LP of CA Gears Up For 2006, Already?

I was actually disappointed to find, in my inbox this morning, an e-mail stating the Libertarian Party of California has found a full slate of candidates for the 2006 elections, at least for the North Coast. Ted Brown, our statewide candidate recruiter, does a miraculous job each election of rounding up candidates all over the state. Local Green Party babe, Kaitlin Socopi- Belknap, commented to me some time ago she was impressed with how many candidates the LP manages to find. Well, for the most part, the credit belongs to Ted Brown and his hard work.

Of course, this doesn't mean the candidates will just show up on the ballot. They have to either pay filing fees, gather a certain number of signatures, or, come up with a combonation of filing fees and signatures- each signature being worth a certain amount toward the filing fees. I forget the cash value of an individual signature but it varies with the office being sought.

It is nice to have a libertarian to vote for come election time, but it has it downsides as well. Getting the candidate on the ballot can be a real hassle to me, since up here it's pretty much up to just me. It takes time, money and a lot of work to do the signature gathering. I was kinda hoping no one would want to run this next time around so I could pretty much sit out the pre- election hassles. Oh well. We'll see what happens.

Some of the volunteer candidates may just end up being paper candidates. That can be a bit of a disappointment for people going out and gathering signatures but we've been fairly lucky up here to have candidates that are fairly active and actually show up for candidate forums and such. I've done some candidate web pages for other LP candidates around the state, off and on, and have been struck by the inability of some of our candidates to even come up with issues they want to run on. Had one guy who just wanted me to link any issues on his web page to the generic LP CA issues web page and didn't want me to put any background info on his page. You know, the stuff nearly any candidate has on a campaign web page: "I'm a father of four kids and have been practicing medicine for 25 years.....". If someone can't even come up with the basics, why bother running.

But, like I said, we've had fairly decent LP candidates up here since I've been with the Party. Here's who's looking at running next year:

1st District, U.S. Congress- running against Mike Thompson - Joe Farina from Woodland. I believe he's run before for one thing or another so at least he has experience. I've certainly heard his name before.

2nd District, State Senate- currently held by Wes Chesbro, who I believe can't run for this office again because of term limits - Our very own, Verne Skjonsby, who recently, unless I'm mistaken, won one of the seats on one of the Arcata School Boards and prior to that won a seat on the Board of some recreation district in Arcata.

1st District, State Assembly- running against Patty Berg- Tom Reed, out of Cloverdale. Never heard of him but past LP State Assembly candidate, Ken Anton, told me Reed had called him to talk a bit about running for that office.

We'll see how this shapes up and whether they can get on the ballot without paying filing fees. What I'm curious about is what Chesbro is gonna do, assuming I'm right about him being term limited out. Will he try to run against Thompson in the primary? I wonder.