GOP Openly Recruiting Green Party Candidates in Arizona

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by: Colorado Pols

As the New York Times reports, about as audacious as it gets:

Mr. Pearcy and other drifters and homeless people were recruited onto the Green Party ballot by a Republican political operative who freely admits that their candidacies may siphon some support from the Democrats. Arizona’s Democratic Party has filed a formal complaint with local, state and federal prosecutors in an effort to have the candidates removed from the ballot, and the Green Party has urged its supporters to steer clear of the rogue candidates.

“These are people who are not serious and who were recruited as part of a cynical manipulation of the process,” said Paul Eckstein, a lawyer representing the Democrats. “They don’t know Green from red.”

But Steve May, the Republican operative who signed up some of the candidates along Mill Avenue, a bohemian commercial strip next to Arizona State University, insists that a real political movement has been stirred up that has nothing to do with subterfuge…

The Democratic Party is fuming over Mr. May’s tactics and those of at least two other Republicans who helped recruit candidates to the Green Party, which does not have the resources to put candidates on ballots around the state and thus creates the opportunity for write-in contenders like the Mill Rats to easily win primaries and get their names on the ballot for November. Complaints about spurious candidates have cropped up often before, though never involving an entire roster of candidates drawn from a group of street people.

“It’s unbelievable. It’s not right. It’s deceitful,” said Jackie Thrasher, a former Democratic legislator in northwest Phoenix who lost re-election in 2008 after a Green Party candidate with possible links to the Republicans joined the race…

It isn’t the first time that the Green Party has been openly used by the GOP, but given the disaffection with both parties strongly registering in polls, you can certainly understand why they’re trying wherever they can. It’s still surprising to see it happening quite this blatantly, though–feeling a little cocky? Obviously, in Colorado, the third-party candidates are set to split Republicans, not Democrats. And Democrats didn’t have to recruit Tom Tancredo.

10 thoughts on “GOP Openly Recruiting Green Party Candidates in Arizona”

JO says:

September 7, 2010 at 11:15 pm

Wanna send people to the New York Times to read an interesting story? Great. I do it all the time. Paste the URL, not the story.

Wanna rip off the Times (or any other organization that pays people to report news) by cutting and pasting large blocs of text? OBJECTION. Newspaper sites sell ads, just like ColoradoPols does, and charge based on page hits, just like you do (I presume, since you like to brag about how many page hits you got one month recently). Newspaper sites, UNLIKE ColoradoPols, pay journalists to discover and report the news. Those salaries need to come from someplace, and increasingly that place is the Web pages.

Without newspaper sites, ColoradoPols would be just another hot-air balloon ride, devoid of news, largely devoid of facts.

Shame that it took the threat of a suit by the Denver Post to get you to stop this wholesale copying/pasting rip-off routine with regard to their copy. You really shouldn’t require the threat of legal action by other publications before you observe copyright and to send readers to the site(s) of origin. Frankly, I don’t care how many words you’re copying/pasting and/or whether it squeaks past under some technicality of copyright law. The practice is wrong. It hurts the Fourth Estate, upon which we all depend for a functioning democracy. Kindly stop it

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1. Colorado Pols says:
  
  September 7, 2010 at 11:25 pm
  
  We’ve already disproved this nonsense.
  
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  1. JO says:
    
    September 7, 2010 at 11:33 pm
    
    Your earlier blather proved/disproved nothing except that you can type self-justification and then link to it, as if Nonsense were a variety of French cheese that improves with age. It isn’t and it doesn’t.
    
    It’s an old, old issue on this site, and others, that I’ve mentioned it before, to no avail.
    
    Copying & Pasting at length is a ripoff whether it diverts one re4ader from going to the original site, a “million,” or none.
    
    I’d like to hear from some other readers on this topic. Copy and Paste multiple paragraphs: legitimate or not?
    
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    1. Colorado Pols says:
      
      September 7, 2010 at 11:54 pm
      
      That go back from the link above. This has been discussed ad nauseum, with hundreds and hundreds of comments. Now, please leave the discussion on this thread to the topic intended.
      
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2. JeffcoBlue says:
  
  September 8, 2010 at 12:37 am
  
  You’ve been doing so well lately. Five paragraphs out of a 21 paragraph story, with attendant commentary, is about as fair use as it gets. Silly objection.
  
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Froward69 says:

September 8, 2010 at 12:08 am

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Diogenesdemar says:

September 8, 2010 at 12:09 am

the Green Tea Party?

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JeffcoBlue says:

September 8, 2010 at 12:50 am

It’s minor PARTY abuse. You couldn’t even do this in Colorado because the Green Party has an actual process here.

Or maybe you could…? I’ve heard rumors of Wadhams paying off the anti-Udall Green Party protesters in 2008.

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1. Phoenix Rising says:
  
  September 8, 2010 at 7:40 am
  
  Just because there’s a process doesn’t mean you can’t abuse it.
  
  How much of the state doesn’t even have a functioning Green Party? Get a few folks who haven’t been regular contributors to the GOP to “form a chapter”, get some person to run for an office… If you want to be long term, do this in a lot of places and subvert the party structure through the party elections process. (Conversely, look what the GOP effectively did to the Reform Party with the Pat Buchanan run – heard much from the Reform Party lately?)
  
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Half Glass Full says:

September 8, 2010 at 9:15 am

Tancredo = Street Person

Peter Boyles and KHOW = Sleazy Operatives

Peter Boyles convinced gullible Tancredo that he was the savior of the world. Tancredo is now polling only about half of Maes’ numbers. In the meantime, the American Constitution Party has been turned into a mere shell of a party.

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