On February 12, Lyndon LaRouche died at the age of 96. LaRouche was once a member of the Socialist Workers Party, but he formed his own party in 1973, the U.S. Labor Party. It placed nominees on the ballot in 1974, 1976, and 1978. LaRouche was the party’s 1976 presidential nominee. He polled 40,043 votes.
In 1979 he dissolved his U.S. Labor Party, and started having its members run in Democratic primaries. He himself ran in Democratic presidential primaries in 1980, polling 177,784 votes in those presidential primaries. LaRouche supporters have been running in Democratic primaries for various offices ever since, and a few of them have won Democratic nominations for U.S. House and state office. Two of his followers won Illinois Democratic primaries in 1986 for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State.
LaRouche did not run for president in the general election of 1980, but he did run in the general elections of 1984, 1988, and 1992 as an independent, even though he had also run in Democratic presidential primaries in all those years. In the general election, he polled 26,333 votes in 1992; 25,562 votes in 1988; and 78,807 votes in 1984. In the general election of 1984, he was the only third choice on the ballot in Texas and Virginia. No minor parties got on the ballot in those two states that year.
LaRouche and his organization won several important election law court precedents. In Texas, he won a decision from the Texas Supreme Court saying that states may not bar candidates from a presidential primary ballot just because they have been convicted of a felony. That will be a noteworthy precedent if any state passes a law keeping presidential candidates off the ballot if they don’t reveal their income tax returns. LaRouche v Hannah, 822 SW 2d 632 (1992).
In New Jersey and Utah in 1984, he won decisions striking down the early petition deadlines for independent presidential candidates (both of them were in April). In California, he won a state court decision that said when the state puts candidates on presidential primary ballots automatically if they are discussed in the news media, the state must not be too stringent in its definition of “news media” (the LaRouche organization had its own weekly newspaper).
By running in 1992 presidential primaries and then in the general election as an independent, LaRouche set nine precedents that “sore loser” laws don’t pertain to presidential primaries. He set these precedents in Alabama, Arkansas, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin. LaRouche created more such precedents than anyone else in history except for John B. Anderson, who set them in Connecticut, D.C., Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Oregon. However, since then, Alabama, Arkansas, and Michigan have chosen to ignore these precedents, and the Ohio law has been altered to specifically bar “sore losers” in presidential elections.
LaRouche’s death means that the sole surviving presidential candidate from the 1976 election is Jimmy Carter.
