Write-Ins are Personal: Wayne Morse

 How fascinating that during the month of February we learn the origin of the 'Write-In Wayne Morse The Dark Horse' for President bumper sticker I picked up a few years ago on ebay from a seller in Washington State. If you are patient, with the massive digitizing of older media, you will eventually stumble upon some answers. 

Remembering Those We Lost in 2020

A number of Oregon politicos have left us in 2020, more so than most years and instead of trying to do lengthy posts about all of them, and some that we do not have many items for we have provided links to their obituaries or other online memorials. If we have written about them in the past we have included a link to that article on our own blog. Also, if you believe we have missed someone feel free to send us a note.

 

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 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

Eugene Started to Think Mink

The race for the Democratic nomination of 1972 saw one of the largest field of candidates to enter a modern day presidential primary at that time (15 candidates). The McGovern–Fraser Commission, also known as the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection reformed the process in response to the 1968 Democratic primaries/convention help generate such a large selection of candidates. 

One of those candidates was Hawaii Congresswoman Patsy Mink. She helped usher in a lot of firsts.  

• She was the first Asian American woman ever elected to Congress
• She was the first woman of color ever elected to Congress
• She was the first woman ever elected to Congress from Hawaii
• She was the first Asian American ever to seek the nomination of the Democratic Party
• She was the first Democratic woman to deliver a State of the Union response
• She was the first person of color appointed as Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs