The Hobby: APIC Elections & The Future

Hobby posts are where we discuss the hobby of political collecting, organizational issues within the OR-APIC or National APIC, or just generalized discussions that might be important to the members or potential members of the American Political Item Collectors non-profit. 

2020 is not just an election year from America, but it is an election year for the APIC, the parent organization of the Oregon APIC (we are a geographic chapter). In the May edition of the Bandwagon (a publication sent out monthly), APIC members that are currently paid up on their dues ($42.00 a year) will get a ballot. By and large, these elections are a sleepy affair. Rarely is a race contested seriously. The positions seem even less desirable than running for your local cemetery board. Why is that you might ask?

2020 Political Buttons Part 9: Joe Biden Works For Series

The Biden presidential primary produced 4 really nice buttons for the four early contest states. That would be Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. This follows with what the campaign produced in 2008 when they made a set of pins for Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. Here are the 2008 pins.

You will notice that there could be two versions of each. One would have a blue union bug and the other a red union bug. So far I have only ever seen the Iowa pins with a red union bug. All of these pins are 1" It took me several years after the 2008 election to get 3/4 pins. I have yet to find an SC version, but I did pick up a red union bug pin for Iowa.  The Nevada and South Carolina pins seem to be the harder to get versions from the 2008 set.

2020 Political Buttons Part 8: Bennet & Patrick Items

The New Hampshire primary has now come and gone. President Trump easily won the GOP contest. The Democratic contest had a fair amount of competition. In the end, Bernie Sanders and Mayor Pete seemed to be the top two finishers. After the problems in volunteer reporting of the Iowa caucus the week before, politicos were excited about the first state-administered primary. Instead of taking days to report results, we had the results within hours.

Each election night we see winners move onto the next state and we see some candidates bow out of the race. The night of the New Hampshire primary we saw three prominent candidates end their campaigns.  Andrew Yang or New York, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, and former Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. We will look at a small selection of items from the campaigns of Bennet and Patrick in this post. Yang had a large following and produced many items during the primary. That we will cover in a stand-alone post.

Bennet Items

Senator Bennet used bumperactive store to fulfill items purchased from his campaign. Two buttons were sold via the online store. They both have a CWA union bug on the face. One is a generic Bennet for America pin and the other is a neat Bet on Bennet button. It is possible this button with the gambling theme was intended to appeal to Nevada, which is next door to Colorado.

2020 Political Buttons Part 7: Cory & Castro

The first votes of 2020 have started. Some lucky folks in Minnesota have already started voting. December and January featured several notable exits from the 2020 race. The Iowa caucus is 13 days away. The field has narrowed considerably There are now just 12 active candidates. When we last wrote about Cory Booker items it was fairly early in the summer of 2019.  Not many new buttons came out later, at least on the website. If you were in Nevada, New Hampshire or Iowa you might have been able to snag a great button from an event.

This pin is 3" and seems to be from NH Booker efforts. It was given out to students going back to school and recruited as Campus Fellows in September as part of a campus outreach effort. I am not sure if these were also given out in Nevada, South Carolina, and Iowa.

2020 Political Buttons Part 6: Minnesota State Fair

2020 Political Buttons Part 5: Iowa Steak Fry

Had an amazing trip to Iowa for the Polk County Democrats Steak Fry event in September. APIC member hosted a couple Oregonians. The trip included a visit to the Iowa State Capitol building, a Star Trek Museum in Riverside, Iowa and many, many visits to campaign offices. Of course, you don't get APIC members in the same room without getting into buttons. Getting a tour of John's collection was amazing. He collects VOTE materials and Theodore Roosevelt. The wildest thing I saw was VOTE toothpaste. I thought I had seen everything. Here is a commercial from 1968.

2020 Political Buttons Part 4: Kirsten Gillibrand

In our last update on 2020 campaign items, we covered a series of candidates that had dropped out of the race over the summer of 2019. It seems that as soon as we hit publish on a post there is something worthy of an update. A few days after our last post, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand announced she was dropping out of the race for the Democratic nomination. She decided to because of the campaign was unable to qualify for the next round of Democratic Debates. She was unable to secure higher polling numbers and the required unique donors.

This was just as her campaign, only a couple weeks before this had begun to offer buttons in her campaign store. It would be interesting to know if she would have reached the 130,000 donor threshold had she offered buttons on her website a few months ago, instead of a few weeks ago. Here is the button that was offered on her website.

 

2020 Political Buttons Part 3: The Campaign Is Over For Them

We are fast approaching Labor Day in the United States. A traditional time for many candidates to be starting their campaigns and known as the time when the pubic during general elections, traditionally starts to pay closer attention to the race. The next Democratic presidential debates are not until September and the last debate was at the end of July. Between these two events, we have already seen several candidates drop out of the race in just the last week.  Seth Moulton, Jay Inslee, and John Hickenlooper have all dropped out in August. They joined Mike Gravel and Eric Swalwell after they bailed on the race in July. While these campaigns may not have made it to Iowa or New Hampshire, many of them did participate in the first two debates, had supporters and even generated a button or two. Let's take a look at the items produced by some of these campaigns.

Jay Inslee

The first presidential candidate to come from the Pacific Northwest in more than forty years sought to raise the profile of the climate change debate in the United States. Governor Inslee started his quest for the Democratic nomination in March of 2019 and ended it on August 21, 2019. He was able to qualify for the first two debates, but only met 1 of 2 qualifiers for the September and October debates. He was able to gather over 130,000 individual donors but not able to secure 2% or more in 4 qualifying polls. After coming to the conclusion that he could not raise his profile enough to raise his poll numbers he opted to drop out and run for a third term as governor of Washington. Here are some of the items, especially buttons, produced to promote his presidential campaign. There are a fair number of vendor items out there and right now you can also find pretty good deals on items issued by the campaign or supporters.

This first pin comes from a set of fifteen 3" inch pins created for an auction basket for the Multnomah County Democrats Dick Celsi Dinner & Auction. At the time, March 2019, there were only 14 candidates announced. The set included the 14 announced candidates and a pin for Jeff Merkley, who had just announced he was not running for President. The pins were included with a couple bottles of wine and auctioned off during a silent auction. Somehow, the one set auctioned off made all the way to the Political Junkie Ken Rudin! 

2020 Political Buttons Part 2

Back in May, we started highlighting the items generated by the 2020 presidential campaigns. You can read Part 1. We have prepared another installment with a run down of more items generated by the campaigns and grassroots groups supporting them.

Many of the campaigns have turned to a Texas company called 'BumperActive'. It is very uncommon for so many campaigns to use the same vendor as their official source of campaign materials. Some campaigns are not using this company (notably Joe Biden,  Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson). Some campaigns even switched over from their previous vendor to BumperActive (Cory Booker). All this is to say, that there are a lot of items out there if you are interested in getting some from a campaign this cycle.

2020 Political Items Part 1

2020 items seem to be popping up as fast as the campaigns announced. For a current list of the 2020 Democratic Presidential nominees you can visit Wikipedia.  The Republican field for 2020 currently consists of President Donald Trump and frm. Massachuttess Governor Bill Weld. We've covered some of the really early items from candidates that had announced in 2017 and 2018.

On to the items!

All four of these buttons come from the candidate's official web stores. You might notice that they all have the same union bug. At least half of the field of Democratic candidates appear to be using the bumperactive as the source of their campaign items.  You will have to visit the individual links in our campaign stores section to visit each store.

2020 Convention Button

I was cleaning out a coat pocket and I found a button that my friend Valdez had picked up for me at a recent DNC meeting. It is from the Wisconsin delegation pushing to get the 2020 Democratic National Convention hosted in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Right now there are cities placing bids for host of the 2020 Democratic National Convention. Starting as early as 2017, cities and state parties that want to host the convention develop plans and bids to the DNC.  This 2.25" inch heat sealed cello pin is the kind of thing they will give out. They also had water bottles from what I was told. The article linked above also has pictures of host committee officials in very nice sweaters with the logo of the button below.

First Official 2020 Items!

Well I made my first official donation to a 2020 Presidential candidate to get some buttons this month. Andrew Yang is probably a long shot of long shots, but at least he has a campaign store!

There are buttons and stickers for the traditional collectors and other items like shirts and tech stickers (smaller stickers for your laptop or phone case). 

For 10 dollars I got two buttons and two stickers. They are pictured below. His campaign site is here: www.yang2020.com and his STORE