Libertarian Chad Perry has won his run-off against his Democratic opponent. The office, Justice of the Peace, ward 7, Calcasieu Parish, is a partisan race. Here is a link to the returns. Scroll down to Justice of the Peace.
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Here is a link to the Louisiana Secretary of State’s web page, showing election returns for U.S. Senate and two U.S. House run-offs. Republicans are winning all three races, as expected.
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.
On December 5, Die Linke gained its first premiership of a German state. See this story. Die Linke, which means “The Left” in German, was founded in 2007. It represented a merger between the old Communist Party that had ruled East Germany, and some other groups.
Thuringia state comprised the southern-most portion of East Germany before reunification. Die Linke does not have a majority of the members of the Thuringia parliament, but the new Premier, Bodo Ramelow, put together a coalition that includes the Social Democratic Party and the Green Party.
The Libertarian Party had candidates for the office at the top of the ballot in 35 states, plus D.C., last month. The 36 candidates appear to have polled approximately 1,475,000 votes. The exact number can’t be known until December 15, when New York releases its official election returns. By comparison, in 2010 the Libertarian Party top-of-the ballot nominees polled 1,015,009. The increase in the Libertarian vote was 44.8%.
The Republican Party vote decreased for the top-of-the-ballot offices from 43,507,666 to 40,851,521, a decrease of 6.1%.
The Democratic vote decreased from 41,043,721 to 36,759,972, a decrease of 10.4%.
The Green Party vote decreased from 508,041 to 405,621, a decrease of 20.2%. The main reason for the Green Party change was that it had a candidate for Governor of California in 2010 who polled 129,231 votes, but in 2014 no such candidacy was permitted.
The 2014 numbers will increase somewhat when New York and Ohio complete their tallies.