Long shots: 3rd-party candidates keep plugging away

Like a lot of political hopefuls, Joe LaBonte has spent this campaign season on the road. Unfortunately, most of these roads have been in places like Oklahoma and New Jersey, miles away from his potential constituents in Utah.

LaBonte is a long-haul truck driver and a candidate for the U.S. Senate. He has an extensive political platform but no yard signs, no bumper stickers and no billboards — and virtually no seat at the political table here.

To be a member of the Personal Choice Party is to be ignored by the traditional candidates, the news media and most of the voting public. It is the Catch-22 of Utah politics: A candidate who does worse than 5 percent in the polls can't appear in televised debates that might help him do better in the polls.

But that hasn't put a damper on candidacies such as LaBonte's. There are 86 third-party contenders running for statewide and legislative offices in Utah, representing the Constitution, Green, Libertarian and Personal Choice parties. That's a remarkable one-third of all candidates running for these offices, and a 72 percent increase since the 2000 election.

In House District 34 alone, there are three different candidates from "third" parties. There's also the best-known third-party candidate in Utah politics — Salt Lake County mayoral candidate Merrill Cook, who has been famously "independent" off and on for years.

"We didn't get word that we had qualified as a political party until one week before the filing deadline" in March, said Gary Van Horn of the Constitution Party, "and yet we've got over 30 candidates."

"There is a suppressed need for what we're doing," says Van Horn, who thinks he should really be called a "second-party" candidate because Democrats and Republicans offer no real choice. "Republicrats," he calls them.

Van Horn is running for Republican Bob Bennett's U.S. Senate seat, along with Democrat Paul Van Dam and Personal Choice candidate LaBonte. This is Van Horn's fourth statewide election the past 12 years. He has run for governor against Mike Leavitt, for the Senate against Orrin Hatch and for the Senate once before against Bennett. He never received more than 3 percent of the total vote.

But winning isn't everything. In fact, for some third-party candidates, winning isn't even an expectation. "They're usually issue and cause driven," said political science professor Shaun Bowler of University of California Riverside, who has studied the whos and whys of third-party politics in America.