Party Time: What Can A New Party Actually Do?

Get this party started (Ooh)
Get this party started
Get this party started right now

This is the seventh entry in a series:

I don’t have time to research the systems in other states so I’ll just be talking about California.

What you can’t do (in California) as a new political party is put candidates on the ballot.

That’s reserved for what they call “qualified” political parties; as in, qualified to participate in elections so, ya know, kinda obvious.

A qualified political part is one that:

has registrants totaling .067% of registered voters and gets at least 2% of the votes for one out of a list of statewide elections
or has registrants totaling .33% of registered voters

Which is, in a state with 25 million registered voters, not a terribly high bar for qualification; so congratulations on that, California.

But, you have to have that before you get access to put candidates on the ballot.

So until you have your 77 thousand registered voters what can you actually do that’s useful?

What most parties seem to do is voter registration drives.

This serves the dual purpose of getting voters signed up to vote and, since the party is choosing who to pursue, hopefully getting them to register as “preferring” your new party so they count towards your qualification.

Which is useful, but takes either a lot of money or a lot of volunteers (and recruiting those usually takes a lot of money).

I don’t have a lot of money, sadly, and I don’t know anyone who does either.

So, that’s out.

OK, until you have your 77 thousand registered voters what can you actually do without a lot of money that’s useful?

In this case, since the entire idea for creating this new party is to pursue a single-issue platform of preventing the conversion of the United Stares into a fascist dictatorship, probably the most useful thing to do would be to write that platform up as a pledge and then pursue the candidates from existing parties to get them to sign on to it.

While also trying to convince their voters to change their registration to the new party as a way of expressing the desire that everyone get on board with this platform, of course.

The “try to get other parties’ candidates to sign your pledge” was actually Grover Norquist’s entire strategy. He never started an anti-tax party; he just got all the other parties’ candidates to sign onto his anti-taxes pledge.

And he mostly did that by getting the media to publicize his pledge every time he started a new campaign for signers and whenever he got someone to sign onto it.

Which actually did pretty well for him.