With most of the votes in, we have 5,412 votes in Wisconsin. In percentage terms this our best result in the country.
We also beat Don Blankenship.
The CP is about 30 years old and at one point was the country's 5th largest party, so we're pretty pleased about this.
In Illinois, we have 6,515 votes counted so far, but there is still more to come.
Currently 5th of 6th, beating the Socialism and Liberation Party.
On a crowded ballot in Louisiana, we've got ~2,500 votes, and apparently people there like us better than most other 3rd parties.
We got another ~2,500 votes between Arkansas and Mississippi.
716 votes in Rhode Island (a few left to count) and 207 in Vermont. The Rhode Island results are about the same percentage as elsewhere where we're on the ballot (it's just a really small state!)
Finally we got 2,100 votes in Colorado so far, coming in 8th of 21 candidates (can't even fit them all in this image). This more than doubles our 2016 performance, and we also beat several well-financed independent and third party campaigns.
That leaves the write-ins, where we expect to get a large share of our votes. Some states are already starting to report them. We know that we have more than 1,000 write-ins in Texas, with only partial results. Stay tuned for more.
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It's true Republicans are increasingly a party *of* the (white) working class.
That's a different thing than being a party *for* working people at the policy level.
There are some good ideas for things like family-friendly tax and spending policy floating around conservative intellectual circles, and we're glad to see people like @AmerCompass reassess movement dogma about labor rights, trade, and more.
For a long time American conservatives liked to say that liberals were the party of "moral relativism." The conservatives stood up for the old fashioned moral truths, while liberals believed "if it feels good do it."
They weren't *entirely* wrong about this, but...
...the American Right has long suffered from its own form of moral relativism in the economic sphere.
Specifically, the idea that outcomes in the marketplace are somehow above moral judgement.
Right-leaning economists tend to believe that the market produces the best outcomes because it rationally aggregates the subjective preferences of all the actors involved. Whatever exchange value people are willing to give up to get something, that is what it is worth, they say.
"Why do Third Parties run candidates for president? Wouldn't it make sense to start with local and state races that are less long-shot, and build their way up?
Maybe you have asked that question yourself. It's a fair question.
This thread's for you.
To start, off we absolutely agree that state and local races are important. We're a party that believes in subsidiarity. That's the idea that higher levels of authority exist to support the lower levels in their proper function.
But there's the thing:
State and local races are also very difficult for third parties. The odds are stacked against us by the duopoly. To be a real contender takes resources. Even something as relatively low-level as a state representative race takes ample volunteers and tens of thousands of dollars.
It's Monday night, let's kick back with a distributism thread.
Remember back when George W Bush had this idea called the "ownership society?"
Yes, that does seem like a lifetime ago.
Here's what President Bush said about it back then: "If you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America, and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country."
This poll a good example of what often passes for conservatism in this country.
It has such an impoverished understanding of liberty that it can't conceive of anything between "I do what I want" and communism.
Edmund Burke, often considered the founder of conservatism as a political philosophy, had this to say:
"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites."
Guess he should have subscribed to Prager U.
The truth is that neither of the duopoly parties in this country have a remotely adequate understanding of how our individual rights should be balanced with responsibilities to serve the common good.