Kentucky State Senator Damon Thayer, leader of the State Senate and a Republican, will decide by March 5 whether to introduce a bill to let candidates run simultaneously for President or Vice-President and either house of Congress. March 5 is the deadline for bills to be introduced in the Kentucky legislature.

If Senator Thayer introduces this bill, it will be to help U.S. Senator Rand Paul, whose term is up in the 2016 election and who may run for President that year. Other individuals who ran in the the general election in the same year for President and either House of Congress are Henry Clay in 1824, James Garfield in 1880, William Lemke in 1936, John Schmitz in 1972, and Randall Terry in 2012.

Clay and Lemke were re-elected to the House in the years in which they were running for President, but neither won his presidential race. Clay was re-elected to the House on August 2, 1824, and ran for President that year as well. There were no party nominees for President in 1824; candidates ran as individuals. Clay won all of Kentucky’s electoral votes in a popular vote held in November but he did not win the presidential election nationally.

Lemke was the Union Party presidential nominee and he was simultaneously re-elected to the House from North Dakota as a Republican. For president within North Dakota, he polled 13.4%.

James Garfield was elected to the U.S. Senate by the Ohio legislature early in 1880, and he was nominated for President at the Republican national convention on June 8, 1880, and he won the presidential election. He had not sought the Republican nomination for President, and had made the nominating speech for presidential candidate John Sherman at that convention. Garfield himself did not receive more than 2 votes for president at the convention until the 34th ballot.

John G. Schmitz was defeated for re-election to the U.S. House in California in June 1972, and then in August 1972 he was nominated by the American Party/American Independent Party for President.

Randall Terry ran in 2012 for Congress in Florida, and for president in Kentucky, Nebraska, and West Virginia.

North Dakota held a gubernatorial election in November 2012. Independent candidate Paul Sorum has been fighting in court to overturn the election results, on the grounds that both the Democratic nominee and the Republican nominee should not have been on the ballot. The basis for this claim is that both candidates make paperwork errors when they filed for office. The Secretary of State had removed the Libertarian nominee, Roland Riemers, from the Libertarian primary ballot, for making the same error. Riemers later argued in the State Supreme Court that he should not have been removed from the ballot, but the State Supreme Court upheld the Secretary of State. Riemers got on the November ballot anyway, because after he was not permitted to run in the Libertarian primary, he petitioned to get on the ballot as an independent candidate.

As this newspaper story says, on March 3, the attorney for state government did not appear in court, and missed the argument, due to a misunderstanding about what time the case would be argued.

The November 2012 election returns for Governor were: Republican Jack Dalrymple 200,526; Democrat Ryan M. Taylor 109,047; independent Sorum 5,356; Riemers 2,616. Sorum argues that because the Republican and Democratic nominees were improperly on the ballot, their votes are invalid, and he is the legitimate governor. His case is filed in Mandan, Morton County, in district court.

On March 3, the Minnesota Senate Subcommittee on Elections, part of the Rules Committee, passed SF 585. This is the National Popular Vote Plan bill. It had been introduced over a year ago, and this is the first progress it has made in the Senate. The only midwest state that has approved a National Popular Vote Plan bill so far is Illinois.