Wow, I had been thinking about starting exactly this thread. I assume the OP is also in Washington State, unless another state also has 36 candidates for Governor.
I love playing Spot the Loonie during primary election season. The Presidential election is OK, but that’s usually just the relatively boring nationally established Loonies like the Socialist Workers Party, Constitution Party, Natural Law Party, etc.
For those who don’t know, Washington has a “jungle” primary where the top two vote getters advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. Voters don’t have to indicate any party affiliation (except when voting for, say, Democratic Party precinct officers) and don’t need to confine their votes to one party’s candidates. Candidates indicate a party “preference” in their voters’ pamphlet listing . It’s not required, but most do. It can be almost anything, though, and doesn’t need to be an established party and doesn’t mean an established party endorses them. As far as I can tell, the candidate puts their preference on a form and whatever they put gets sandwiched between “Prefers” and “Party”. One guy put “Unaffiliated”, so he appears as “Prefers Unaffiliated Party”. Hence the various weird party names that some of the candidates have.
I had thought that it wouldn’t be a good season for Spot the Loonie because neither of Washington’s US Senate seats are up for re-election, but the Governor’s race and others more than make up for it. Unfortunately, I can’t link to the voters’ pamphlet, because the King County elections site (at least) wants your name and date of birth so they can look up your registration and provide a customized guide.
I’ll skip all the usual boring candidates - Democrats bloviating about left-wing issues, Republicans bloviating about right-wing issues, and independent candidates bloviating about the established politicians and PAC money.
At the bottom of the pile, you have the slackers. They filed to run for office, but didn’t bother submitting any information for the voters’ pamphlet. Sorry, if you’re not interested in telling me why you deserve the job, I’m not interested in voting for you. Honorable mention in this category to the guy whose statement is mostly bloviating about PAC money and so on. He concludes with “Please vote for [candidate name], U.S. Senate.” Uh, dude, you’re running for governor this year. Might have wanted to do some copy editing there.
Then there are the guys who are running for a high-level office like Governor, but have no elected experience. Or, better yet, their elected experience consists of “High School ASB Class Vice President”. Sorry, we’d like a little more experience. Or under Community Service they list “UBER and Lyft driver during the pandemic.”
There’s the guy being touted by Facebook critic-bots on Jay Inslee’s feed, whose statement (other than his life story and his family) consists of “His platform advocates a return to respecting citizen rights and accountability for state government.” Wow, real detailed there. Or the other guy whose statement reads like an Instagram post - lots of misspellings, and it contains two commas but no other punctuation of any kind.
Goodspaceguy has been around forever. He’s always running for something. These days, he’s mellowed from being a true Loonie - more like a Libertarian with a dash of Buckminster Fuller.
Commissioner of Public Lands has a couple of doozies. Judging from their photos, the first two candidates are The Dude and Saruman. Dude says “I like environmental protection. I don’t like fires. […] President Trump says we need to rake our forests to clean up debris that exacerbates fires and that’s where I intend to start.”
Saruman intends to “deconstruct” the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. He’s also against Bio-mass for electricity, and wind power, and coal trains, and solar power energy farms. Not quite sure where he expects electricity to come from. He’s also against lots of other things, like 5G, chemtrails, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, eugenics, Satan, and New World Order.
Not much in the way of “platform exceeds job title” this year. Just the guy who wants to convene a “Create Jobs Now” task force to streamline permitting and reduce regulatory burdens. Not sure how he’s going to do that as Attorney General.
I think one of the top two Loonies this year is the aforementioned StandupAmerica Party guy. I won’t give his name, but he appears to be Russian (which is OK in itself). He’s been around for a few years, and has always been somewhat ranty and Loonie, but he’s topped himself this year. He opens his statement with the paragraph:
Standup! America First! Live Free or Die! Stop Seattle / King Fascism with idiotic face. A One party system is always Fascism. They are all war criminals!
He then repeats that paragraph verbatim for some reason. His closing paragraph is relatively sane:
Vote for Trump and [candidate name] to bring Washington and America back to common sense of, by and for the people!
The truly Loonie part: In between those he lists his twenty-five point policy platform. It’s twenty-five repetitions of “Stop Seattle / King Fascism with idiotic face!”. How do I know it’s 25? He helpfully numbered them.
The other top contender is running for Insurance Commissioner. He starts by saying “This would be my first elected position as I am of age to hold office now.”, and in his photo he looks pretty young. But he claims to have been involved in the industry for 21 years.
He calls himself an autistic savant. He’s going to use the Insurance Commissioner’s office “to acquire and manage 168 students as I need in order to major in Every Degree at UW.” With some weird references to Reagan and Jefferson, “externally” he’ll be I.C. for 60% of the time, and the incumbent Democrat and the Libertarian candidate will serve 20% each. As for “internally”, the 168 mentioned above will “each serve in 1 hour increments as Internal Insurance Commissioners”. Pretty sure that’s not how elected positions are supposed to work.
For Washington’s Top Loonie of 2020, I think 168-disciple-Insurance-Commissioner guy wins out over StandupAmerica Party guy, but it’s pretty close.