Politics & Advocacy
Third party candidacies for statewide office by prominent drug reformers garnered significant attention for drug reform issues during the campaign season, but failed to make a dent in the two-party monopoly on competitive races for elected offices. On the other hand, one prominent drug reformer running as a Democrat will take a seat in his state's House of Representatives.
In Washington state, Roger Goodman, the guiding force behind the emergence of the King County Bar Association's Drug Policy Project, has won the District 45 Position 1 state representative race with 55% of the vote. While Goodman is known as an articulate advocate of substantive drug policy reform, he did not emphasize those positions during the campaign and was attacked in opposition mailings (quoting extensively from Drug War Chronicle) for speaking out on those positions.
In Alabama, Loretta Nall, running a write-in campaign for governor on the Libertarian Party ticket, reports that her write-in votes will not even be counted until a week from Monday. She also reports receiving numerous e-mails from angry voters wondering why their votes aren't being counted.
In Connecticut, Cliff Thornton, the founder of the Hartford-based drug reform organization Efficacy, ran for governor on the Green Party ticket. Despite a vigorous campaign and a full-fledged drug policy blitz, he could do no better than 1%.
In Maryland, long-time drug reformer Kevin Zeese ran a three-party third-party campaign for US Senate under the banner of the Green, Populist, and Libertarian parties, with a broad range of issues ranging from the war in Iraq to corporate control of US politics to drug policy reform, Zeese hoped to break through the bipartisan stranglehold on electoral office. Democratic nominee Ben Cardin ended up defeating his Republican challenger Michael Steele by 55% to 44%. Zeese got the difference, 1% of the vote.
Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.
Comments
People who truly want a
People who truly want a reform in our drug laws won't get it unless they are willing to vote outside the duopoly and then make certain their votes WERE counted..
they need a green leaf party in the US like they have in Israel
See title
green leaf party
Israel has proportional representation so it's possible their Green Leaf Party can get enough votes to be represented in parliament. No such luck here. Seems to be we're doing a lot better in referenda than we would as a political party. I didn't vote for Kevin Zeese, though he surely deserved my vote, because I felt the overriding need was to block the Republicans. The difference between the 40% and 44% achieved in Colorado and Nevada and Zeese's 1% is striking. The successes in all the local referenda this year might suggest the direction to go in for the next year or two.
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