John Wayne Smith,the Libertarian Party’s Florida gubernatorial candidate, is starting to get some mainstream media coverage, over his ballot access woes. See this story. The Sunshine State News is an online newspaper headquartered in Tallahassee.
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On the weekend of October 22-24, a Perot Reunion will be held at the Hyatt Regency Airport at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Ross Perot is expected to attend the Saturday night dinner. The purpose of the event is for people who worked together on the Perot presidential campaigns to enjoy each other’s company again. It is not an event for political activity.
Registration begins at 1 p.m. on Friday, October 22, and the reception begins at 6 p.m. On Saturday the event starts at 9 a.m. with informal conversation. A panel discussion, “The Perot Years, a Retrospective Look” will be held 1-4 p.m. That is followed by “open mike”, with the suggestion, “Bring your funniest story.” The dinner is at 7 p.m.
Sunday morning will also provide time for informal conversation. The event costs $100. Those who are interested should send payment no later than October 15, to the Perot Reunion, PO Box 7499, Tallahassee Fl 32314-7499.
The Rhodes Cook Letter has collected primary election returns for 2010, for 33 states. This data is in the August 2010 issue. It shows that in primaries so far this year, approximately 16,160,000 voters have chosen to vote in Republican primaries, but only 13,191,000 voters have chosen to vote in Democratic primaries. This data is always slightly inexact, because some states don’t release the number of voters who chose any particular party’s primary ballot. Therefore, the calculation is based on the actual vote cast in each primary, generally for Governor or U.S. Senator or U.S. House-at-large, depending on which office had the highest vote total cast.
The 2010 primary participation so far is a sharp reversal from the 2008 presidential primaries, when 37,000,000 voters voted in Democratic primaries, but 21,000,000 in Republican ones.
The Rhodes Cook Letter is published six times per year. Every issue consists of election data that is not available anywhere else. It is written by Rhodes Cook, who is also the author of America Votes, the book published every two years by Congressional Quarterly that has election returns for all federal offices and all gubernatorial elections. The Rhodes Cook Letter costs $99 per year and can be contacted at PO Box 574, Annandale Va 22003.
On August 24, Vermont held primaries for the Democratic, Republican, and Progressive Parties. Vermont does not have registration by party, and any voter is free to choose any party’s primary ballot.
The Democratic primary ballot was chosen by 74,633 voters; the Republican primary ballot by 30,058 voters; and the Progressive Party primary ballot by 553 voters.
By comparison, in 2008, when there were four parties entitled to their own primary, the number of voters choosing the September primary ballot of each party was: Democratic 23,499; Republican 12,444; Progressive 470; Liberty Union 172.
Liberty Union Party was not entitled to its own primary in 2010 because none of its statewide nominees in 2008 polled as much as 5% of the vote. However, Liberty Union is still a ballot-qualified party in Vermont, nominating by convention this year.
The Alaskan Independence Party will continue to run Don Wright for Governor. Wright won the party’s primary last month, but there had been speculation that he might withdraw and let the party substitute someone else. See this story.