Thursday, January 28, 2021

A Brief Look Back at the Green and Constitution Parties in North Carolina

By Chris Cooper

This week's memo from the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) lays it out pretty clearly: “the Constitution and Green Party are no longer recognized political parties in North Carolina.”  As of January 27, 2021, neither party is listed listed on the voter registration application (h/t Gerry Cohen, the oracle of NC election law, for linking this on his Twitter account). Unless they can successfully re-qualify for ballot access before the February 22, 2021 meeting of the NCSBE (h/t to everybody's favorite Libertarian candidate, Sean Haugh for spelling this out clearly), members of both parties will have their party affiliation switched automatically to Unaffiliated. 

The elimination of both parties wasn't done out of spite, but rather because neither party achieved "the required 2% of the total vote for their candidate for governor or for presidential electors in the 20202 general election” (see this piece from Danielle Battaglia for a good run-down on what happened).

Given the impending demise of both parties, it seems like as good a time as any to take a look at life and times of the Green and Constitution parties to see if it can teach us anything about the future of party registration in the Old North State.

Wednesday, January 27, 2021

ONSP "Vlog" Episode 4: Is 2021 vying to be 2020 version 2.1?

Well, 2021 certainly is trying to up the ante on 2020: from insurrection to impeachment to an inauguration, the first few weeks of January has been historic...yet again.


So, it was time to gather the Old North State Politics crew together for our fourth 'vlog,' which can be found here and on YouTube, along with the audio file on Soundcloud.