On March 20, Bob Healey died, at the age of 58. See this story. He founded the Cool Moose Party of Rhode Island in 1994, and was its gubernatorial candidate that year, polling 9.08%. That made it a ballot-qualified party. In the 1996 election, it had 18 candidates for the legislature on the ballot, the most any party other than the Democratic and Republican candidates had run for the Rhode Island legislature since 1920. Also in 1996, the party elected two nominees to the Hopkinton Town Council, in a partisan election.

In 1998, Healey again ran for Governor, and again got over 5%, thus keeping the party on the ballot for another four years. His percentage that year was 6.28%.

In 2002, he ran for Lieutenant Governor, and got 18.78%, but the party went off the ballot because only the vote for Governor or President counts.

In 2006, he petitioned onto the general election ballot as the Cool Moose Party candidate for Lieutenant Governor, and got 13.41%.

In 2010, he again petitioned for Lieutenant Governor as the Cool Moose Party candidate, and got 39.15% in a race that also included the Democratic nominee and an independent candidate.

In 2014, he was the Moderate Party’s gubernatorial nominee, and he polled 21.43%, the highest percentage for any minor party gubernatorial nominee in the nation that year. Thanks to Jack Dean for this news.

The Connecticut presidential primaries will include nine candidates. The six Republicans are Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump.

The three Democrats are Hillary Clinton, Rocky De La Fuente, and Bernie Sanders. De La Fuente qualified via petition; all the others were put on the ballot automatically because they are discussed in the news media. The primary is April 26.

Filing closed on March 14 for candidates running in the District of Columbia primary. Three parties have their own primaries: Democratic, Republican, and Green. No Republican filed for Delegate to the U.S. House. See the list here.

D.C. defines a “political party” as a group that got at least 7,500 votes for one of the partisan districtwide offices (excluding shadow U.S. Senate and shadow U.S. House). Because there will be no Republican running for Delegate to the U.S. House in November, it should be fairly easy for any party that is not now ballot-qualified to run for Delegate, and to expect to receive 7,500 votes. In 2012, when the Republicans also ran no one for Delegate, the Libertarian nominee, Bruce Majors, got 16,524 votes and gave the Libertarians party status. However, in 2014, a Republican did run for Delegate, and no Libertarian ran, and the Libertarian Party lost its party status.