I’m not interested in a discussion of the merits of the various political parties. What I am interested in is knowing about the weird National political parties in the US.
Here in Canada we only hear about the two major political parties (Democrats and Republicans). But in Canada we have a number of nut job political parties like the Rhinocerous Party of Canada , (BTW, I know the Rhinocerous party doesn’t exsist anymore, but it did exsist at one point) the green party, the Marajuana party, and the communist party.
What I want to know is, in the US are there any nut job political parties that run nationally? (the Aforementioned Republicans and Democrats do not count as nut job, as they are mainstream parties).
Neither the Libertarians nor the Greens are nutty. They disagree with the Democrats and Republicans more often than the Dems and Repubs disagree with each other, but that’s hardly surprising.
The Reform Party under H. Ross Perot was nutty because Perot was a fruitcake. The party Pat Buchanan fronts for is nutty because Buchanan is a whackjob. Do you want personality cults to be included in this list?
There are many parties which will never field credible candidates. This includes the American Communist and Nazi Parties, the America First Party, and a whole list of increasingly nutty ones from there. All of those parties are, in theory, national, but they often have never appeared on a ballot and will never be worth listening to.
Offhand I can think of the Libertarians and the Greens. The Libertarians are big on civil liberties. They want to restrict the government’s power as far as possible. The more extreme members are basically anarchists. The Green Party are environmentalists.
There’s also Ross Perot’s Reform Party (from the early 90’s), but from what I hear they’re pretty much defunct.
In any given election, there will be a number of very minor parties that are only on the ballot in one or two states. Around here, they tend to be named something like “National Workers Party.”
New York has the Liberal and Conservative parties, who only continue to exist because they co-nominate the Democrat and Republican candidates, respectively. As far as I know, New York is the only state that allows a person to run on more than one ticket simultaneously.
Then there’s the Prohibition Party. And the start-up Personal Choice Party, a Libertarian organization whose VP candidate is Marilyn Chambers and that’s in the ballot in Utah already. Heck, this site seems to have a huge list of minor party pretenders.
Third parties have trouble in the USA since the system is, of course, run by the two majors to begin with. Truly wacko parties have even worse problems.
BTW, the NLP for some reason endorsed Dennis Kucinich in '04! (Its 92/96/2000 candidate, Hagelin, jumped to the Perot wing of the Reform Party.)
I’m pretty sure I remember seeing the CP on the ballot in NY. Remember, to get on the ballot in any given state, there have to be enough supporters to sign the required number of petitions. It doesn’t surprise me that you haven’t seen the CP on the ballot in Big Sky Country!
… specially when you consider that to run aon a party (or independent) ticket you have to try to get a spot on the ballot (pay filing fees, gather endorsement signatures, file disclosure reports, etc.) in each of the 50 states plus DC separately.
So at best your truly nutjob party may get a proper ballot spot in, say, Nevada, Wyoming, Arkansas and Delaware, but then have a dissident group get in on the same party name in Alaska, and running as independents in South Carolina and Vermont.
Here’s a listing of over 200 American Political Parties, including the Planetary Engineering Party, the Royalist Party of America, the Neo Whig Party, the National Barking Spider Resurgence Party, and the Utopian Anarchist Party of Maryland.
I wasn’t trying to suggest that they were. I was merely listing my own personal experience with presidential ballots so the readers could get a snapshot of what one particular ballot in one particular county at one particular time looked lot.