No Labels is publicizing the ABC-Washington Post poll released on May 7 that shows in a two-person race between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, Trump would win. No Labels has this to say about the poll:

“Still think our 2024 presidential election insurance policy is a bad idea?
That is an impossible position to maintain after reading the new ABC News/Washington Post poll.
This is one of the most respected surveys in the country – not partisan or slanted, and certainly not pro-Trump.
And yet this new data makes the following clear: Trump is now the clear favorite to win the Republican nomination and beat Joe Biden in November 2024.

In a head-to-head matchup against DONALD TRUMP in 2024:

Trump … 44%
Biden … 38%
Undecided/neither/someone else … 18%

And when undecided respondents are asked who they lean toward, Trump’s lead grows:

Trump … 49%
Biden … 42%
Neither/someone else/ wouldn’t vote … 8%

The critics of our insurance policy (whether well-meaning and misguided or disingenuous and conniving) would have you believe they are sure it will be a Biden-Trump rematch and they know who would win that contest in a two-way race.

If you agree with that point of view, this poll should be deeply unsettling.

I urge you to read the whole survey here, but here are some of the most salient points:

When asked who they would support in 2024, 44 percent of voting-age adults say they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Trump while 38 percent would definitely or probably vote for Biden. The remaining 18 percent are either undecided or gave another answer….”

The Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly has this very detailed account of how Ohio has tried to keep minor parties off its ballots, for over 100 years. The article is by Law Professor Mark R. Brown, who has been active in ballot access litigation in Ohio for almost twenty years.

Ohio was unique among the populous states in the 1910’s for its severe ballot access laws. The main problem was that in 1908, Ohio raised the definition of a qualified party to a group that had polled 10% of the vote, at a time when virtually no other states had such a severe definition. It was the only populous state that had no statewide minor party or independent candidates on the ballot in 1918, nor 1922, nor 1930, for example.

The main part of the article concerns the battles in this century, particularly in 2014, when a federal court ordered the Libertarian Party put on the ballot but then Republican officials still managed to keep the party’s gubernatorial candidate off the party’s primary ballot. Because the vote test required 2% (for 2014 only; the ongoing vote test was to be 3%), and only the gubernatorial election counted, this meant that the Libertarian Party had no gubernatorial candidate and thus fell off the ballot. The article also explains the attempts by Republican officials to prevent recognizing the Libertarian Party after the 2016 election, even though its presidential nominee, Gary Johnson, on the ballot as an independent, had met the 3% vote test.

On May 3, Jordan Marlowe, Mayor of Newberry, Florida, announced that he had switched his registration from Libertarian to Forward. Marlowe had just been re-elected the previous month. Newberry city elections are non-partisan.

Newberry was first elected in 2017, when he had been a Democrat. He had switched to the Libertarian Party in 2019, when he was re-elected. He was also re-elected while a Libertarian in 2021. In all four of his elections, he was unopposed. The April 11, 2023 city election was cancelled when no one filed to run against the incumbents for any city office.

Newberry is in Alachua County, and has a populatioin of 7,342.

He is the Foward Party’s second Mayor. In November 2021, Dan Rosenthal had been elected First Selectman of Newtown, Connecticut. Rosenthal also won unopposed. “First Selectman” is the equivalent of Mayor in Newtown.