What Your Third-Party Choice Looks Like

Andy Ellis, welcome back to I Hit Politics.

Excited to be here.

As a Green Party candidate for the governor of Maryland, you are not part of the primary elections being held June 23rd.

But watching from the sidelines as things play out, what are you seeing?

I live in District 45 in Northeast Baltimore, and we have a competitive primary for House of Delegates.

Baltimore is notorious for peppering the streets and every sidewalk with lawn signs.

Many of them put up illegally.

Many of them put up in medians and things like that.

But I have seen very, very few lawn signs in our competitive delegates race this year.

It almost makes me feel like, They got too expensive or they all got together and decided not to do it.

But that's the first thing.

Last lawn signs here in Baltimore.

The other thing that I'm seeing is a whole lot of people are running against the system, running as outsiders and are trying to capitalize on what they think is an anger with both parties.

That being said, I'm not sure that in the primaries, this is going to be a big change year where a lot of those folks are going to win.

And so I get a sense, you know, in 2018, I got a sense that more of those folks were in a position to win this election.

I get in a sense that more of those folks have some support, but I don't see this being a year in which there's a lot of big upsets in the primary at the state level.

There are more outsider campaigns less likely to win.

There should be some relationship between electability

and...

Since I'm running as a third-party candidate, I have to have a very clear theory of electability versus candidacy.

But I don't think that a lot of folks who are running as outside challengers within the party structure... are articulating the same theory of action and which electability may not be what is driving their campaign.

And I think for me, that is a difference between folks that run against the system within the system and folks that run like in our race, we have to have an explanation for that.

Otherwise, the conversations don't get started.

Well, is your point then that if you are running within the party as an outsider, really, you have no chance?

I think you can be an insider's outsider in some ways.