|
by Frank Fluckiger, Constitution Party of Utah State Chairman
December 9, 2008
I have spent a fair amount of time analyzing the November 4th General Election returns and want to share with you some of the conclusions that I have reached. I hope you will
refer to the spread sheets as your read this article. (Download the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet fi
le, or view the individual reports in PDF format in each of the paragraphs below). I have done four spread sheets:
1) The state by state
election returns for president. ( you will note that the returns are still not complete, especially from states where the candidate name was a write-in candidate such as CA and PA. Once
those figures are entered in mid December, the total vote for Baldwin will be over 200,000. This is an increase of over 55,000 votes from 2004 or an increase of about 38%. Had Baldwin been on the ballot in CA, PA and MT as Peroutka was in 2004, the CP p
residential vote total would be closer to a quarter of a million votes. That would have been an increase of about 74% from 2004. From that perspective, the party did amazingly well. It seemed clear to me that in the final weeks of the campaign, the momen
tum was clearly in our favor at the expense of the other third party candidates. All of them did less well than the closing polls indicated. The only nation wide poll I saw for Baldwin showed him at 0.10% and he ended up at 0.15%. Utah gave Baldwin the h
ighest vote percentage of any third party candidate in the nation with the exception of Maine and ND which gave Nader 1.45% and 1.32% respectively. Also Millard County gave Baldwin the highest vote percentage in the nation again with the exception of one
small very rural county in ND which gave Barr 21% of the vote (280) and Baldwin 13.56% (180) votes in the same county. In addition to this, Utah was the only state in the nation in which Baldwin out polled both Nader and Barr. Again, that is the first t
ime in the history of the CP that has happened. That is not all. There were seven states (highlighted in light blue) in which Baldwin out polled Barr, the Libertarian candidate. That likewise is a first for the party.
2) County by count elec
tion returns for the presidential race.
3) U S Congressional races
by district
4) State auditor race
by county.
In each case the state and counties are listed from those with the highest votes percentage wise to those with the lowest vote percentage-wise. I did not include the county ra
ces, because at this point the pattern of voting is pretty clear. Four schedules is enough for us to see that pattern. The top counties in one race are pretty much the top counties in the other racers as well. Below are some conclusions that I have arriv
ed at from my analysis.
The returns from all of the states and and even all of the Utah counties are not yet official, but I was able to do a bit more analysis that brought to light some facts that I
feel are note worthy. I feel the reason that Utah did as well as we did in the election can be summarized in a few points.
1) In order to maintain ballot position we selected a non high profile state wide office (state auditor) in which to run a candidate. Richard Proctor was certainly qualified,
but he simply agreed to file for office with the sole intent to help us maintain ballot position. He did very little campaigning. This proved to be a wise choice. To maintain ballot position Utah law says that all of the votes cast for all congressional
candidates are to be added up. Then two percent of the total is tabulated. To maintain ballot position for the party, any candidate must receive two percent of that total. Richard received 3.75 percent of the vote (33,700 so far) and therefor we maintain
ed ballot position. The thing that I found most interesting is that in every single county he received at least 2% or more of the vote. Scott Bradley was our top candidate in the 2006 election with about 22,000 votes, so we improved on that total by abou
t 50%. In the presidential race we went from 6,841 for Peroutka to 12,012 for Baldwin which was a 5,171 increase or about a 76% increase, so that indicates positive and steady growth for the party. Even though Jim Noorlander got less percentage of the vo
te in 2008 than in 2006, his hard vote tally actually increased. He received 17,365 votes. All of the U S Congressional candidate votes combined exceeded 29,000 which is quite impressive.
2) However, I feel the real key to our success has been our on going effort to teach about the Constitution including the writings and teaching of the Founding Fathers. In con
junction with this we have tried to teach what has been happening historically to the nation since it's founding. This effort has been spear headed by Steve Pratt as well as Scott Bradley, and Jim Noorlander. They are increasingly in demand as speakers,
not only here in Utah ,but surrounding states as well. Steve in particular has been a strong promoter of this approach and constantly refers to the CP as the only viable vehicle to return to the Constitution as in the original intent of our nation's foun
ders. What I admire most about these men is that they give of their time freely. Often they are not even compensated for travel expense. They do these things out of duty and love of liberty.
We have had this teaching effort as a pilot project on going for nearly four years. It is a slow but sure process. We began this as a pilot project in Steve's home county (Mil
lard) and have since spread to other counties. Those counties are high lighted in yellow and that is where we consistently have made good progress. We are now spreading into other counties. Those counties in the top group that are not high lighted are co
unties in which we have had exceptional leadership. Salt Lake County also has exceptional leadership, but it is such a large county, that it lags behind the other smaller counties in noticeable change. Much of our success in these areas are due to the ef
forts of such people in Davis County such as Mark and Jill Hudson, Dennis Whitaker of Millard, Mark Kemp of Utah County, Melvin and Sonya Ray in Uintah, Alison Howes in Iron, and Joyce Simmons in Juab Counties to just name a few.
3) Finding and recruiting top leadership has been another key to our success. That is much easier said than done, but we do have some outstanding leaders in the state for whic
h I am very grateful. We just need to somehow speed up the process as the hour is late. We will do all in our power to face the task at hand. Some of the leaders have employed great ingenuity to accomplish what they have. Funds have been very limited to
us. As stated before, the Ron Paul campaign drew many of the funds that otherwise would have come our way.
4) Taking advantage of some excellent DVD's such as the Voter's Guide, the Baldwin/Bradley TV Interview, the Jim Noorlander DVD's, Meet the Candidates DVD, and others that we
have gotten from national meetings have been most useful tools in promoting the party. We have simply duplicated them and then distributed them at our cost to get them out to the public. I can not begin to express just how valuable these tools have been.
In the long run they are a source of future donations.
5) A lot of consistent hard work and not giving up when things look bleak as they did at the height of the Ron Paul campaign.
These factors, in a nut shell, I feel have been the key to our success. I will be the first to admit that we fell short of some of our goals among which were to have both Jim
Noorlander and Chuck Baldwin receive enough votes to maintain ballot position. We did fall short there but we will continue to pursue this path.
Having said all of the above, we now need to go to the county clerk's of each county and get the vote totals for each precinct and then analysis where our strength is coming f
rom. As you go through the voting results by precinct you will discover pockets of strength. Wherever there is such a pocket of strength we can be sure that there was a driving force in that area that got out the vote for our candidates. Our job as count
y leaders is to then identify that person(s) who succeeded in getting the vote out in that precinct. We then need to involve them in the party.
This is going to take a lot of time and effort and we cannot expect just the county leaders to be able to do this. If we are to be successful this is a task that must be done.
We also need to recruit from among these people candidates who will run for office in their local communities next year. We need to have at least 10 people elected to city and town councils next year. This is what is meant by grass roots politics. That
is where our people will begin to teach correct principles of government to their fellow city council members and in turn prepare them to run for state and county offices in subsequent years.
Please take the time as SL County has done and get maps from your county clerks that show the boundaries of each voting precinct and fill these positions with good people as s
oon as you can. This is going to take some serious time and effort, but if we are going to grow, it is a job that must be done.
In conclusion then, I feel your good people have done a remarkable job. Utah has truly become a beacon for other states to follow. I feel that as we lead the way, other states
, first neighboring states in the West such as ID, WY and AZ and then other states in the Midwest, will follow suit in our path. We cannot let them down. So very much is depending on us doing our duty. As we do so, everything else will fall into place. <
hr id="HRRule2" width="80%" align=left size=3> |
