Ballot wars

The 2016 ballot wars begin

Each failure to appear on a ballot undermines a candidate’s credibility as a national figure.

By Shane Goldmacher

Voting doesn’t begin for another two months but some presidential candidates have already failed their first big ballot test – actually getting on the ballot in all 50 states.

The business of getting a candidate’s name on the ballot is a costly and complex endeavor, a major drain of money and manpower that threatens to weed out the most underfunded campaigns and strain the others in what remains a historically unwieldy Republican field. Some states require thousands of signatures to qualify; others charge tens of thousands of dollars.

Nationally, the price tag for ballot access can soar well past $1 million – more money than some campaigns have left in the bank.

“Right about now is the time when some desperation will set in,” said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican political attorney who served as national counsel for Mitt Romney but is unaligned in 2016.

Barring a major organizational misfire, there’s little doubt that the top-tier Republicans with big money operations – Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump – will be on the ballot nationwide. But for everyone else – including Chris Christie, John Kasich and Rand Paul, whose campaigns say they are on track to be on the ballot everywhere – ballot access is an expensive challenge.

Carly Fiorina’s campaign, which says she will appear on the ballot everywhere, has estimated ballot access will cost her $2 million. In a video sent to her supporters this week, she complained about the difficulty of the endeavor by accusing “party bosses” of trying to “rig the game…to protect the establishment candidates and then try to keep everyone else out.”

“Every conservative candidate deserves to be on the ballot,” Fiorina said. “Not just those with Jeb Bush money or Hillary Clinton money.”

In Alabama, one of the few states where the filing deadline has passed, neither Jim Gilmore nor George Pataki, two longshot former governors running bare bones 2016 campaigns, paid the $10,000 fee to appear on the March 1 ballot. Failing to file guarantees that Gilmore and Pataki won’t win any of Alabama’s 50 delegates up for grabs next year.

While it’s true mathematically that candidates need not compete in every state to win the nomination, the political reality is that each failure to appear on a ballot undermines a candidate’s credibility as a national figure. “Nobody pats you on the back if you get on every ballot,” Ginsberg explained. “But if you don’t get on the ballot in every state, boy, there are huge ramifications for your campaign.”

Gilmore, who had just $34,000 cash on hand at the end of September, says his strategy was focused on New Hampshire, South Carolina (where he paid the $40,000 filing fee), Florida and Virginia, where he was governor from 1998 to 2002.

“You’re focused on the fact that the candidates who are likely to win are the ones that have enough money to be on the ballot in every state,” Gilmore complained to POLITICO, adding, “Our strategy would be that our $10,000 would be better spent in New Hampshire [than a non-early state like Alabama].”

Four years ago, Virginia was home to one of the biggest procedural embarrassments of the presidential campaign when Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, among others, all failed to meet the burdensome requirements necessary to make the ballot. Only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul succeeded.

Now, Virginia’s December 10 deadline to collect 5,000 signatures, including 200 in each of the state’s eleven congressional districts, looms large for the 2016 field. (Virginia has halved its signature requirement since 2012).

“Iowa votes first,” said Tim Saler, who had served as Bobby Jindal’s deputy campaign manager and was in charge of ballot-access efforts before the cash-poor governor dropped out of the race earlier this month. “But Ohio comes and goes on December 16. Virginia comes and goes on December 10.”

So far, Cruz, Carson, Trump and Kasich have submitted signatures in Virginia, according to the state GOP. Buried among Kasich’s roughly 9,000 signers is an unusual name: Jim Gilmore. “They asked me to sign,” Gilmore said. “So I did.”

(Gilmore said he had signed other ballot petitions, too. “Just as a courtesy to my fellow candidates,” he said.)

If Virginia was the big stumbling-block state in 2012, numerous campaign officials point to Illinois as the likeliest to play such a role in 2016. Illinois’s complex rules require not only collecting signatures in all 18 congressional districts, including Chicago’s Democratic strongholds, but recruiting delegates who will appear on the ballot on the candidate’s behalf. One 2016 campaign strategist called it a “Rubik’s Cube.”

“There’s a real premium on people who will be delegates whose name will be known enough to win,” Ginsberg said.

Even Romney almost missed the ballot in Illinois. Republican consultant Dennis Lennox was a last-minute Romney hire in 2012 and recalled standing in the snow at Chicago train stations in overwhelmingly Democratic districts to gather signatures days before the deadline. “The reality is the Romney campaign barely made the ballot,” Lennox said.

The 2016 Illinois filing deadline is the first week of January. Multiple campaigns also singled out Indiana for its particularly onerous requirements – its deadline is in late January.

In those states and others, there are lots of ways for things to go wrong. There are only a handful of veteran ballot-access experts in the Republican Party – and certainly not enough to staff every campaign. Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum – the Republican runners-up in 2008 and 2012, respectively, who had less than $1 million at the end of the last quarter – must rely heavily on volunteer labor since it’s far cheaper to collect signatures with volunteers than with paid professionals. Paul, with less than $2 million on hand when accounting for his debts, must similarly rely on the remnants of his father’s past presidential campaigns.

The Republican National Lawyers Association made all their jobs much easier when, for the first time, it made available a state-by-state guide to getting on the ballot, free of charge, to every campaign this year. The so-called “Ballot Access Initiative” document is likely saving campaigns thousands of dollars in research costs.

For some candidates, the ballot access wars have been a way to showcase organizational muscle. Bush, for instance, has been the first to file in numerous states, including in Delaware this week and in Vermont way back in August 2015, months before any of his rivals. He is already on the ballot in about two dozen states.

Others have touted their ability to go above and beyond qualifying for the ballot by filing complete slates of delegates, such as in Alabama where Carson, Cruz, Rubio and Paul filled out complete slates, while Trump was a delegate-slot short. Bush filled out more than half the slots. Lindsey Graham and Christie, meanwhile, made the ballot but had no people qualify as delegates.

Alabama delegates are bound on the first ballot at the GOP convention in Cleveland next summer, so having a full slate won’t necessarily impact the nomination unless the convention deadlocks. But Reed Phillips, political director of the Alabama Republican Party, said delegate slates still matter symbolically. “You want to have delegates,” he said. “You want to go back and say you have people in Alabama supporting me.”

The state by state accumulation of delegates is, after all, the path to the nomination. The current Republican National Committee rules require the nominee to win the majority of delegates in at least eight states and territories. That has highlighted the importance of contests in far-flung places like Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, which is charging campaigns $7,500 to get on the ballot there.

“It’s about playing the long game this cycle,” said Lennox, who works for Cruz’s campaign as a consultant trying to capture delegates in the Pacific territories, “and part of playing the long game is getting on the ballot.”