The Political Items of Moses Ross

 

 Oregon APIC Member Moses Ross passed away in April of 2025. He was a passionate collector who worked in politics and ran for office several times. He was a good friend to all he encountered in Oregon and the greater APIC community. He attended the Reno APIC National in the summer of 2022. 

 

Send Carl to Philly: The Buttons & Experience of one Delegate

In the summer of 2016 I boarded a plane for the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For political junkies, a national political convention of any party is an experience to be remembered. I will have the buttons and photos to help my ailing memory one day as I reach my mid thirties. In writing this, I wanted to share my campaign experiences and political items I picked up along the way with my fellow APIC members.


I started my campaign about a month before Oregon’s congressional district nominating conventions began. In order to participate in these conventions you must declare a candidate caucus and register for the convention. This was after the Oregon Presidential Primary. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and celebrity Donald Trump won their respective primaries in Oregon. Knowing that competition in the First Congressional District would be fierce for Bernie Sanders delegate slots, I decided to file for a Hillary Clinton delegate position.

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.

The Hobby: What Type of Collection Do You Have?

Early APIC Collector Joe Fuld with his collection

Over the last few years, I have seen more and more collections of political items from a myriad of different people and backgrounds. Everyone is proud of their collection and they should be. It doesn't matter if you have a collection of a dozen items or thousands of items. It doesn't matter if your collection is mostly of free items or if you have to store your collection in a safe deposit box at the bank. Some collections fit into a dresser drawer, some take up a wall in the den and others fill up storage units! So long as it follows the first maxim of our hobby (collect what you like) your collection can be whatever size you desire. Still, throughout all these years now of collecting political items, I have discovered a few commonalities to the types of collections that exist.

George HW Bush Medford Button

In the heat of the 1992 campaign President George H.W. Bush made one of only three trips to Oregon during his term in the White House. He spoke at a lumber mill to workers from Southern Oregon and California. This was during the height of the 'spotted owl vs workers' debate and the 1992 presidential campaign in Oregon lay open the clear divisions between the urban and rural divide.

Here is some video coverage of the event. Watch NEWS CAST

This trip produced one button.

Remembering John McCain in Oregon

Bush and McCain campaigning in Oregon 2000

With the passing of Arizona Senator John McCain, I thought it might be interesting to look at some of the political items generated by his campaign, especially the Oregon items. During the historic 2008 presidential election, McCain made one swing through Oregon right before the May primary.  Yet, he still managed to make it to the Beaver State several times before and after his 2008 presidential run.

Early Life & Non-Campaign Visits

John McCain found himself standing next to Oregonian Gary Hill in one of the most widely used photos of a young John McCain completing a flight training. The photo was used a lot during his 2008 campaign. The Bend Bulletin covered the life of Gary Hill and his connection with McCain in this article.

We know, thanks to Jeff Mapes that he came to Oregon in 1993 to headline an Oregon Citizens Alliance fundraiser in Portland. You can read about that here: McCain 1993 visit.

Part of the deal for McCain coming to headline the dinner was to help keep Bob Packwood from getting a social conservative primary or third-party challenger in the '92 campaign. Lon Mabon, the leader of the OCA would eventually run for the U.S. Senate in 1996. Finishing with only 8% of the Republican Primary vote. Here is a Mabon for Senate button. McCain kept his word, even if Oregon's other Senator, Mark Hatfield was suggesting he should back out.

In the recap from Jeff Mapes, it mentions Chair of the Oregon Log Cabin Republicans, Mr. Lee Coleman. I know Lee Coleman. By the time I had met Lee he had become a Democrat and was running for the Oregon House in district 26 in 2006. Here is a photo of his button from that campaign.

This visit was unusual because you don't necessarily equate the views of John McCain to the Lon Mabon crowd. He made sure his speech set an appropriate tone that would not offend his hosts nor his supporters that fundamentally disagreed with the OCA. We learned that McCain also met with other local leaders from the NAACP and the local Jewish Federation to help smooth things over. The Seattle Gay News covered more of the speech and fallouts in a 2008 post around the time of the Democratic National Convention.  As soon as he was done with the dinner he bolted for his plane.

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.

Mitch Greenlick: Capitol Letters & Buttons

One of the great joys of also collecting political buttons and working in politics is meeting the candidates behind the button. Over the years I have had the chance to get to know Oregon State Representative Mitch Greenlick. He has represented Washington County and Multnomah County in the legislature since 2002. He first ran in 2000 and was defeated and ran again in 2002 and has won every re-election since (2004,2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016). He is currently up for re-election in 2018.

There are some buttons that his campaign produced in the early years. All that I have picked up are badge-a-mint produced by supporter Wayne Anderson. For a long time, all I had known about was a 2.25" version. Just this last week I was able to find a 3" version as well!

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

Oregon's Measure 101: All that's left are the Mailers

Oregon just finished its first January Special Election in about a decade. Voters in Oregon got a ballot near the start of the month that had one quetion on it. The people voted and the YES side won. Was there anything leftover for collectors? Not much. My home recieved at least three different YES mailers. I picked up some walk lit and other campaign documents that I was involved in during the election itself and one button from my group. Other than that, it seems most collectors will only get a mailer to remember this election.

Just Oregon Buttons

A few months ago I scanned all the random Oregon themed pins I have picked up over the years while collecting political memorabilia. I'm often surprised at how much of a collection you can create just by random chance. I have not gone out of my way to pick any of these items up, they just came with political buttons I had purchased over the years. Sometimes you buy a bag or jar of buttons just to get that ONE pin.

Enjoy!

Oregon JFK Items

Let's take a look at some Oregon 1960 JFK related items! These items mostly come from the collection of John Gearhart, John Silvertooth, and Carl Fisher. Many of these items were not featured in the Oregon Historical Society High Hopes exhibit.

First some JFK Oregon pins. There are at least three known pins. Two show up fairly frequently online and in collections of JFK and Oregon items. These two pins were featured in the High Hopes exhibit.

The third Blue-White-Black Kennedy shows up rarely. This is the only one I have ever seen.

Here is a great Kennedy newspaper sent during the 1960 Oregon Primary. I had been trying to purchase one for most of this year, and finally was able to get one.