Oh, and I finally found a reason to go green ...
Posted on 10/17/2009 3:43:28 PM PDT by luckybogey
...Enter the Republican establishment. They sold this country out when they were in power and can’t ever be trusted again. But they see an opening and are setting the stage for their own return.
They are handpicking candidates — Bush-likes and Bush-lites — to run against conservatives in primaries. Many are retreads, all are available for purchase. Then the party elite endorses their candidate early in the primary, fills their coffers with millions from corporate PACs and special interests, pressures party regulars to get in line, and sends word to the grassroots candidates: “Drop out — you can’t win”.
Their game plan: shut out the conservative populists. But if candidates running for office because of love of country are marginalized by the party elite, in favor of career politicians beholden to party leaders, we are lost — and so is America...
The rebellion must start to focus on producing candidates that will do represent the American people in Washington — then we must rally behind them and defeat the establishment candidates in the primaries.
If that doesn’t work, we must field candidates to run as independents in the general. The country is too important to let the establishment of either party continue to have their way with her...
(Excerpt) Read more at luckybogey.wordpress.com ...
South Carolina's liberal senator wants to read the the conservative Texas Congressman and his limited government philosophy out of the Republican Party. SA@Takimag - Lindsey Graham vs. Ron Paul
I’m afraid you’re right (no pun intended). Another party will have to form to scare the Repubs straight or they’ll disappear (reminds me of the birth of the Republican Party 150 years ago when the Whig party basically disappeared. A wierd repeat of history, possibly, huh?)
IB4TZ?
The RINOS are selling us out.
NY-23 should be the last straw, a handpicked far-left candidate is too stupid for words
I'm middle aged and so can my wife and my kid's for all that matters.
Middle aged crazies I guess.
My congressional choice is running as a republican and he’ll get my vote. However he’ll get my vote if he runs as anything else as well.
I was with you till you posted a link to Ron Paul, the man’s a loon IMO.
Listen to the SA youtube...
In Colorado, District Attorney Ken Buck, a tough prosecutor of illegal aliens, was gaining traction in his campaign for U.S. Senate. Enter John McCain. He calls Jane Norton, former Lt Governor and state chairman of his presidential bid, and convinces her to run against Buck, promising the NRSC endorsement, plenty of money, and a lock on the nomination. Le Moine Dowd, a grassroots activist, summed it up perfectly: “Do we want the NRSC deciding our candidate? Does this action by the NRSC make the primary election irrelevant? Does it make the Colorado Republican Party irrelevant?”McCain is evil. In some ways more evil than The Messiah.
PLEASE DONATE TO HIM and others. That's what we at FreeRepublic should be doing...finding these candidates and supporting them.
They can both can go to hell.
The GOP remains in a coma. With some hard work conservatives can reclaim the party of Reagan. Sure beats supporting any third party long term.
“Another *party* will have to form...”? There are three parties in the game now: Dems and Repubs, who are virtually indistinguishable and despicable; and Marxists, who have quite a few of the Ds and Rs in hand, but who are *glaringly* different than Ds, Rs, Libertarians, and any other legitimate politicians.
You don’t vote revolutionaries down. They hang around and try, try again. When they succeed, you look back on “one person, one vote, once.” Our situation is getting worse by the day, but maybe, just maybe, our vision is improving.
Not since 1853, when the presidency of Millard Fillmore ended, have we had a President who has not been a Democrat or Republican. That is 156 years of two party dominance of the White House. Millard Fillmore was a Whig.
Duverger’s law explains the tendency of a plurality-centered electoral system for a two party system of election.
Since President Fillmore, the Democrats and Republicans have established themselves as the major two parties in accordance with the principles of Duverger’s law.
There are several third parties that exist today all of which try to establish themselves on the ballots in each state. Currently, their current ability is only to frustrate the major two parties by siphoning votes from them to the point that it could cause the opposite major party to win. With very few exceptions, third party candidates only suffice to bring attention of various issues to the major two parties.
If a third party candidate wants to win, there has to be a major fallout in either or both of the major two parties. Each party, major or minor, has a base voting block. These are groups of people that these parties cater to for their support so they will take on issues that are important to their base.
We will examine the 2004 and 2008 Presidential election results to find some trends in both major parties and minor parties.
2004
Republican: George W. Bush. Won.
Popular Vote: 62,040,610 votes. 30% Eligible Voter Turnout.
Democrat: John Kerry. Lost.
Popular Vote: 59,028,444 votes. 28.7% Eligible Voter Turnout.
Non Party: Ralph Nader. Lost.
Popular Vote. 465,650 votes.
Libertarian: Michael Badnarik. Lost.
Popular Vote. 397,265 votes.
2008
Republican: John McCain. Lost.
Popular Vote: 59,934,814 votes. 28.7% Eligible Voter Turnout.
Democrat: Barack Obama. Won.
Popular Vote: 69,456,897 votes. 31.6% Eligible Voter Turnout.
Independent: Ralph Nader. Lost.
Popular Vote: 738,475 votes.
Libertarian: Bob Barr. Lost.
Popular Vote: 523,686 votes.
In 2008, it is estimated that the Registered Voters was around 214,579,951 voters. In 2004, the estimate was 206,250,517 voters. This in an increase of 8,329,434 voters.
With a 52.9% Democrat versus a 45.7% Republican popular vote, we can take the 8,329,434 additional voters and average them out to 4,406,270 votes for the Democrat, 3,806,551 votes for the Republican, and 116,613 votes for the Third Party candidates.
We also see a small increase in votes for third party candidates from 2004 to 2008 but they have not amounted to anything significant to warrant any major claim of prominence.
The above data doesn’t fare well for third party candidates. If this trend continues, none of us will be alive at the time their candidates can get enough votes to win the White House...
http://forums.hannity.com/archive/index.php/t-1442791.html
John: A 3rd party will not win a national election in our lifetime:
Listed below are all elections in which a third-party or independent candidate won an electoral vote or won at least 1% of the popular vote. Elections where a third party candidate won electoral votes (excepting faithless electors) are marked with an asterisk (*).
1832 The Anti-Masonic Party, seeking the eradication of the Freemasons and other secret societies from the United States, nominated former U.S. Attorney General William Wirt for President. Wirt, a former Mason, received seven U.S. electoral college votes from the state of Vermont and 8% of the national popular vote.
John Floyd received no popular votes but won 11 electoral votes when the state of South Carolina, where the state legislature cast electoral votes, voted to support Floyd. President Andrew Jackson was unpopular in South Carolina due to the Nullification Crisis. Jackson won re-election while Henry Clay finished second.
1844 James G. Birney, running as the candidate of the anti-slavery Liberty Party, won 2.3% of the national popular vote. Birney’s candidacy may have been decisive in swinging the election to winner James K. Polk. Democrat Polk beat Whig Henry Clay 170-105 in the Electoral College, but in New York, which had 36 electoral votes, Polk edged out Clay by 5,000 votes, 48.90% to 47.85%. Birney won nearly 16,000 votes in New York, a quarter of his national total and good for 3.25% in that state. If Birney had not run, the majority of his votes would have gone to the Whigs rather than the pro-slavery Democrats, but whether or not Clay would have netted five thousand more votes is unknown. Starting with Birney, anti-slavery parties would make strong showings in every election up to the Civil War.
1848 The Free Soil Party, another anti-slavery party and a precursor of the Republicans, nominated former President Martin Van Buren as its presidential candidate. Van Buren won 10% of the nationwide popular vote but did not carry a state. Zachary Taylor, the Whig Party candidate, won the election.
1852 For the third election in a row, an anti-slavery party made a significant showing, as John P. Hale of the Free Soil Party received 5% of the nationwide popular vote. Democrat Franklin Pierce won the election.
1856 In 1856 the original two-party system (Democrat and Whig) collapsed. The Whigs, who had been one-half of the two-party system since 1832 and had won the presidency in 1840 and 1848, disintegrated, fatally split by dissension over slavery. Southern Whigs and a minority of northern Whigs coalesced around the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic American Party, better known as the “Know Nothing” movement. Their candidate was former President Millard Filmore. Northern, anti-slavery Whigs formed the new Republican Party and nominated explorer John C. Fremont. Which was the “third party”, Republican or American, is a matter of perception. In the Northern, free states, Fillmore ran a distant third. However, in the Southern, slave states, the Republicans received almost no support, not even appearing on the ballot in 13 of the 15 slave states and receiving tiny shares of the vote in the border slave states of Delaware and Maryland. Democrat James Buchanan won the election with 45% of the popular vote and 174 electoral votes, Fremont received 33% and 114 electoral votes, while Fillmore won 22% but carried only one state, Maryland, thus winning 8 electoral votes.
1860 The election featured four candidates, including the breakaway Southern Democratic Party, which nominated Vice President John C. Breckenridge as its candidate, and the Constitutional Union Party, neutral on the slavery issue, which nominated John Bell. Breckenridge, the southern pro-slavery candidate, carried most of the slave states, but had little support in the North outside of Pennsylvania. Bell drew most of his support from former southern Whigs.
Abraham Lincoln won the election with 39.8% of the overall popular vote with 180 electoral votes, his votes being concentrated in the northern free states. Stephen A. Douglas finished second in the popular vote with 29.5%, but his votes were scattered all over the country and as a result he won only 12 electoral votes. Breckenridge, the quasi-third party candidate of southern Democrats, got 18.2% winning 72 electoral votes from several south states. Bell, a true third party candidate, finished with 12.6% but received 39 electoral votes from three states.
Following 1860 a new two-party system coalesced around the Democratic and Republican parties.
1880 James B. Weaver of the Greenback Labor Party won 3.3% of the popular vote.
1884 The Greenback Labor Party changed its name to the Greenback Party. Ben Butler, running as the joint candidate of the Greenback Party and the new Anti-Monopoly Party, won 1.3% of the popular vote. Neither the Greenback nor the Anti-Monopoly parties lasted past the 1884 election, but other progressive and populist parties would succeed them.
Also in 1884, the Prohibition Party made its first significant showing, with John Pierce St. John of Kansas winning 1.5% of the popular vote.
1888 The Prohibition Party, with nominee Clinton B. Fisk, improved on its showing from four years before, increasing to 2.2% of the popular vote. Alson J. Streeter of the short-lived Union Labor Party won 1.3%.
1892 James B. Weaver, the Greenback Labor nominee in 1880, ran as presidential candidate for the Populist Party. The Populist Party won 22 electoral votes and 8.51 percent of the popular vote [4]. Weaver became the first third-party candidate to win a state since John Bell in the transitional election of 1860. The Democratic Party eventually adopted many Populist Party positions after this election, notably the Populist call for the free coinage of silver, making this contest a prominent example of a delayed vote for change.
John Bidwell, running on the Prohibition ticket, won 2.2% of the popular vote.
1896 The Populist Party supported Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan after Bryan and the Democrats came out for support of Free Silver. Democrat/Populist Bryan won 47% of the vote and 171 electoral votes, losing to Republican William McKinley.
1900 John G. Woolley of the Prohibition Party won 1.5% of the popular vote.
1904 Eugene Debs, Socialist Party candidate, won 3% of the popular vote. Debs and the Socialists would be factors in Presidential elections for several more cycles.
Silas C. Swallow of the Prohibition Party received that party’s usual 2% of the popular vote.
1908 Debs, running again for the Socialists, got 2.8% of the vote. Eugene W. Chafin of the Prohibition party got 1.7%.
1912 Republican Theodore Roosevelt ran as the “Bull Moose Party” (Progressive Party) nominee in the 1912 election. Roosevelt won 27.4% of the popular vote and carried six states totaling 88 electoral votes. If the transitional elections of 1856 and 1860, when there was no clear two-party structure, are excluded, Roosevelt’s was the most successful third-party candidacy in American history. It was also the only third-party effort to finish higher than third. Instead incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft finished third, taking only 23% of the popular vote and 8 electoral votes. The split in the Republican vote gave Democrat Woodrow Wilson victory with 42% of the popular vote, but 435 electoral votes.
Debs, running in his fourth consecutive Presidential election as the Socialist Party candidate, won 6% of the vote, an all-time high for the Socialists. The elections of 1860 and 1912 are the only two times that four candidates each cleared 5% of the popular vote in a Presidential election.
Eugene Chafin, running again as the Prohibition candidate, got 1.4% of the popular vote.
1916 Allan L. Benson, taking over as the Socialist Party candidate from Eugene Debs, received 3.2% of the vote. Prohibition candidate J. Franklin Hanly won 1.2%.
1920 Eugene V. Debs went to prison in 1919 for violating the Espionage Act by giving a speech opposing American involvement in World War I. Despite being incarcerated in Federal prison, Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate again in 1920, his fifth and last campaign. Debs received 3.4% of the vote.
Parley P. Christensen, running as the candidate of the newly formed Farmer-Labor Party, received 265,411 votes for 0.99%[19] of the total vote despite being on the ballot in only 19 states. (The Farmer-Labor Party continues to exist today in the state of Minnesota, where it merged with the Democratic party to form the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.)
1924 Erstwhile Republican Robert M. La Follette ran as a Progressive. After the Democrats nominated conservative John W. Davis, many liberal Democrats turned to La Follette. He received 4,831,706 votes for 16.6% of the popular vote and won his home state of Wisconsin receiving 13 electoral votes. With the Democrats split, incumbent President Calvin Coolidge won election by a wide margin.
1932Norman Thomas running as the Socialist Party candidate received 884,885 for 2.2% of the total vote. Following Eugene Debs’s death in 1926, Thomas became the Socialist standard-bearer and was the party’s Presidential nominee in every election from 1928 to 1948.
1936 William Lemke running for the short-lived Union Party received 892,378 votes for 2.0% of the total vote.
1948 Democrat Strom Thurmond ran on the segregationist States’ Rights (”Dixiecrat”) Party ticket in protest of the Civil Rights Act. Former Vice President and Cabinet Member Henry Wallace also sought Democratic votes by running for the Progressive Party ticket, opposing racial discrimination and calling for closer relations with the Soviet Union. Thus the Democratic vote was split three ways between Thurmond on the right, Wallace on the liberal left, and incumbent President Harry S. Truman in the center. Thurmond received 1,175,930 votes (2.4%) and 39 votes in the electoral college from Southern states. Wallace earned 1,157,328 votes for an identical 2.4% of the popular vote, but no votes in the Electoral College due to his support being mostly concentrated in the more populous states of New York and California. Despite both challenges, Democratic incumbent Truman still defeated Thurmond, Wallace, and Republican Thomas Dewey in what was widely regarded at the time as an upset.
1968 Former Democratic Governor of Alabama George Wallace ran on the American Independent Party line. Wallace received 9,901,118 votes for 13.5% of the popular vote, receiving 45 electoral votes in the South and many votes in the North. Wallace remains the only third party candidate since 1948 to win a state. Republican Richard Nixon won the election with 43% of the popular vote and 301 electoral votes.
1972 John G. Schmitz, the American Independent Party candidate won 1.4% of the vote, or 1.1 million votes.
John Hospers of the newly formed Libertarian Party received only 3,674 popular votes but won an electoral vote when Roger MacBride, an elector pledged to winner Richard Nixon, instead voted for Hospers. Hospers’ vice presidential running mate, Toni Nathan, became the first woman ever to receive an Electoral College vote.
1980 Congressman John B. Anderson received 5,719,850 votes, for 6.6% of the vote, as an independent candidate for President. Libertarian Party candidate Ed Clark won 921,128 votes, or 1.1% of the total. No other Libertarian candidate has ever gotten more than 0.5% in a presidential election.
1992 Ross Perot, an independent, won 18.9% of the popular vote (but no electoral votes). His was the second-best popular vote showing ever for a third-party candidate, trailing only Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Perot finished second in three states: in Alaska and Utah ahead of election winner Bill Clinton, and in Maine ahead of incumbent President George H. W. Bush.
1996 Ross Perot ran for president again, this time as the candidate of the newly formed Reform Party. He won 8% of the popular vote.
2000 Green Party candidate Ralph Nader received 2,882,955 votes, 2.7%, of the popular vote and tipped the election to Republican nominee George W. Bush. Bush carried New Hampshire by 7,211 votes, a 1.27% margin. while Nader received over 22,000 votes there, 3.90% of the total. In Florida, after a disputed recount that was eventually terminated by order of the United States Supreme Court, Bush was declared the winner by only 537 votes out of 5.96 million cast, a margin of 0.01%. Nader received 97,488 votes in Florida, 1.6% of the total. Bush beat Gore in the Electoral College by a vote of 271 to 266 (with one Gore elector abstaining); if either Florida or New Hampshire had gone for Gore, he would have won the Presidency.
Source: Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_party_%28United_States%29
I wonder if Soros will be funding RINOS
figuring a conservative split-off could put Baraq back in with 42% like Clinton did.
I hear ya
I believe that this situation (NY-23) is further proof of my cynicism in regard to the Republican Party: I believe that they do not actually endorse their stated party-planks, but rather give them lip-service and then claim to us that they really, really ARE trying. {Fiscal responsibility, immigration, abortion, etc...}
Perhaps it’s not that the Republican party is dissolving, but that there is a war brewing as noted by some here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2364819/posts
>John: A 3rd party will not win a national election in our lifetime:
So then, since we are being offered a choice for our [political] meal of either fetid, rotting maggot-infested meat OR hot, pliable, corny/nutty feces we should NEEDS BE eat one of these simply because it’s what’s offered?
That is EXACTLY the “at least he’s not George Bush” reasoning that got Obama elected, and you’re ADVOCATING it?
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