According to this Newsday story, the Nassau County Republican organization has recruited a 25-year-old nephew of the head of the county Industrial Development Agency to run for Nassau County Executive this year. The organization carried out a petition drive to place him on the Green Party primary ballot, which required 60 valid signatures of Green Party registrants. The story implies the candidate, Phillipp Negron, was not even registered to vote until three weeks ago. If he had been registered to vote in another party, New York election law would not have permitted him to switch his party registration to the Green Party; he would have to have done that last year. The local Green Party organization had not previously been aware of him.
Republicans hold the office, but the race is expected to be close this year. Of course it does not necessarily follow that voters who vote for a Green Party nominee would have voted Democratic if the Green had not been running. Polls for the special U.S. House election in South Carolina earlier this year showed that a large proportion of the people who said they expected to vote for the Green nominee were people who said they had voted for Mitt Romney for President in November 2012. Thanks to Timothy McKee for the link.
Is there a link for that Public Policy Polling poll in which a large proportion of those saying they expected to vote for the Green had voted for Mitt Romney?
In the event, most of them wound up voting for Sanford or not at all, but it would be interesting to see the data.
His petition should have been rejected because of his enrollment status.
Still, the best way for the Greens to avoid situations like this is to field our own candidates in as many races as possible.
In Albany, a Green submitted a petition for mayor simply to block the line from being hijacked by someone else. I don’t think that’s such a bad strategy, in some situations.
We really do need to run more active campaigns in New York State though. The circumstances are as good as they’ve ever been right now.
I think 2014 is going to be an excellent year.
He just enrolled so the petitions are valid.
So the Republicans are supporting spoilers, in a sense. Anything to get elected like the top two primary.
The polls are available on the PPP website.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/
Click on POLLS at the top left, and then in the upper right select the year 2013, which will give you links to their polls for this year.
There were polls on May 5, April 22, and March 26. The first poll was before the primary.
The cross-tabs for April 22 show Platt at 3% of all voters, with 1% of Obama voters, and 5% of Romney voters, and 3% of other/couldn’t remember. That poll showed that of those polled, Rommey had a 50-45-4 advantage. If you multiply those numbers out, it would mean that 81% of Platt supporters had supported Romney. But these are actually tiny subsamples. 796 were polled. 3% of 796 is 24+-4, and Romney voters composed 19 of those 24. Of the 31 voters who didn’t vote for Romney or Obama or could not remember, 1 favored Platt. So your sample is just too small.
In the May 5 poll, just before the special election, Romney had a 55-42-4 advantage, which I suspect was closer to reality (Tim Scott was elected with a 62-36 majority, but he may have received some votes from Blacks).
The May poll showed 3% of both Obama and Romney voters supporting Platt. So there might have been a slightly larger number of Romney-Platt voters vs Obama-Platt voters, but the difference was within the roundoff error, let alone sample error, and response errors.
In the actual election, Platt got about 0.5% of the vote vs. 4% in the poll, so the poll badly missed his support, and I doubt that you can really make any valid conclusions.
Gracias.