A fourth key to victory is to improve our electoral options.

Although it’s vital for us to build an enduring precinct-level organization for electoral victory, this will come to naught if we lack worthy candidates to elect.  For each public office, we need at least one candidate (or perhaps only one due to the “spoiler effect”) who will expertly help us to defend our rightful liberty under Constitutional law, rather than arrogantly seek to control our land, spend our money, provide our utilities, monitor our health, parent our children, censor our communications, keep us entertained, and generally run our lives from womb to tomb.

Politics, more than most professions, seems to naturally attract smooth-talking corrupt cunning statists more readily than plainspoken virtuous wise statespeople, and so we need to actively seek out neighbors who demonstrate both personal virtue and political wisdom, and then encourage those neighbors to run for public office, because they might not do so otherwise.  We might even need to consider campaigning ourselves.

Experience can be helpful, as well, but it’s unessential, and sometimes overvalued.  Experience can always be gained, although it won’t necessarily be gained in doing the right things—which is why it’s always better to elect virtuous wise novices than corrupt cunning experts, especially considering that a candidate’s character and principles don’t normally improve much over time.

Unimportant qualities include outward appearance or self-applied labels.  Anyone can adopt a label, but labels aren’t always correct, nor necessarily informative.  Parties are “big tents” that welcome a wide range of factions, and labels like “liberal” or “conservative” have sometimes been hijacked over time—plus, in one-party-dominated states like Utah, people who hunger for power know that they can obtain it more easily with a conservative Republican label, and therefore may try to adopt such labels without adopting associated principles.  Which is why we need to be especially careful to always defer campaign rhetoric to voting records.

Here in Provo, for at least a decade, each city office has usually been sought by at least one statist.  Those central planners have sometimes been challenged by free-marketeers, but the latter have almost invariably lost to the former, sometimes by very narrow margins.  In 2011, for example, central-planner Winterton defeated free-marketeer Morrow by only 6 votes—which means that merely one liberty-lovin’ Provoan with six like-minded friends could have reversed that outcome.

So, if you’re a rights-defending Provoan who’d like to provide a viable alternative to this sad status quo, then please plan to file your candidacy and/or encourage your virtuous wise neighbors to do likewise.  Provoans who seek municipal office must file an official declaration their candidacy between June 1st and June 7th (between 8AM and 5PM) at 351 W Center Street through Provo’s city recorder.  If you’d like to read our appraisal of Provo’s current candidates, then you’re welcome to follow our blog (see Progress).

After we’ve found and/or become worthy candidates for public office, we’ll need to rally our neighbors to support those candidates between early June and early November, as described elsewhere on this website.  A primary election in mid-August will eliminate any candidates beyond two for each office, and a general election in early November will choose a winner among each pair.

(For more Solutions, please see both Key #3 and Key #5.)

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References:

• www.voteprovo.com