On April 8, the North Carolina affiliate of the Service Employees International Union declared that it will attempt to qualify a new party for the North Carolina ballot this, to be called North Carolina First Party. The Washington Post, on April 19, has this story.
The SEIU says it has hired over 100 circulators to obtain the needed 85,379 signatures before the May 14 deadline. The Washington Post story erroneously says the petition deadline is June 1. The story confuses the deadline for turning in signatures to the counties, with the deadline for turning in signatures from the counties to the state.
The SEIU has 2,000,000 members nationally. Nurses, janitors, and bus drivers comprise the core of the union. The SEIU left the AFL-CIO in 2005 and is in a competing national alliance of labor unions called “Change to Win”, which contains six other nationally-organized unions. Andy Stern, outgoing president of SEIU, chose North Carolina for this effort because he wants the new party to run U.S. House candidates against the three North Carolina Democrats who voted against the recent health care bill. Those three Democrats are Mike McIntyre in the 7th district, Larry Kissell in the 8th district, and Heath Shuler in the 11th district. The latter two districts are swing districts.
New parties in North Carolina nominate by convention, not by primary. Therefore, the leadership of the new party, assuming it gets on the ballot, is free to choose not to run candidates for other partisan office. For instance, there is a U.S. Senate election in North Carolina this year, but the party has no interest in entering that race. Thanks to Bradley Jansen for the link.
If North Carolina had reasonable requirements for independent candidates for district office, it is likely that the SEIU would have chosen to sponsor independent candidates in each of the three U.S. House districts. However, the independent procedures in North Carolina for district office are so difficult, no one has ever qualified as an independent candidate for U.S. House in North Carolina in the entire history of government-printed ballots, which began in 1901 in that state. Those requirements are under attack in two pending lawsuits, one in state court and one in federal court. They require the signatures of 4% of the number of registered voters in each district. In some districts, that is as many as 20,000 signatures. No candidate for U.S. House has ever overcome a requirement greater than 12,919 signatures, in any state (for Illinois, this statement only includes instances at which a petition was challenged; Illinois lets people on the ballot with fewer than the required number of signatures, if no one challenges).
