Stories

“I hear people say, ‘There’s socialists? There’s actually socialist parties? I didn’t think they existed.’ We get no media access,” presidential candidate Gloria LaRiva said over coffee in Iowa City. “We can hardly get through.”

On the first day of in-person early voting two weeks ago, a staffer friend of mine was marking his ballot and wondering aloud about the plethora of socialist options among the nine presidential candidates on the ballot. Socialist, Socialist Workers, and Party of Socialism and Liberation, not to mention the Peace and Freedom Party and the Green Party.

As one considers the minor arcana of dogma that separates these groups from one another, it’s easy to recall a scene from Monty Python’s Christ parody, “Life of Brian.”

The ninth and last presidential ticket to qualify for the Iowa ballot before last week’s deadline used an obscure approach, Ballot Access news reports.

Nine presidential tickets is about average for Iowa in recent presidential cycles. The most crowded ballot was in 1992 with 14 candidates.

Democrat-turned-independent candidate William Meyers, who hoped to challenge U.S. Rep. Tom Latham in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, told the Iowa Independent yesterday that his name would not appear on the ballot this November.
But he said it is not for lack of signed petitions.  Those, he said, he “surrendered” to “Democratic leaders.”
Nor is it for lack [...]

Wendy Barth, the Green Party’s 2006 candidate for governor, filed for Congress Wednesday in the 2nd Congressional District, setting up a four-way contest.

Iowa’s two official third parties both qualified their presidential candidates for the state’s ballot on Wednesday. In a coincidence, both parties are running former U.S. House members from Georgia.

At least three of Iowa’s U.S House races are now three-way contests, as independent candidates join the races.

With only a week to go before Friday’s filing deadline, Iowa’s U.S. Senate race and five congressional contests remain two-way races. Announced independent candidates in the 2nd and 4th districts have not yet filed.

As the first week of filing ended, only one presidential ticket and two state legislative candidates had turned nomination petitions in to the Secretary of State’s office.