The June 1, 2024 print issue of Ballot Access News carried a chart showing the number of registered voters in each party, in each state. At that time fourteen states were providing data on the number of voters registered in the No Labels Party, and the national total for No Labels was 112,016.

Since then, there is new data from nine states, and in eight of them, the number of people registered in No Labels has risen. Here are the nine states, with the June newsletter data first and the July (current) data next:

Colorado: 7,969; 9,266
Delaware: 1,768; 1,755
Kansas: 39; 242
Maryland: 234; 1,858
North Carolina: 7,799; 14,208
Oregon: 2,183; 2,569
South Dakota: 19; 26
Utah: 2,095; 2,447
Wyoming: 14; 71

On June 1, the ballot-qualified Legal Marijuana Now Party of Nebraska nominated Cornel West for president.

The Republican National Convention begins on Monday, July 15. There is a strong recent tradition that the front-runner for the presidential nomination always chooses the vice-presidential running mate informally before the convention starts. This tradition has been unbroken in the Democratic and Republican conventions in all cases since 1980.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan didn’t express his preference for George H. W. Bush for vice-president until after the presidential roll-call, near the end of the convention. Reagan took a long time an unusually long time to choose Bush over former President Gerald Ford as his running mate.

Since then, the range of days between the presumptive presidential nominee expressing his or her preference for a running mate has varied from one to twenty days before the start of the convention. The longest advance decision (for tickets that weren’t running for re-election) was the Democratic choice in 2004, when John Kerry expressed his opinion twenty days before the opening of the convention. The shortest was the Republican convention of 1988, when George H.W. Bush didn’t express his opinion until one day before the convention opening.