On April 10, Cornel West announced that his vice-presidential running mate is Professor Melina Abdullah, a Californian. See this story.
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The New York Times has this article, saying Republicans want to boost minor party and independent presidential candidates this year. The authors repeated debunked claims about the 1992 and 2016 elections. They say Ross Perot helped Bill Clinton win in 1992, ignoring the exit polls in 1992 that said half the Perot voters said they would have voted for Clinton if Perot had not been running. They also ignore the fact that between July 17 and September 30, when Perot wasn’t running, Clinton was leading in the polls.
About the 2016 election, they say Jill Stein “gave a meaningful – and arguably election-deciding – boost to Mr. Trump by drawing progressive votes away from Hillary Clinton.” Yet the 2016 exit pollsters had extra questions for Stein voters, which reveal that 25% of the Stein voters said they would have voted for Clinton if Stein had not been on the ballot, but 14% of the Stein voters said they would have voted for Trump. Applying those percentages to the actual vote returns in the three states mention in the article (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) Stein did not change the electoral outcome in any state.
The authors are Maggie Haberman, Shane Goldmacher, Jonathan Swan, and Rebecca Davis O’Brien.
On April 9, the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. campaign said it had submitted almost twice as many signatures in Nebraska as are legally required.
See this story.
It’s the same story as in Ohio, which we recently blogged. Probably a lawsuit will be forthcoming in Alabama on this matter, as is likely in Ohio.
Here is a link to the story, and thanks to Thomas Jones for providing it to us. Hopefully, some good will come from these lawsuits for minor party and independent candidates’ ballot access in the future.
In 2020, the Alabama legislature passed HB 272, to move the deadline for 2020 only to August 27, because otherwise the Republican Party would have had a problem with the deadline. It is believed that the Alabama legislature made a similar adjustment in 2011 or 2012, and also 2007 or 2008, to solve the same problem in those two election years. The problem also existed in 2004 and the 2003 session of the Alabama legislature passed HB 127 which made the deadline later but only for 2004.
Of course, Joe Biden is highly unlikely to win Alabama, and Lyndon Johnson won the 1964 presidential election without being on the ballot in Alabama.
On April 9, the Catoosa County (Georgia) Republican Party filed a lawsuit in state court to remove four candidates from the May 21 Republican primary ballot. They are running for County Commission and three of them are Republican incumbents. The Catoosa County Republican Party believes it has a freedom of association right to exclude candidates from its primary ballot if the party organization believes they are not loyal to the party’s principles.
It is true that federal courts in Georgia have permitted the Republican Party in the past to control which presidential primary candidates appear on the party’s ballot, but the section of the law on presidential primaries differs in that regard from the section of the election law governing other office.
The Catoosa County Republican Party may have developed its philosophy by watching Alabama. In Alabama the law has long given parties complete control over who may appear on party primary ballots, and every year the Alabama Republican Party rejects candidates from its primary for ideological reasons, or because a candidate gave money or an endorsement in the past to a nominee of another party or an independent candidate. Catoosa County does not border Alabama but it is physically close to the Alabama border.