Iowa Caucus Guy’s Presidential Election Blog

 I started the VoteYerMusic project as a quick and fun idea to ask Presidential candidates what kind of music they liked. There's two reasons right?  Music is universal.  I believe this.  Give musicians Mike Huckabee and Pete Buttigieg a couple of instruments and they will bond.  The second reason is that Leaders should be accessible.  I can understand that Leaders may get a lot of requests, but if they can't take time for an easy question, what does that say about some of the real concerns. I questioned many candidates during Primary season and was pleased by the response.  While many campaigns stopped this Spring, the ideas of these candidates are out in the public discussion.  Some of these candidates have launched new endeavours.  ( Dan Behrman is running for Governor of Texas, Keenan Wallace Dunham is running for Senate in North Carolina.)   As a process, VoteYerMusic has been a vehicle for candidates without a Mas...

This series is about combining my love for politics with my love for music. We may not fully realize it, but we are in the midst of big changes. While the Republican primary seems uneventful, we know that at some point, Donald Trump will cease to be  the party's nominee (either due to the 22nd Amendment or his fast food diet).  This will leave a huge hole for someone to try and pick up and fill.  With Reagan, it took a decade to find anyone even close to living up to that personality.  Sorry, Donald Jr,  I'm not quite convinced. The Democrats initial show of unity has given way to infighting and paranoia.  We can only guess at who the nominee will be and what the after-effects will be. The Libertarian Party is also at an interesting crossroads, which could benefit from some of the fallout from what happens in the other two parties.  The result is a wide list of candidates from across a political spectrum, with varying ideas and experien...

In November, I embarked on putting together a list of music-related posts about the Democratic Presidential candidates.  Part 1 covered the very musically inclined Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg.  Part 2 covered Deval Patrick (son of a member of Sun Ra's Arkstra), and the musically gifted pair of Tulsi Gabbard and Marianne Williamson. Part 3 will start off with a candidate who has now dropped, Kamala Harris , but had a couple of music related stories that stepped in to distract from her campaign. One of which was that when asked about recreational marijuana, Kamala said, sure, in college she would listen to Tupac and Snoop Dogg and partake in the Chronic. All would be well in good, if Kamala hadn't graduated in 1986, Five years prior to 2Pacalypse and 7 years before Doggystyle, their respective debuts. Which gives a few possibilities.  1- She's lying to sound "cool" 2- She did smoke some weed but it was back when Dr Dre said Cess caused Brain Dama...

There is (as everyone knows) a Democratic primary.  What gets less attention is that there is also a Republican primary.  While Trump seemingly has large support from his base, there are challengers. If you look online, there are dozens of Presidential candidates, of course, but by my count, there are really only seven serious candidates who are running credible campaigns to challenge Trump, and today, I am featuring one of them- Robert Ardini. Ardini is an award-winning Advertising Executive, Business Owner and Publisher who made news when he ran in the New York House district that Donald Trump is from.  Running as a Republican in a very heavily Democratic district, he still garnered 50,000 votes (Interestingly, he did twice as good as Trump did there).  Ardini wrote a book Running for Congress in Trump's Backyard, which looks like an insightful look into what it must be like to run in New York politics. Ardini is a serious candidate, getting his name on b...

As unpopular as Donald Trump seems, there are only a handful of serious Republican candidates running against him.  One of these is writer Zoltan Istvan. Zoltan is on the ballot in many of the states holding Republican primaries including New Hampshire, California, Colorado, and Texas.  I first heard of Zoltan (his real name) in 2016 when he ran as the Transhumanist Party's candidate for President. As much of a campaign for Transhumanism as for the White House, Zoltan's 2016 write-in campaign was covered in the Guardian , Vice, New Yorker, USA Today. the BBC, Business Insider, Vox, Salon, Huffington Post and many other media outlets. Zoltan made a run for Governor of California as a Libertarian in 2018 and gathered over 14,400 votes.  As featured in the Washington Times, his run in 2020 is as a new type of Republican- a candidate who is fiscally Conservative, appealing to Libertarians and Republicans, but with a focus on Science (a subject that often seems owned...

If you have been following my blog, you know about my project to ask Presidential candidates what kind of music they like.  It goes towards a further conversation about communication, and I have been also able to use it to highlight candidates people might be interested in. I reached out to Keenan Wallace Dunham after I saw some positive buzz about him on social media.  Then, his name kept popping up.  He is one of the major candidates listed on the Torch of Liberty's 2020 Libertarian Party poll.  Dunham is one of 13 candidates that will appear on the California Libertarian primary. and one of 10 on the New Hampshire Libertarian Presidential Preference Primary. Checking out his twitter, I notice he mentions a couple of issues where there should be a big audience, but the Dems and GOP don't seem to be consistent on- privacy issues (Dunham would pardon Assange and Manning) ending war, and applying term limits. I asked Keenan to share a bit about his campaign, and...

Per the wikipedia article on the 2020 Primaries, there are 19 Democrats who are running for President and are on at least one State Ballot. Today's post features one of those- Robby Wells. Wells is a name recognizable in Election circles. In 2012, he ran for the nomination of the Constitution Party, and 2016 as an Independent in the General Election. For 2020, he has ramped up his campaign. He was actually the first Democrat to announce his candidacy, announcing even before John Delaney. He will be on the ballot for the early primaries (New Hampshire, South Carolina, Colorado, California, Texas).  He was at the Jim Clyburn Fish Fry in June (where the Washington Post reported "Robby Wells who has appeared at some state party functions, was given the same time onstage as Biden, Sanders and the rest" and as part of The University of South Carolina's Presidential Town Hall series (appearing the same weekend as Bill DiBlasio, Julian Castro, and Pete Buttigie...

In my last post, I talked about my #VoteYerMusic project. I have been lucky to have heard from many Libertarian Presidential candidates- Dan Taxation is Theft Behrman, Ken Armstrong, and Max Abramson, as well as former candidate,  Democrat,  Joe Sestak. Today, we feature another Libertarian, Sam Robb. In an April posting on  Pittsburgh News Wire , Robb, a former naval officer and software developer for several Pittsburgh-area start-up companies said " “My intent is to seek the Libertarian Party nomination for President in 2020. We have two major parties that each want to increase government control. Both consider personal liberty a secondary issue – if they consider it at all. In contrast, The Libertarian Party embodies the freedom-loving, independent spirit of our Founders. If we are to succeed as a nation, we must once again embrace these core ideas of freedom and liberty.” Robb participated in the Olean, NY Debate in November and is starting to make inroads towar...

I do a thing here that I came up with many years ago, and I call it "voteyermusic". You can read about it more in some earlier posts, but the main gist is that I ask Presidential candidates what music they like. The answer isn't important. It's the question, and there are two reasons why.  First, it is about how accessible the candidate is, and if they really care about the public they will be serving. Over time, I have noticed that division between candidate and public has widened. Go to Cory Booker's site and see if you can even find a way to get that question to him. You can't; and it's the easiest question a candidate will ever be able to answer. The other is that music is a great uniter. Some of my best, longest lasting friendships started with conversations about music. If you know me, you just know that is how I am. In fact, I had ten minutes one-on-one this summer with a (now former) Democratic candidate here in Iowa. I knew his policy plan...

Music and Politics seem to go hand in hand. For years, people were attracted to the idea of a plain speaking musician running the government, which fueled the likes of Frank Zappa, Joe Walsh, and Jello Biafra to run for office. This month I have been collecting the music related stories of 2020.  I have spent time on Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, but I want to cover the rest of the field. We will start with the latest entrant  Deval Patrick.   The former Massachusetts Governor has music in his blood.  His father is the late Pat Patrick, who had a notable musical career playing saxophone and bass, most notably as part of Sun Ra's Arkestra. Patrick joined Sun Ra in the 1950s and played on seminal acid jazz albums like Sun Song, Sound of Joy, and Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth, continuing into the 60s playing "Space Lute" on The Nubians of Plutoniana and essential records The Futuristic Sounds Of ... and The Heliocentric Worlds Of....  He would tour and...