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.
Pennsylvania still won’t permit out-of-state circulators to work on petitions for candidates running in primaries. That policy is being challenged by a lawsuit filed in January 2016, Benezet Consulting v Cortes, m.d., 1:16cv-74. A status conference in the case is set for April 20 at 11 a.m. in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg.
The case had been filed by a Michigan resident who wanted to circulate a Rand Paul primary petition. The judge denied injunctive relief on January 27 on the grounds that the lawsuit had been filed too late, but that is no barrier to her later ruling that the restriction is unconstitutional.
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.
According to this New York Post story, some persons attending the Republican national convention in Cleveland are altering their hotel reservations to include one or two more days. The official dates of the convention are July 18-21, but if the convention itself takes more than one ballot to choose thew nominee, the convention may not be over on July 21.
This fairly lengthy New York Times story talks about the hopes and plans of Republican Party leaders who are so opposed to Donald Trump that they are thinking of independent candidate activity. Toward the end of the story, Nicholas Sarwark, national chair of the Libertarian Party, is quoted.
