Sunday, June 13, 2010
Filing Week follies
Last week saw one of Washington’s annual exercises in political action. It was Filing Week, the five days during which all potential candidates for office in the year’s election make their decisions known to the public.
There’s always some suspense in Filing Week. Used to be a lot more, back when filing had to be done in person in Olympia or at King County Elections. For reasons that always escaped me (extra publicity, perhaps?), candidates routinely waited until Friday to file their papers. Every year, it seemed, somebody showed up at the designated office just before they closed the doors. Or they’d arrive a few too many minutes late, and be denied the opportunity to file. Now that they’ve gone to electronic filing, whatever point someone thought they were making by hurrying in at the deadline is moot.
These days, the only potential suspense is at the State Representative level and in some judicial races—which of the equivalent offices will the person file for? In Washington, unlike most other states, Senate and House districts are identical. Each Legislative District has one Senator (elected every 4 years) and two Representatives (both elected every 2 years). So a candidate can choose either of the two House seats to contest. One of the incumbents might be more vulnerable than the other, or perhaps there might be an open seat. Those usually draw bigger crowds.
Now that the odious Top Two primary is firmly entrenched, and even being idiotically copied by California, there’s more suspense in the political party nomenclature than in the office selection. In his (highly questionable) wisdom, the Secretary of State permits each candidate to write whatever he/she wants, limited only by character count and propriety, in the
(Prefers _______________ Party)portion of the candidate listing. Inevitably, as Goldy noted last week, a few Democrats forget to switch to the adjectival form of their party’s name; thankfully, all of those mistakes were corrected. At least, that’s what the SoS says ... King County Elections shows a few (Prefers Democrat Party) candidates on its website, as well as a few other differences from the SoS listing.
Sprinkled through the party designations are a number of, ummm, gems of creativity. I’m not talking about the two (Prefers Green Party) candidates, since that’s a legitimate political party. Nor do I refer to the five candidates who tried to mask their Republicanism by using some variation of (Prefers G.O.P. Party) ... even though that expands to “Grand Old Party Party”. And (Prefers Independent Party), seen 12 times, isn’t much different from the 11 (States No Party Preference) listings. Beyond those, however, we’ve got some inventive designations in the listings:
- (Prefers Centrist Party)—Mohammad H. Said, US Senator
- (Prefers Bull Moose Party)—Anthony (El Tigrero) Novack, LD13 House Pos.2
- (Prefers Lower Taxes Party)—Tim Sutinen, LD19 House Pos.2
- (Prefers SeniorSide Party)—Mike Huisman, LD21 House Pos.2
- (Prefers Demo Party)—Jeremy Miller, LD22 House Pos.1
- (Prefers Progressive Dem Party)—Steve Robinson, LD22 House Pos.1
- (Prefers Prolife Democrat Party)—F.G. (Fred) Jensen, LD22 House Pos.1
- (Prefers Reluctantly Gop Party)—Ray Carter, LD34 House Pos.1
- (Prefers (R) Problemfixer Party)—Leslie Klein, LD36 Senator
- (Prefers Happiness Party)—Doug (Yoshe) Revelle, LD40 House Pos.1
Finally, there’s Christopher Hurst, the incumbent in LD31 House Pos.2. If this Washington had Blue Dogs, he’d be one. He’s apparently in such a snit at the House Democratic caucus that he refuses to use the real identifier. Instead he’s calling himself (Prefers Independent Dem. Party). When he made that announcement, hepromised (threatened?) that a bunch of other conservative Democrats would join his micro-protest by using the same moniker.
So how many colleagues did Hurst recruit to his cause? The answer, it would appear, is exactly zero. Great move, Chris.
