Minor-party hopefuls face uphill battle

Published in the Asbury Park Press 10/13/03

By MICHAEL SYMONS
GANNETT STATE BUREAU

TRENTON -- Rarely has the political establishment assigned an incumbent state legislator less of a chance of winning re-election than it gives Assemblyman Matt Ahearn of central Bergen County.

Then again, probably never has an incumbent held that political establishment in lower regard than Ahearn, who fled the Democratic Party in January to become one of two Green Party lawmakers in America.

Ahearn says running as a Green is "more fun" because his volunteers are philosophically committed to a cause.

"It's just really good people out to do good things, not just a group of people trying to decide who you shake down for money, what deals are going to be cut, who's going to get what jobs," said Ahearn, who is running in the 38th District.

Still, the odds are long that voters will elect Ahearn or any of the 60 minor-party and independent candidates running for Legislature in a cash-soaked system structured to favor Democrats and Republicans.

Such small political parties are often referred to as "third parties" because they hope to break into what now is an almost exclusively bipartisan system.

Thirty-nine of the 60 minor-party candidates are from the Green Party, which began in New Jersey in 1997. The party doesn't expect too much success this year, though it hopes to help Ahearn win re-election; its focus is on 2007, when it hopes to attain recognized party status by garnering 10 percent of the Assembly vote in a nongubernatorial year, as state law requires.

"We realistically don't expect to get 10 percent of the overall vote this year. We're not running candidates in every district. Our infrastructure is still in the formative stages," said Jane Hunter, the Green Party chairwoman and its Assembly candidate in the 16th District. "This is part of a long-term ballot access plan, if you will."

The political environment for minor parties in New Jersey has gotten marginally better in recent years, said Albert Larotonda, director of the Council of Alternative Political Parties and a community organizer in Red Bank.

One lawsuit forced the state to move the filing deadline for independent candidates from April to June. Another lets New Jersey voters declare themselves members of minor parties; only 731 did as of June of this year. Also, minor parties no longer must pay the 21 counties thousands of dollars for voter lists long given for free to the Democrats and Republicans.

Bucking the system

Still, minor parties face long odds and want the system changed, Larotonda said.

"The political system we are working in here in New Jersey has a lot of built-in bias against competition. But it's been taken as commonplace, and people don't think about it," said Larotonda. "The reality is . . . they see that the cards are stacked against them, that it's a stacked deck, and that it makes it impossible to compete."

Despite those hurdles and substantial fund-raising shortfalls, dozens of independent candidates run year after year. Most say they're exasperated by the two-party system, though they acknowledge they probably won't win.

"I would love to get 20 percent or 25 percent," said Brian Unger of Long Branch, Green candidate for Senate in the 11th District. "But I'm more concerned that I run the right campaign, that I speak the truth, and that the people understand that their government doesn't have to be owned by these individuals who use it to obtain power and financial benefit."

The chairman of the state Libertarian Party, Emerson Ellett, said the yardstick of success isn't a percentage of the vote. One thousand more registered Libertarians -- there are around 250 now -- is a realistic goal, he said.

"You've got to try. If you don't try, nothing happens. I think the Libertarians have the solutions to a lot of problems in the state, and we're going to try to present them to the voters," said Ellett, of Ocean Township, who is running for Senate in the 11th District.

Faded prospects

The most successful minor-party effort in recent history was the New Jersey Conservative Party in the 1990s.

Three years after its formation, the party ran 59 candidates for 80 Assembly seats in the 1995 off-year elections, drawing nearly 100,000 votes, or 4.7 percent in the 31 districts in which they ran. Overall, they attracted 3.6 percent of the Assembly vote.

Those fortunes soon faded. The party's founders got sick or died, and the replacements couldn't match the founders' organizing skills. The party's slate of candidates shrank, and its vote share fell below 1 percent.

This year the party is all but gone, with just one candidate running -- and the party went to court Sept. 30 to kick 13th District Senate candidate Mac Dara Lyden of Middletown off the team over fliers attacking various Republicans.

Party Chairman Norman Wahner said Lyden had become "an embarrassment." Ironically, Lyden doesn't want the New Jersey Conservative Party label any more, either, claiming the party's too close to the GOP.

"I suffer from the problem that I'm too maverick and I'm too independent, and I don't shut up and get down," Lyden said.

Conservative Party members say they remain politically active, at least by pursuing lawsuits that seek to change the system. And the party also works for conservative Republicans who support its platform.

Even Richard Pezzullo -- who ran six times as a Conservative and gained a party-best 50,971 votes for U.S. Senate in 1996 -- has returned to the two-party fold. While he keeps a foot in the Conservative Party today, Pezzullo ran in this year's Republican primary against Senate co-President John O. Bennett III, R-Monmouth, and is now working for Bennett's re-election.

"The objective of the party is to promote the agenda, and since we support Republican candidates, there is nothing wrong with actually going out and being one," said Pezzullo. "If you want to win state office today, you would do it outside the third-party movement."

Pezzullo, of Freehold, said every serious minor-party effort adds credibility to the movement, but he said minor parties today are "acting more or less as farm teams for the major parties."

Thinking locally

One stumbling block for Green candidates stems from the international movement they say they'll rely on for staying power. Even in races for state office, they'll quickly turn the conversation to world trade, nuclear proliferation or the war in Iraq, rather than property taxes or car insurance.

Ahearn tried to help address that weakness in three candidate-training seminars in the spring. And the party has found a state-level pitch in a refrain common to many independent candidates by calling for public financing of legislative elections.

"As long as private money influences public elections, the legislators are going to do what's in the best interest of their campaign contributors and not their constituents," said Greg Orr of Atlantic Highlands, the Greens' Senate candidate in the 13th District. "They're going to serve their cash constituency, not their electoral constituency."

"There is a drastic need for public funding of elections up and down the line, so that this kind of thing that we call campaign finance, which is nothing but legalized bribery, will be stopped, and we have a return to something that resembles real democracy," said Earl Gray of Red Bank, the Greens' Senate candidate in the 12th District.