This year’s election in Texas features a host of competitive elections between Democrats and Republicans in statewide, county and legislative races. Also present on the ballot, though unexpected to win any contests, are candidates from the Libertarian Party and Green Party. The reality that the two parties’ candidates will not be victorious on Nov. 2 does not, however, lessen the importance of these elections for their members. In particular, the parties’ statewide candidates are competing for an important prize: access to the ballot without the need of a costly petition campaign in 2012 and 2014.
It is not an easy task for political parties to gain access to the ballot via the petition process in Texas. To do so requires a number of precinct convention attendees plus valid petition signers who equal at least 1 percent of the vote cast in the most recent gubernatorial election. This year, parties needed to gather (during a 75-day window in the spring) a minimum of 43,992 valid signatures from Texas registered voters who did not vote in the Democratic or Republican party, nor attended a precinct convention or signed the ballot access petition of another party.
To obtain ballot access for the next two election cycles, and thereby avoid having to petition in 2012 and in 2014, a party’s candidate for governor must obtain at least two percent of the valid vote in the gubernatorial election this year. This is not an easy task. No third party candidate has surpassed this barrier since the Libertarian Party’s Jeff Daiell won 3.3 percent in 1990. Daiell was the first third-party candidate to cross the 2 percent line since Ramsey Muñiz of La Raza Unida won 5.6 percent in 1974.
This year, in spite of a competitive race between Republican Rick Perry and Democrat Bill White, Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Kathie Glass has a very legitimate chance to shatter the 2 percent ceiling. The combination of Glass’s active and visible (for a third-party candidate) campaign, as well as the rejection of Rick Perry (but also Bill White) by some Republicans and independents who generally tend to vote for Republican candidates, makes it very likely that Glass will win more than 2 percent. In contrast, Green gubernatorial candidate Deb Shafto has run a less active and more low-profile campaign, which combined with the controversy surrounding the support for the Green Party’s 2010 ballot access petition provided by Republican donors (which has alienated some progressives from the party), make her prospects for winning 2 percent much less bright.
In the event the candidate of either party fails to win at least 2 percent of the vote in the gubernatorial election, there is a consolation prize. If a party’s candidate garners at least 5 percent of the vote in any election for statewide office, then the party achieves ballot access for the next election cycle (2012).
Both parties are virtually certain to surpass this 5 percent barrier, since in the race for Comptroller of Public Accounts, the Democratic Party failed to nominate a candidate (the Democrats also did not nominate a candidate for some statewide judicial offices where the only candidates are a Libertarian and a Republican). As a result, Republican incumbent Susan Combs’ only opponents are the Green Party’s Ed Lindsay and the Libertarian Party’s Mary J. Ruwart. The lack of a Democratic candidate signifies that the total number of valid votes in this race (and hence the denominator used to calculate the 5 percent threshold) will be substantially lower than in other statewide elections as Democrats who cast a straight ticket will not vote in this election. For Democratic and independent voters who choose to vote in the race for comptroller, but do not to wish to vote for a Republican, Lindsay and Ruwart are the only options on the ballot. Finally, one might expect at least some independent and Republican voters who generally vote Republican, but do not vote a straight Republican ticket, to not vote for Combs, who many view as responsible for the state’s appliance rebate program fiasco this past April.
Mark P. Jones is the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy’s Fellow in Political Science as well as the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Rice University.