Saturday, July 30, 2016

Reform Party Presidential Nomination Results

There aren't any. At least not yet. Delegates at the Reform Party's national convention in Bohemia, New York, narrowed the field down to two possibilities -- Rocky de la Fuente and Darcy Richardson -- but were unable to reach a decision before adjourning.

What happens next? I've heard two different things:


  1. From Darcy Richardson, I hear that there will be an email ballot of the nine delegates to make a final decision, and the result will be announced at 5pm on Monday, August 1st.
  2. At Richard Winger's Ballot Access News, I read that the choice has been postponed until August 8th. No word at BAN on whether the process is email ballot or something else, but Winger's opinion is that they are "likely to nominate the presidential candidate who has qualified for the most state ballots by then."

It seems nearly inexplicable to me that they would put the choice off until August 8th, especially if the criterion is ballot access (Mr. Fuente is clearly the candidate who would appear on the most ballots and that's not going to change in the next nine days), so I'm assuming Darcy's interpretation of events is the correct one.

Of course, this leaves me a bit on tenterhooks since I'm Darcy Richardson's preferred running mate. I had expected to know today whether to continue ramping up campaign operations or let it go and get back to other things.

I guess the campaign goes on, either for 48 more hours or nine more days. So I just went ahead and paid an ad broker for 50,000 more impressions of the campaign banner. Here it is (reduced to 400 pixels in width because 468 breaks my blog post formatting):



UPDATE: I just heard from Darcy, who reached out to Reform Party secretary Nicholas Hensley by email for clarification (when he got the impression that the issue would be decided and announced this Monday, it was by phone while he was driving). The decision will, in fact, be announced on the 8th.

My working theory for why they would rob their nominee of more than a week of campaign time with only three months to go until the election is that they are leaning toward Fuente and have given him time to withdraw from the Democratic primary for US Senate in Florida (Florida does not allow a candidate to be on the ballot for two offices, so if he tries to do both the Reform Party will likely lose its only solid ballot line for the year).

I guess I'll improve the time by campaigning. If Darcy's not the nominee, I don't want it to be due to a lack of effort on my part.

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