See this story. The process by which major party candidates in South Carolina are being disqualified from the June 12 primary continues. It is too late to delete any names from the primary ballot, but if this challenge is successful, the votes for the affected candidates will be considered void.
According to this story, Roseanne Barr is toying with the idea of running for President in November, even though it is extremely unlikely she will win the Green Party nomination. Her ballot label might conceivably be the Green Tea Party. There has been some indication that her backers in Minnesota are thinking of circulating a general election petition for her with that label.
In 2000, Minnesota allowed both the “Reform Party” and the “Reform Party Minnesota” to appear on the November ballot. Each group used the independent candidate petition, which allows a partisan label. John Hagelin had the “Reform Party” label and Pat Buchanan had the “Reform Party Minnesota” label.
Major parties and minor parties alike have been injured by the U.S. electoral college system, in which all the power to determine the presidential nominee of a party is in the hands of the state party officials and activists, and national convention decisions have no binding force. In 1968 the Alabama Democratic Party said George Wallace was its presidential nominee. In 1948, the Democratic Parties of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina said Strom Thurmond was their presidential nominee. In 1912 the Republican Parties of California and South Dakota said Theodore Roosevelt was their presidential nominee. In 2000, the Arizona Libertarian Party said L. Neil Smith was its presidential nominee.
The San Diego Union-Tribune has this story about the June 2012 primary race in California’s 51st U.S. House district. The two candidates who had been thought to be strongest were current Democratic State Senator Juan Vargas, and the area’s former State Senator, Denise Moreno Ducheny. The 51st district is strongly Democratic. Under California’s top-two open primary rules, it had been assumed they would place first and second in the June primary and compete against each other in November.
The primary race had three Republicans and four Democrats running. Senator Vargas spent between $40,000 and $50,000 to promote one of the Republican candidates, Michael Crimmins. Crimmins himself did not have a very active campaign, and only raised $5,000. He had been expelled from the Republican County Central Committee in 2010 by a vote of 44-1. The basis for his expulsion was partly that he had made allegedly racist comments about one of his primary opponents in his 2010 congressional race, and also that he had allegedly filed baseless ethics charges against the Republican Party’s state chairman. In the 2012 race, the Republican Party had endorsed Xanthi Gionis. Crimmins’ 2012 campaign web page said he was endorsed by Tom Tancredo, Darrell Issa, Duncan Hunter, Ron Packard, and Ed Royce (all current or former Republican congressmen), as well as Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio, but those politicians had not endorsed him for his 2012 race, but for his earlier unsuccessful runs for Congress in a different district.
Senator Vargas’ strategy of boosting Crimmins worked. Crimmins came in second, so Ducheny is now defeated. The same trick was used in Washington state in 2010, in the State Senate 38th district race. In that race, there were two Democrats and one Republican running. The district was heavily Democratic. However, one of the Democratic candidates, Nick Harper, made large independent expenditures to boost the Republican. The expenditures were not reported until after the primary was over. As a result, the Republican placed second, and the other Democrat, incumbent Jean Berkey, placed third and was unable to run in November. After the election was over, some Democratic State Senators felt that Harper’s action had been so unethical, they tried to oust Harper from the Senate, but that motion was defeated. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link about the San Diego race.
This Sacramento Bee story analyzes California’s June 5 primary and concludes that the top-two open primary did not cause more moderates to succeed.
On May 23, 2012, the Columbus (Ohio) Metropolitan Club used corporate donations to host a forum on “Presidential Politics in Ohio”. The only two speakers were the chairs of the Ohio Republican Party and the Ohio Democratic Party. On June 4, Ohio law professor Mark Brown asked the Federal Election Commission to determine that the two major parties illegally received corporate contributions, because the event organizers did not invite the state party chairs of any of Ohio’s other ballot-qualified parties to participate.
The federal law that provides for the Federal Election Commission permits any voter to have standing to file such a complaint. Here is the Complaint.
