Montana requires a petition of 5,000 signatures for a group to become a qualified party. The Montana Green Party now has 3,000 signatures. The deadline is March 15, 2018. Assuming the petition succeeds, it should be easy for the party to poll enough votes in November 2018 to remain on the ballot. Montana has three statewide races up in 2018, including Clerk of the Supreme Court, a partisan race in which voters don’t care very much who wins, so they are quite willing to vote for their favorite minor party.
The last time Clerk of the Supreme Court was up, in 2012, the Libertarian Party was in a two-way race with a Democrat, and the Libertarian nominee, Mike Fellows, received over 43% of the vote and carried a number of counties. Currently the Libertarian Party is the only qualified third party in Montana.
I’m surprised that in Montana, the Republicans let a statewide office race happen without a candidate. It’s not like the Republican Party is weak there, so that’s odd. Also, if there was a Republican in the race, obviously the result for the Libertarians would have been much worse, though considering Montana, I could still see as much as 10% depending on the candidates involved.
None of that is to take away from the Green Party’s success there, or their overall hopes in electoral politics. If they have that many signatures at this point and there’s that much time left, it seems really close to a guarantee that they’ll get it, though of course it shouldn’t stop them from trying hard to make it a fact. If only it would be that relatively easy for third parties in Indiana. Oh well, I can dream.
Oh, and happy Thanksgiving, Richard and all.
It’ll be interesting to see how many candidates they put up. I have seen the Illinois and Maryland Green Parties have amassed many candidates already.
In 2012, nobody filed for the Republican nomination. There was an effort to qualify a nominee by write-in votes, which required votes equsl to 5% of the votes cast for the office in the previous general election. From a news article at the time, it appears the effort was not that organized – there was a comment from the would-be candidate that they wouldn’t object.
“It is true,” Greenwood said Thursday. “I wasn’t the initiator, but I am going along with it.”
Bowen Greenwood had intended to file for the office on the final day, but made a mistake and failed to do so. Greenwood received 4,442 of the needed 11,186 votes.
Montana is odd in that Supreme Court justices are elected in non-partisan races, but the clerk of the court is elected as a partisan office. The current clerk, Ed Smith, has been elected every six years since 1988.
A Libertarian candidate has gone head to head against a Democrat for statewide office a few times. The Libertarian candidate result is in parenthesis.
2012 Clerk of the Court (43.1%)
2000 Clerk of the Court (26.5%)
1996 State Auditor (17.1%)
1994 Clerk of the Court (31.0%)