On April 13, the Michigan House Elections & Ethics Committee passed HB 4530. It moves the non-presidential primary from August to the second Tuesday in June. It would not take effect until 2023. It would have no impact on the petition deadlines for independent candidates or new parties.
Two Wisconsin state senators have introduced SB 250, which would end political party nominations for U.S. Senate and U.S. House. Instead, all candidates for those offices would appear on a single primary ballot, and then only the top five candidates could appear on the November ballot. The November ballot (but not the primary) would use ranked choice voting. Here is the text. The bill has 20 co-sponsors in the House. It was introduced March 25, and has not yet had a hearing.
If enacted, the bill would probably result in a complete absence of minor party candidates on the November ballot for U.S. Senate, because there are always so many Democrats and Republicans that run for that office, minor party candidates can’t place in the top five. But for U.S. House, there would be some districts in which a minor party candidate did qualify for the general election ballot, because not as many major party figures run for U.S. House.
California and Washington have had top-two systems, and the data from these two states can be used to predict what would have happened if those states had top-five systems instead. No minor party candidate in California or Washington has placed as high as fifth for any U.S. Senate primary, in the history of their top-two systems. There have been seven US Senate primaries in the two states:
Washington 2010: highest minor party candidate, a Reform Party member, placed 12th
California 2012: highest minor party candidate, a Libertarian, placed 9th
Washington 2012: highest minor party candidate, a Reform Party member, placed 8th
California 2016: highest minor party candidate, a Libertarian, placed 10th
Washington 2016: highest minor party candidate, a Libertarian, placed 6th
California 2018: highest minor party candidate, a Libertarian, placed 15th
Washington 2018: highest minor party candidate, a Libertarian, placed 12th
Florida has an election law that says, “A political advertisement of a candidate running for nonpartisan office may not state the candidate’s political party affiliation…A candidate for nonpartisan office is prohibited from campaigning based on party affiliation.”
On April 15, a candidate for school board in Escambia County filed a federal lawsuit against that law. Hetherington v Lee, n.d., 3:21cv-671. Here is the Complaint. Thanks to the Institute for Free Speech for the link.
On April 14, the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee passed HR 51, which makes most of D.C. a state. The part of D.C. that would not be inside the new state consists of the White House, the Capitol, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, the Mall, and a few other federal buildings.
Geoffrey Skelley, an elections analyst for FiveThirtyEight, has this column about the findings of a 2016 political science book, Independent Politics. The authors of the book did many social science experiments, and determined that 75% of people who identify as independent voters are actually strong supporters of one of the two major parties. The Skelley column doesn’t seem to have any new data, but was written to make the book’s findings better known. Thanks to PoliticalWire for the link.
