The Democratic-Republican Party of New Jersey, which appears on the ballot as the “D-R Party” (because the state won’t print the actual name of the party), had more candidates for congress in 2014 than any other party in New Jersey, other than the two major parties. It had a U.S. Senate candidate and five U.S. House candidates. Here is the party’s web page.
For the November 2015 election, when all of New Jersey’s Assemblymembers are up, the party plans to have a candidate on the ballot in all 40 districts. Each district elects two, so that involves recruiting 80 candidates. New Jersey defines “political party” to be a group that polled at least 10% of all the votes cast for Assembly, a definition that is so stringent, it has never been used since it was created in 1920, except by the two major parties.
Obviously, if any new party is ever to attain status as a “party”, it needs to run candidates for all 80 seats, to maximize the party’s vote. During the last 60 years, the only group that tried to do that was the Conservative Party in 1997. It succeeded in getting 47 candidates on for the 80 seats.
The D-R Party’s lawsuit over whether or not the two major parties should have lost their party column on the November 2014 ballot is still alive, and is waiting a briefing schedule from the State Appeals Court. A New Jersey law says that even qualified parties can’t have a party column on the November ballot unless their primary turnout that year was 10% of the previous election’s general election turnout. If the law had been enforced, there would have been no party columns on the November 2014 ballot, and all Republican and Democratic nominees would have been given the same unsatisfactory ballot format that all other candidates must suffer.
