On October 26, the Arkansas News Bureau indicated that Green Party nominee Richard Carroll appears likely to be elected to the Arkansas State House of Representatives. See this report, about 9 paragraphs down. The extensive article also mentions, but does not emphasize, that most state legislative races only have one nominee on the November ballot.
Other minor party legislative wins are also likely. All six of the Vermont Progressive state house members are running for re-election, and are expected to be re-elected. The Vermont Progressive Party hopes to win some new seats as well.
The New Hampshire Libertarian Party has a handful of candidates for the State House who are running to win. The Vermont Libertarian Party has one nominee who also won the Republican nomination, and he could conceivably win.
In Montana, Constitution Party state house member Rick Jore can’t run for re-election due to term limits, and the party has no candidate in that district.
Are the Progressive Party candidates stand-alone candidates for that party, or are they fusion candidates with the Democrats?
The Progressive Party runs stand alone candidacies. At one point, most of their officeholders came from the Burlington area, but I believe they now have at least one state house member from another part of the state. They are not a fusion party. So far as I know, from reading B.A.N., Vermont does not practice fusion.
the party’s website is here: http://www.progressiveparty.org/
Christopher Pearson, David Zuckerman, Paul Cook, Cindy Weed, Winston Dowland, Dexter Randall, are stand-alone Progressive Party nominees for State House. Susan Davis, Nancy Potak, Mollie Burke, Sarah Edwards, and Sandy Haas, are on the ballot for State House as “Progressive, Democratic”.
John Bloch, for State Senate, is just “Progressive.”
There is one Democrat running for the legislature who also has the Progressive nomination. That is Tim Ashe, running for the State Senate.
For some reason, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Alaska have elected the majority of third-party legislators in recent years.
Other states that have elected minor party state legislators in the last 30 years are California, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, and New York (in a special election, a New York candidate nominated by the Independence Party and no other party won the election).
In my list of Vt Progressives above, I forgot to mention Ellen Garneau.
Vermont doesn’t have fusion candidacies like New York, but many candidates appear with more than one party listed after their name. Our current Republican Governor has run for State office as an R/D as often as he has run against a D. If one of the major parties does not field a candidate in their primary, it is usually easy for another candidate to win that by write in. In 2006, one of our candidates ran as a Prog/D/R.
The important piece is after the election, what party those candidates caucus with. We hope the Progressive caucus will expand by 1-4 seats next week.
Now, if the Green is elected, let’s see if the GP can keep the Dems from “wooing” the potential GP member of the Arkansas legislature!
Deran has a good point. I believe Carroll was a “lifelong Democrat” before he was recruited by the Greens. This situation highlights another quirk of the restrictive ballot access laws in some states: Often, once a certain date passes, the only way a candidate can get on the ballot is with the nomination of a qualified minor party. Parties in this situation attract a lot of short-term acquaintances. Whether Carroll is serious about sticking with the Greens will only become apparent after the election. Hopefully he is.
The Green Party has other state legislative candidates who have a reasonably good chance of winning. One is Farheen Hakeem in my own district in Minneapolis. The Greens are always competitive in several of the districts in Portland, Maine, as well.
Let us hope that the Progressives win the 1-4 seats they’re looking for, the Libertarians win Rex Bell’s seat (in Indiana,which im told is competitive) as well as their hopefuly seats in New Hampshire and Vermont, the Greens win the seat in AK, Minneapolis, and a few in Maine, and the CP wins Janine Hansen’s seat in Nevada.
Richard Carroll is an honest man. He’s also a strong progressive on most issues. So when he says he will serve as a Green if elected as a Green, I believe him.