I’ve just been looking at the US presidential election results over the years and there are a significant amount of smaller parties that have fielded candidates. None of these seem to ever have been that successful. Do candidates from these other parties or do independents get elected to Senate/Congress/State level official positions or other positions?
Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist democrat and he is a congressional senator from Vermont. I think that is about as far as people get in alternate parties these days. There are lots of independents around and they hold offices all over the U.S. Occasionally, someone like a congressman will drop out of their party and still hold their office as an independent.
Joseph Lieberman is listed as an “Independent Democrat” in Senate records, having won his last election running on the “Connecticut for Lieberman” ticket.
At the very local level politicians very often have no strict party affiliation.
For example where I grew up most small towns (read: sub 20,000 pop) mayoral candidates or city board/council candidates do not have any mainstream party affiliation. In some small towns they run with the tag ‘Citizens’ party which is just a generic name and I don’t think it actually refers to any organized political party.
Certain states also have relatively strong independent parties. The Conservative Party in New York is relatively powerful in that state. They sent a guy to the U.S. Senate one year. In general though they act as a quasi-independent wing of the GOP, endorsing GOP candidates they dislike and withholding their endorsement from candidates they do not like (said withholding will often make or break a GOP candidate’s chances in certain elections in New York where the voting is going to be close and where the GOP candidate certainly can’t afford a sizable minority of the conservative vote falling out from under them.
The city of Milwaukee used to be big on beer, bratwurst, bowling, and Socialism:
Another Socialist, Daniel Hoan, was mayor of Milwaukee from 1916 to 1940, and a third Socialist, Frank Zeidler, was mayor from 1948 to 1960 (the Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley era), the most recent socialist mayor of any major American city.
More on Milwaukee Sewer Socialism, so-called for its emphasis on good municipal infrastructure.
A list of minor-party and independent candidates elected to the US House between 1902 and 2000
Of those elected, a mix occurs: Sometimes, it’s a case where a major-party politician is running on a minor-party or independent line and rejoins the main party once elected, sometimes a minor party takes the place of a major party in a given region (the Progressive Party of Wisconsin and the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, for instance, were the New Deal parties in states with a weak Democratic Party), sometimes a minor-party/independent candidate receives some sort of support from a major-party, either openly (the ones on the list with major-party backing) or not so openly (Sanders, for instance, tends to not have a strong Democratic opponent), and still others win three-way fights (Frazier Reams, many of the 1912/1914 Progressives).
Bernie Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont from 1981 to 1989. While he now runs as an Independent, his mayoral campaigns were as a Socialist. Admittedly, Burlington is smaller than Milwaukee but it is the largest city in Vermont.
Alex Joseph was a Libertarian mayor and police chief in Big Water, Utah, a town founded by Joseph and his wives. Yes, wives.
He married 20 women over his lifetime. When I met him in 1987 he had 9 wives, and he provided for all of them. He died in 1998 leaving seven wives, 21 children and 23 grandchildren.
Alex was a true individualist. With his rough-cut beard and weather-darkened skin, he ran into trouble with the law when he tried to “homestead” government land in 1975, and insisted that his occupation on his death certificate be listed as “pirate.” He was once described as a “cross between Henry David Thoreau and the outlaw Josey Wales”
He was also one hell of a nice guy and I was proud to call him a friend.
He was trying to take land that didn’t belong to him but he called it “homesteading”? Isn’t that called “stealing”? I thought Libertarians were supposed to be big defenders of property rights.
Maine had a Green state rep, Jon Eder, until he lost his most recent election.
Minneapolis, Minnesota has a couple of elected officials from the Green Party. And they are really the opposition party to the DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) within Minneapolis, rather than the Republicans. The Republicans have become so far-right that any candidate who might have a chance of winning within Minneapolis could never get their party endorsement. Most of the time, the Republicans don’t even run candidates. If they do, their candidates seldom make it thru the Primary.
The Green Party is somewhat active in Minnesota state-wide races, and seems to be getting more active in close-in suburbs, too.
In the last Massachusetts Senate election, the Green candidate outpolled the Republican. Kennedy won again, of course.
There have been independent Governors recently, too - Angus King in Maine comes to mind. Jesse Ventura in Minnesota was, officially anyway, Ross Perot’s Reform Party’s only real electoral axxomplishment.
But it’s hard to get elected without a substantial organization behind you to do the high-level fundraising and precinct-level legwork. A “none of the above” or “I’m not corrupted by the system” platform only goes so far. At the Presidential level, with first-past-the-post rules in every state, it’s almost impossible - nobody outside the 2 majors has carried a state since 1968, and that was backlash over a single issue we’ve (mostly) put behind us.