= Because those big names abandoned the Party afterwards. And the national AIP was brought down by a few bad apples from the JBS that wanted to ‘purify’ it from the populist atmosphere and instigated in-fighting.

-Sorta like the theocratic kooks that joined the CP in the late 90′s and tried to do the same thing, even tried kicking Mormons and other non-protestants out of the CP, but they lost and left soon afterward.

Yes, indeed.

And, unlike most times when we repost BAN articles, they are getting way more comments over there, at least so far.

I dont know, but I hope so. I had an opportunity to meet Rarick and he was a very interesting man.

I told Gemma, on the Ballot Access page, that I’d once had plans to write a book on far right third parties since WWII–but i’d since put off those plans.

Schmitz did badly in the South – his highest vote in the South was 5% in Louisiana, where he had been endorsed by Congressman Rarick. He was not on the ballot in Georgia, Florida or Texas, all of which had active far right groups.

At the same time, Schmitz was not a particularly good campaigner. I went to a Schmitz rally in Culver City, and barely stayed awake when Schmitz spoke. Tom Anderson was a better speaker, but even more obscure.

The only area of strength for Schmitz was the far west and the Rocky Mountain states, where he got votes from Republicans disenchanted with Nixon. But fear of McGovern caused many conservatives to vote for Nixon, and fear of Nixon caused some libertarians to vote for McGovern.

A far better strategy for the CP would be to run someone who has not held particularly important political office, but who nevertheless possesses a national profile. The holy grail here is Roy Moore, but there are other attractive options.

My point was that after Wallace built the AIP into a national party, it’s amazing that this long string of big names couldn’t sustain that. It would be as if Perot really had yielded to Dick Lamm in 1996, only to see Lamm fail to crack 5% in the general election. Numbers like Schmitz’s are impressive by today’s standards, but they also show a party in precipitous decline. The Constitution Party has done far better party-building work with nonentities like Peroutka and Baldwin than the AIP did with governors and congressmen.

Im actually somewhat surprised that the modern CP has not run a single former Congressman–many of them are interested in doing just that. I know 4 former congressmen, and a former senator, who would run if they were approached and given the backing of the party. Then there is Alan Keyes (who is obviously not very popular, but im just talking big-names here) and a number of higher profile businessmen.

Let’s not forget that one of the party guys associated with the AIP was George Wallace himself–who scored 9 million + votes. Jim Gilchrist did better in his race for Congress in ’05 than any Green Party candidate has done in a three way race, I believe.

If these guys were still around and ran as Constitution Party candidates, they would do much better.