ABOUT THIS

I'm so glad to be joined by Richard Winger today. He is an expert in an area that has been a real focus for a lot of the left recently, which is the question of doing a dirty break strategy.

Obviously following the disappointment of losing the Bernie campaigns in 2016 and 2020, a lot of the left were curious about whether or not someone like Bernie Sanders should take the movement he was able to galvanize during those elections and continue to run during a general election contest.

However, there is some dispute about the viability of one such campaign in Richard Winger has done a lot to unpack the viability of one such effort. So I'm so glad to have him here on the podcast. Welcome Richard Winger.

Okay, I'm really grateful that you're having me Richard. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you started researching this particular issue area?

When I was in high school, I got really interested in who votes for third parties. Because at the time in the early 60s, the only three third parties that regularly tried to get on the ballot and really run candidates was the Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist Workers Party and the Prohibition Party.

And those three parties were so little known and had so little prestige. And yeah, I was amazed that sometimes they got a lot of votes. I wanted to figure out who's voting for them.

But I was a California and I noticed those parties weren't on the ballot in California. And I thought, well, how come if it's a party in the United States, it's on the ballot and some states and not others.

And then I got interested in the ballot access laws and I've never stopped being interested in them.

Well, you came to my attention after I heard a number of other guests give interviews on mainstream media who were authors of a recent paper in a Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

And in that paper, they make the case. They were focused on the viability of Donald Trump, specifically running as a third party candidate if you lost the Republican primary.

But in that paper, they make the argument that a number of laws called sore loser laws along some other prohibitions to ballot access would preclude Donald Trump from running and getting anywhere near the number of electoral votes that would be necessary for him to win because the number of states with a lot of electoral votes that Republicans need to win also aligned with those that have these kinds of sore loser laws.

You just agree with the analysis in this paper. And so let me just open it up to you to explain why it is that you think there is a viable path to a dirty break for a candidate who runs in a Democratic primary or Republican primary and then chooses to go ahead and run again in a general election.

There were a lot of factual errors in that article. And furthermore, a balanced article has to give the precedence on both sides. They only put the precedence that disagreed with me.

They didn't mention the others. It's just amazing to me that people would remember if they're old enough in 1980 John B. Anderson, a prominent Republican Congressman from Illinois, sought the Republican presidential nomination.

And on April 23rd, he realized he wasn't going to get the nomination. So he withdrew from the Republican race and he announced as an independent and he got in the ballot and all 50 states, even though his name had been in the ballot and plenty Republican presidential primaries.

So how could we go from 1980 where a sore loser is not barred in any state and somehow without any change in the laws, people think it can't be done. There's something very fishy about that.

Well, maybe we should start by first explaining what is a sore loser law.

Typically, it says somebody who is defeated in a major party primary can't then be the nominee of some other party in the general election or he can't hear she can't be an independent.

Okay. And how many states have those kinds of laws in the books?

For office other than president, the vast majority do, but many of them obviously don't apply to presidential candidates because they're worded about somebody being defeated in the primary.

Well, in presidential primary, it doesn't make any sense at all because nobody is defeated for the nomination, the presidential nomination of a major party.

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