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It’s Wednesday, August 14
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Good morning, readers.
This week, federal judges ruled on which third party candidates will appear on North Carolina voters’ ballots this fall.
On Monday, a federal judge reversed the North Carolina Board of Elections’ decision to deny ballot access to leftist presidential candidate Cornel West and his Justice for All party. And in a separate ruling, a federal judge said third party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can remain on voters’ ballots in the fall after the state Democratic Party sued to keep him and his We the People party out of the race.
Third party candidates are nothing new. The North Carolina Libertarian Party has worked steadily to increase its ballot access and will have 37 candidates on voters’ ballots across the state this November, including up to 10 candidates in various Wake County precincts.
But this year, when margins of victory in the presidential election could be tight in a swing state such as North Carolina, the impact of third party candidates could be significant, says Asher Hilderbrand, a public policy professor at Duke.
“Voting for a third party instead of one of the two major parties could very well decide the race,” Hildebrand says. “They can absolutely play spoiler in the election.”
But candidates, many of whom say they are just trying to get voters to think outside of the two party binary system, say they want to change voters’ minds even as they acknowledge it’s unlikely that they’ll win.
“I feel like everything we have that’s bad is because we’ve had these two parties consistently giving us bad policy from the top down,” says Mike Ross, a Libertarian candidate for NC governor. “I see that it seems more and more disconnected from what regular people want and need.”
Have a good Wednesday.
—Jane
Durham
The Can Opener is a uniquely Durham food truck park.
ICYMI: The Durham Public Schools Board of Education seems to support its plan to move Durham School of the Arts despite community pushback.
Wake
Vice president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris will visit Raleigh on Friday to discuss the economy.
Orange
UNC System president Peter Hans discussed his choice to select “outsider” Lee Roberts as chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill.
North Carolina
North Carolina officials have approved more than 100 different types of voter ID that resigstered voters in the state can use to vote in the general election this fall.
Today’s weather
Sunny with a high of 86 degrees.
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