The Kansas Reform Party has nominated several candidates for statewide office and placed them on the ballot. It is possible Kansas will be the only state in November 2006 with statewide nominees for the Reform Party, although there are still other states where the deadlines haven’t passed.
On June 16, the Idaho Secretary of State approved the name change of the ballot-qualified Natural Law Party, to the United Party. The United Party is a centrist party headed by Andy Hedden-Nicely, formerly a publisher of a weekly newspaper in Boise. Hedden-Nicely is also the United Party’s candidate for US House in the 1st district.
Idaho had previously let qualified parties change their name, so the decision was no surprise.
Across the nation, the Natural Law Party will not be ballot-qualified in any state after the November 2006, except it will probably still be on in Michigan.
The state elections officials in Ohio and Texas both say they will be finished checking independent petitions by the end of June. In Ohio, the independent gubernatorial candidates are really the Libertarian and Green Party candidates, but they are both using the easier independent candidate petition methods. In Texas, the only two statewide independent petitions are those of Kinky Friedman and Carole Strayhorn.
The South Carolina legislature has now gone home for the year, and the bill to outlaw fusion failed to pass. H4331 had passed overwhelmingly in the House, but it never made any headway in the Senate.
Connecticut Democratic U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman and his primary opponent, Ned Lamont, will hold a televised debate the evening of July 6 in West Hartford. The Connecticut Democratic primary will be on August 8. This is the most interesting major party U.S. Senate primary in the nation this year, since there is a chance that an incumbent U.S. Senator may lose his own party’s primary.
Senator Lieberman refuses to rule out the possibility that he will run as an independent. He would need 7,500 valid signatures by August 9 to run as an independent. The fact that he is a registered Democrat, and that he is running in a Democratic primary, does not bar him from qualifying as an independent. The former Democratic state chair, John F. Droney, a close associate of Lieberman’s, advocates that Lieberman drop out of the Democratic race now and begin circulating a petition. Clearly, the reaction to this first Lieberman-Lamont debate on July 6 will powerfully affect what the Democratic primary voters are likely to do, and what path Lieberman will choose.
