party’s ability to keep the names of its campaign contributors private expired several years ago, and the party has not asked that it be reinstated.

Considering we're voting for electors, I'm not sure what leg the SWP will stand on other than "threaten legal action so they don't want to be bothered with it and choose not to".

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You know, researching this a bit I’ve found around two parties that could surprise us in being up and coming newcomers that are under the radar. The first is the Alaska Independence Party, needing no introduction. The second is the Working Class Party active in Wisconsin and Michigan, and apparently has its own elected local officeholders. The latter is a democratic socialist party organized around the Trotskyist organ “The Spark”. Outside of the fact that apparently SAlt isn’t active in the Midwest, there is one key difference from it and other parties...

That difference is it’s alignment with Lutte Ouvriere, the most entrenched and radical revolutionary Vanguard party controlled tightly by its cadre in a central committee. Outside of LO having tight control over its international, with it more resembling an more tightly interconnected Second International, this is perhaps the closest throwback to the 1930s. LO literally struck gold with this. For comparison; the SEP are an irrelevant international sex cult and SAlt parties are only connected through the American SAlt through writings in a collective publishing cooperation.

The future of third parties is going to be quite odd going forward. 2024 is most likely going to see continuations of consolidation, election rigging for the duopoly, and genuine growth from disappointment destined to come. Anyway, we have less than a few hours before the polls start opening, and only then will we get good data to extrapolate from. Out of all of this, there’s still no word out on what the Alliance & friends are doing right now, only data showing they are in an incline in membership. Seriously, what exactly are they doing?

https://theallianceparty.podbean.com/e/a-pre-election-update-on-the-alliance-party/

https://theallianceparty.podbean.com/e/alliance-party-state-chairs-discuss-the-upcoming-election/

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The last eight minutes starting at 1:06:25 of the latest episode of the Gadfly third party podcast mentions the Unity Party's presidential candidate Bill Hammond. The rest of the episode is about down-ballot third party candidates who are running in this election. Turns out that the Unity Party was founded in 2004 to draft Wesley Clark as a third party candidate and has the same slogan as Andrew Yang's 2020 campaign. And candidate Hammond is running for love.

Listened to it. The co-host adds nothing to the show and is just reactionary.

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You usually need someone for banter and contrast, it's a common show format.

Get someone that can add something then.

Any 3rd party results comments.

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I think Jorgensen will clear 1% nationally, but she'll be on the lower end. 1.5% looks too far gazing at some states' partial results.

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As of me posting, from Google:

Jorgensen 1.1% - 710k votes
Hawkins 0.2% - 140k votes
Others 0.2% - 139k votes

Think the magic mark for Jorgensen right now is to clear Ed Clark's 1.06% from 1980. That would make her the 2nd-most successful Libertarian presidential campaign ever as far as share of vote.

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All from The Green Papers. Don't have a time so I'll add on Trump's and Biden's vote share to provide a reference point.

Biden 68,867,490 49.96%
Trump 66,733,901 48.42%

Jorgensen 1,570,136 1.14%
Hawkins 312,340 0.23%
West 60,403 0.04%
De La Fuente 58,642 0.04%
La Riva 57,942 0.04%
Blankenship 53,012 0.04%
Pierce 41,383 0.03%
Carroll 21,107 0.02%

These numbers have no write-ins.

Total non-Biden/non-Trump vote 1.62%

[StateBoiler]

Working Families Party and Conservative Party both passed the state's new ballot access threshold. No one else did.

[StateBoiler]

Apocalyptic results for the Green and Constitution Party. The worst result for the former since 2008, the latter in 1996. The Constitution party is terminally over, and the Green Party is going in the woods for a few years—but they will never be relevant again. Still, the Green Party has the state ballot purges to deflect on, so they won’t break apart.

Gloria La Riva massively underperformed. Her political career is done as the PSL central committee is probably going to choose someone else, most likely Eugene Puryear. Still, I don’t think they are “over” as their party membership continues to grow.

Brock Pierce and ASP’s Carroll outperformed heavily.

The major winner though is the Libertarians though.

I thought Jorgensen underperformed some. Clearing Ed Clark's 1980 performance (1.06%) as well as Gary Johnson 2012 (0.99%) still can give a viewpoint of growth though as it's the 2nd-best performance of the party ever for what was pretty much a stock Libertarian candidate.

Hawkins was really hurt by the Democratic militarization of state election boards against the Green Party. That and the splintering of the party pre-election that SocraticGadlfy at his blog had discussed with seemingly every losing Green Party candidate running separately in the general. Not that they got a lot of votes, but further splintering the left when he was trying to consolidate the left beforehand.

Constitution Party need a complete rethink. Blankenship was a bad candidate, but they were not unified around Castle either 4 years ago. Think it's safe to say they've fallen out of the 3 national third parties group.

Alliance Party I don't know what to say as there's no baseline to compare to. De La Fuente will about double his vote count from 2016 but that's because he's on the ballot in California. PSL I view more or less even compared to 4 years ago, but I thought they'd perform better than they did due to leftist activism being higher. American Solidarity Party is up, although starting from a low base.

[StateBoiler]

https://twitter.com/johnrobertgage/status/1324027405367943170

As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, the two major parties will blame everyone except themselves for their own failures.

In the middle of updating. These numbers still do not include any write-in votes:

Jorgensen 1,611,642 1.15%
Hawkins 321,981 0.23%
West 60,857 0.04%
De La Fuente 59,980 0.04%
La Riva 57,363 0.04%
Blankenship 53,949 0.04%
Pierce 41,772 0.03%
Carroll 21,585 0.02%

[StateBoiler]

Marshall Burt won a seat in the Wyoming State House for the Libertarians. Bethany Baldes lost by 32 votes.

[StateBoiler]

Latest count, some write-ins in here, some not.

Jorgensen 1,685,612 1.16% - she will have 2nd-best Libertarian performance ever
Hawkins 339,521 0.23% - better than Cobb 2004 and McKinney 2008, that's about it

The Great Race for 5th!

De La Fuente 63,512 0.044%
Kanye 63,023 0.043%
La Riva 61,742 0.042%
Blankenship 56,121 0.039%
Pierce 43,321 0.030%
Carroll 24,727 0.017%

Carroll and the American Solidarity Party get a few multiples higher in write-in votes than everyone else on this list. There's a lot more grassroots strength for them than anyone else above (not counting the Libertarians or Greens). For example, 1382 write-in votes in Ohio and 1262 write-in votes in Texas (compared to 138 for La Riva). They had a strong write-in performance in 2016 as well considering the size of the party and they were new.

Really the strongest 3rd party presidential candidates after Jorgensen and Hawkins was Kanye followed by Blankenship because neither one had California ballot access while La Riva and De La Fuente did. Later post-election can form results showing share of vote only counting places these people had ballot access in.

Jorgensen finished 3rd everywhere. Closest Hawkins got to her was losing 3rd by 181 votes in D.C. Kanye finished ahead of Hawkins where both were on the ballot in Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Utah. Blankenship finished ahead of Hawkins where both were on the ballot in Tennessee and Utah.

[StateBoiler]

Still don’t know what the liberal electoral alliance pole is doing

They publish a podcast every Sunday, so one should come out tomorrow.

https://theallianceparty.podbean.com

[StateBoiler]

Update:

Jorgensen 1,744,193 - 1.17% (+58,581, +.01%)
Hawkins 354,712 - 0.24% (+15,191, +.01%)

De La Fuente 69,956 - 0.047% (+6,444, +.003%)
La Riva 67,363 - 0.045% (+5,621, +.003%)
Kanye 64,456 - 0.043% (+1,433)
Blankenship 57,190 - 0.038% (+1,699, -.001%)
Pierce 43,608 - 0.029% (+277, -.001%)
Carroll 26,377 - 0.018% (+1,650, +.001%)

Best candidate after these is Alyson Kennedy of the Socialist Workers Party with 6,643 votes so far.

[StateBoiler]

Still don’t know what the liberal electoral alliance pole is doing

They publish a podcast every Sunday, so one should come out tomorrow.

https://theallianceparty.podbean.com

Oh, that is actually pretty unique of them

They put it up. Conversation with one of the party's 2 vice-chairs and its national political director.