Please be specific and expressive, I am seriously considering a major political move and I am tired of the dog and pony. Honesty and details will help my heart convince my mind to act.

Thank You

Nevada’s Independent American Party was founded by the late Daniel M. Hansen in 1967 and first appeared on the ballot in that state during George Wallace’s presidential campaign the following year — some 24 years before Howard Phillips founded the U.S. Taxpayers Party, the original name of the Constitution Party.

Hansen, who was vice chair of the state party at the time, wanted Wallace’s supporters across the country to adopt the IAP as the party’s official name while William K. Shearer of California and others preferred the AIP as an appropriate name for the new nationally-organized party.

Despite a somewhat rocky start — the original leader of the Wallace campaign in Nevada burned the party’s petitions after she was removed by Bill Shearer and replaced by Dr. John de Tar, a Reno urologist — more than 20,000 Nevadans voted for the party’s presidential ticket that year.

Dan Hansen, the IAP’s candidate for governor in 1970, and numerous other members of the large Hansen family — a conservative version of “the Kennedys but without the money,” as a younger Hansen delightfully put it a few years ago — have been running for office on the party’s ticket ever since.

The IAP even made national headlines in the Watergate year of 1974 when Jack Doyle of Las Vegas nearly cost conservative Republican Paul Laxalt a seat in the U.S. Senate. Doyle garnered 10,887 votes in that race, or 6% of the vote, while Laxalt defeated Democrat Harry Reid by a mere 624 votes. Doyle, a staunch Reagan supporter who later joined the Republican Party, was widely credited with pushing Laxalt further to the right.

Doyle wasn’t the GOP’s only worry in Nevada that year. James R. Houston, a wealthy 38-year-old silver speculator, spent lavishly in his campaign for governor on the Independent American ticket, virtually crippling the Republican nominee’s prospects from the outset.

While the party’s registration figures are undoubtedly misleading, the IAP — contrary to Joey’s assertion — had established a foothold in Nevada politics long before the Constitution Party was ever conceived.

Once again, people who are independent enough to decipher from the facts rather than rely on a clever marketing trick (i.e., naming the CP affiliate the “Independent American Party”) will always question stories such as this.

To quote Andy:
Lots of confused voters who check the Independent American Party box by mistake thinking that they are registering as independents when they are supposed to check Decline To State A Political Party.

Absolutely.

If the Nevada IAP switched names, I bet there would be a phased-in decrease in those numbers that you guys continue to tout.

= Chuck also didn’t campaign much in Nevada, which is why his vote in Nevada wasn’t so great.

It is also true that alot of people -especially in California – mistakenly register into the Democrat Party, thinking they will end the war.

And of course, alot of people (fewer in California) mistakenly register into the Republican Party thinking it is for less government.

Revert, whom I believe is still active in county government, is a member of one of Nevada’s oldest and best known families. In fact, his family still owns the famous Beatty Ranch. Moreover, Revert’s late uncle and namesake was a longtime Nye County sheriff’s deputy and state assemblyman who once served as Speaker pro tem of the Nevada assembly.

Facing opposition from both major parties in the general election, Revert, a Democrat who switched to the Independent American Party when his own party cast him aside, defeated Democrat Michael DeLee, a realtor and water resources lobbyist, by an unofficial count of 399 to 379 to retain his seat on the county commission. Republican Alpheus Bruton finished a distant third in that race with 114 votes.

= Look at the vote totals for Joel Hansen in 2004 and several of our local candidates in Clark County got 80,000+ votes in that area alone in the 2006 elections. We’re getting there.

= Yet why then is the highest percentages of IAP voters happen to be in the rural counties of Nevada, where voters there are quite educated and competent on registering to vote?

The same thing happens in California with the American Independent Party.

=Yes and No.

Most of the people who are registered under the American Independent Party banner in California have no clue what it is.

= Not exactly true, I used to be a county chair for the AIP down there, and did work on the voter reg. lists I had.