No Democrat filed in most of the 8 statewide partisan judicial races this year, so there will be 4 statewide judicial races between only a Republican and a Libertarian. This provides a virtual guarantee that the Libertarian nominee for one (if not all) of those offices will poll more than 5% in November, thus keeping the Libertarians on the ballot for 2008.
Looks like a Democrat filed at the very last minute:
http://www.txdemocrats.org/demswhohavefiled/
My name’s Bob Johnson, I’ll be running as a Republican in the Texas 3rd Congressional District Primary against Sam Johnson. I ran as a Libertarian for Congress in Florida’s 11th Congressional District in 2004. If there are any folks who are Texas Libertarians who would like to help with my campaign in the primary, you can still vote for Chris Claytor (the Libertarian for Congress) in the general election. My PO Box is:
Friends of Bob Johnson
PO Box 867285
Plano TX 75086
214-205-0813
Do the Supreme Court races count? According to the Dems site, they’ve only filed one candidate for the 4 positions. The LP has candidates for all 4 offices. These races, I think, should keep ballot access for 2008.
The Supreme Court races count as they are statewide. At this point there are 6 races for statewide judicial seats where the LP will be facing only a Republican in the general election (barring a petition-based entry of an independent candidate or some other political party.)
In the non-judicial statewide races, all three ballot qualified parties have put forward full slates.
Filling 7 out of 8 statewide judicial races is an amazing turn of events given that 48 hours ago only 2 such LP candidates were identified and the possibility of no 2-way races was very real especially if the Democrats were intent on screwing the LP. (Kudos to Executive Director Wes Benedict and Asst. Executive Director Art diBianca.)
Behind the scenes, though, the Democrats are not keen on hurting the LP as they see us as a tool for helping them fight Republicans. As it turns out, sometimes we are just that. On the other hand we have helped defeat incumbent Democrats in Texas before and we want to do more of that as well.
To this end we rated the incumbent Texas legislators during the last session and have detailed scoring that indicates where it makes sense to run to the right or to the left. Of course in 2 way races we run to win and the Texas LP will have more a lot of those races in 2006 including my own race for Texas State Senate in District 14.
Hooray!
I would hope Libertarians don’t support a Republican in his race. Once I would have been fine with such cooperation. But now that the Republican Party is the most authoritarian of the two major parties I think Libertarians should curse it and never lift a finger to help any Republican. The GOP itself is morally corrupt and the best thing possible is to see it wiped off the map entirely. Then maybe there will be a fresh start. But the party has a leader(Bush) who is the most openly fascist president since FDR.
I can only agree that the Republican Party is almost entirely corrupt and not worthy of my vote. But then I’m not represented by Ron Paul, so I have not had an opportunity to vote for one I’d mostly consider a libertarian. I welcome all ways of getting libertarians in office, especially in a district that votes straight ticket–do you want to maintain the appearance of virtue and get nothing done, or would you like to actually get people in office?