Thanks (for all the good you comments will do) I am almost bald from pulling my hair out today reading a lot of these threads and ill-informed comments! Sheesh, it was MY franchise and yours that were knocked out with all this, but folks from across the country are convinced it’s all a RINO conspiracy .. if only they knew the first thing about the people they are condemning. It was the Gingrich and Perry campaigns that messed up, no one else. They did too little, too late. Period.
I’m not a big fan of Newt, but I am an attorney who has worked ballot access cases, and it would be a mistake to dump this all on Newt and all the other candidates who didn’t survive the signature war in VA. The RNC did push the whole national process forward. This is akin to rushing the passer. A hurried pass often leads to disaster. Newt and his team were doubtless trying to respond to all 50 fronts in the accelerated ballot access battle, and it may be they simply didn’t have the money to buy the ground troops necessary to pull off a highly technical play like VA. That’s not necessarily a demonstration of an organizational skills deficit.
BTW, Illinois is bad too. Not the same rules exactly, but if they were the same, good luck finding 40 let alone 400 eligible R’s in some districts. Big money and two or more years of advance planning with party cooperation could do it. Being the beneficiary of a recent popular surge, not so much. Advantage, money.
And so while I get the “rule of law” thing, please recall that here in America the highest law is the Constitution, and one of the highest functions of that constitutional law is to protect our right to put the people on the ballot that we believe best represent our interests. It is the very soul of the rule of law that the rules of the parties are and should be subordinate to that higher principle. If the majority of Republicans in VA want Newt or Bachmann or whoever else on the ballot, no party rule should be so onerous as to prevent that from happening. And any rule that prevents almost all of the viable national candidates from successfully jumping that signature hurdle is, on its face, adverse to that constitutional interest. This can and should be challenged by the excluded candidates as a group.
I don’t think write-in campaigns are as difficult as they used to be.
If Newt is truly as popular as the polls say, I don’t see it being a big problem for people to vote for him as a write-in candidate.