On August 18, the California Secretary of State released a new voter registration tally. See it here. The tally is as of July 7. The previous tally had been as of May 23, just prior to the June 7 primary.
The number of registered voters increased to 18,084,999. The deadline for a new party to qualify for the presidential election was July 7. The law requires registration of .33% of the state total, on the deadline day. Until this new Report of Registration was released, it had been impossible to know exactly what the requirement was: 59,681 registrations. The California legislature eased that requirement in 2014; the old requirement had been registration equal to 1% of the last gubernatorial vote. The 59,681 requirement is thus the lowest registration requirement for a new party to qualify for the presidential election since 1964, when it was 59,297.
Notwithstanding that this was the lowest number of registrations needed since 1964, no new party qualified in California this year.
The percentages for the July 7 tally are: Democratic 45.10%; Republican 27.09%; American Independent 2.52%; Libertarian .645%; Green .435%; Peace & Freedom .39%; miscellaneous unqualified parties .54%; independent voters 23.29%.
The percentages for the May 23 tally had been: Democratic 44.82%; Republican 27.29%; American Independent 2.55%; Libertarian .643%; Green .435%; Peace & Freedom .40%; miscellaneous qualified parties .55%; independent voters 23.32%.
Between these two tallies, Constitution Party registration increased from 288 to 310. Reform Party registration declined from 11,946 to 11.835.
The Constitution Party has 22 more members in California. Yea. (Heavy sarcasm.)
I have not check these numbers for a while. And some of these numbers are indeed eye opening. AIP with 455,000 registrants. WOW George Corley Wallace lives. Popular opinon for many years was that AIP reaped the benefit of its name into confusing people into selecting their their party under the mistaken idea that they were registering unaffiliated. But the California Voter Registration Card was revised by the Secretary of State 8 years ago to clarify that ambiguity. Yet AIP Registration numbers keep going up. For many years the Libertarians tread water around the qualification requirement. With the new lower qualification limit and a California Republican Party so weak they couldn’t beat a drum the Libertarians should be on the ballot for a long time. Peace and Freedom always relied on running candidates for statewide office to pick up 3% of the vote in order to maintain their status. In the late 90s they failed and fell off the ballot. They went into a registration drive and clawed their way back but their number of loyal registrants receded to 70,000 shortly there after. P&F is the big recipient from the State Legislature’s new rule. With out that rule they would be off the ballot again, perhaps for good. The big shocker is the Green Party. If I remember correctly they needed 93,000 Registrants in 1992 to qualify for the ballot. When all was said and done they were comfortably over that mark with registrants topping 100,000. After the Nader 2000 Campaign the Greens numbered over 150,000. But the two succeeding campaigns in 2004 and 2008 turned out to be train wrecks and it cost the Greens dearly. At 78,000 they are little more than half the size of what they were at their zenith. We will see what the Stein Campaign brings in my guess is maybe a couple of thousand new registrants in the months following the election. But given the inevitable resumption of the erosion in their base I would expect the Greens to beat P&F off the ballot.
Bob M.–“George Corley Wallace lives.” If that were only the case. He would be better than any of the candidates we have now.
The Green Party lost 28% of its registrants between 2015 and now, as voters switched to Democrat or NPP in order to vote in the presidential primary. A similar phenomena happened in 2004.
The peak Green registration was 167K in 2004, and this had dropped to 161K by November 2004. Over the next four years, registration had declined to 136K, and then dropped to 118K during 2008. Registration had been fairly flat until 2015 (110K), but then has dropped to 79K as a result of the primary.
The erosion has been particularly severe in the northern part of the state. San Francisco Green registration is down 71% from 2004l and 35% for this election.
People in Los Angeles don’t vote in any elections, so they wouldn’t notice that they couldn’t vote in the presidential primary. They might not even notice that there is an election this November. But if handed a registration card, they might check “Green”. They will have moved twice before 2020, and a registration drive will catch them to register at their new address, and they might or might not check “Green” but it should be enough to keep the party afloat, though without attracting activists.
Peace & Freedom appears to have reached its peak before it re-qualified. Once it requalified, it had a drop from 78K to 68K, perhaps by voters who had been caught up in a registration drive. It had slowly declined to 55K by 2010. In 2014, it apparently had a registration drive that pushed it close to its