Historic first for North Carolina - "third" party retains ballot status by vote by Brian Irving
(libertarian)
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Munger will run again
For the first time in modern North Carolina history, a third party has retained its ballot status at the voting booth. Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Mike Munger polled about three percent of the vote today, besting the state's restrictive standard for a third party to poll at least two percent of the vote in the race for governor or president.
Libertarian candidates for lieutenant governor, insurance commissioner and U.S. Senate also broke the two percent barrier.
While conceding that "one of the other two candidates will become governor," Munger claimed a victory on behalf of all Libertarians for besting the states "enormous requirements to stay on the ballot and not have to get the damn signatures" on petitions.
"This is just the first step," Munger said. "We got the signatures and we satisfied the requirements of the State by playing Simon Says in just the way they wants us to."
Now he said its time for the Libertarian Party to take the next step and run competitive races for several General Assembly seats and other offices. Munger then announced he would seek the Libertarian nomination for NC State Senate in 2010 and the party's nomination for governor in 2012.
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Censoredagain, you're about to be censored one more time. If it's one thing that both faction of the LP can agree upon, it's about new ways to hurt the liberty movement and kill down-ticket campaigns. They place so much effort into these grand-sweeping national campaigns that fail...
Granted, Barr did best Badnarik's vote total by almost 3x as much, yet the percentage hardly changed from 4 years ago AND most of the voters were simply conservatives pissed off with McCain and Palin anyway.
Spence, I am not sure where you are coming from; I am looking at the NC results and all the LP candidates pulled in over 120K votes but but Bob Barr on the other hand pulled in just over 25k votes out of the same voting pool. There is just under 100k votes difference between Munger who got the least votes for the LP on this year NC ballot with the exception of Barr who just about 96k votes less then Munger on the same ballot. Now some of those 96 thousand votes went somewhere for for some reason. All I was saying is part of those 96K votes did not go to Barr because many in the LP and even others in the Liberty movement could not bring themselves to vote for Bar. I am not passing any type of judgment on anyone of those that choose not to vote for Barr . Nor am I putting more effort or importance on national offices over state and local offices. My point is just that Barr is bad choice.
Dude read my numbers I am comparing Barr to State Candidates not to other national candidates. I am not exclusively talking about national politics nor local I talking about both because both are important. Yes I agree that the LP needs to focus more on local and state offices, but national offices are important too. I highlighting Barr's performance in this particular environment shows that he repelled many possible voters. I am not a Barr fan and him being the standard barer can be symptomatic of the LP being infiltrated by neo cons that sank the GOP.
The drop-off of votes at the presidential level may reflect on the candidate(s), but might not. Here's an example where it obviously doesn't:
In the 2008 Texas Republican primary, Ron Paul received 70% of the vote for congressional candidate, and 5% of the vote for presidential candidate.
Thing is, to blame it on Barr, you'd have to show there's been no such drop-off in previous elections; and I doubt you can, because I suspect there has been.
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