Several months ago, Michael O’Connor, a township commissioner in Abington Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, changed his voter registration to list himself as a member of the Working Families Party. Abington Township is a large township, with a population of 55,310. Township commissioner in Pennsylvania is a partisan office. O’Connor has been a member of the Board since 1995, and in the past he has always been elected as a Democrat.

O’Connor is up for re-election this year, and he intends to seek re-election as the Working Families Party nominee. That almost certainly means the battle for his seat in November 2011 will be a three-cornered race.

The Working Families Party has elected people to municipal and county partisan office in New York and Connecticut, who were not the nominees of any other party. It is never before had any nominees in Pennsylvania. It is ballot-qualified in Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Oregon, and South Carolina, and was once ballot-qualified in Massachusetts. Generally it doesn’t run its own nominees, and instead cross-endorses Democrats, or, sometimes, Republicans. Generally the party only gets on the ballot in states which permit two parties to jointly run the same nominee.