GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party | |
---|---|
Abbreviation | GâLC |
Chairman | Oliver Steinberg [1] |
Founded | 2014 |
Headquarters | Saint Paul |
Ideology |
Marijuana legalization Democratic socialism [2] |
Colors | Green |
Senate | 0 / 67 |
House of Representatives | 0 / 134 |
U.S. Senate | 0 / 2 |
U.S. House of Representatives | 0 / 8 |
Website | |
grassrootsparty | |
The GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party (GâLC) is a political third party in the U.S. state of Minnesota created by Oliver Steinberg in 2014 to oppose cannabis prohibition. GâLC Is a democratic socialist party with a background branching from the Grassroots Party established in 1986. [2] [3]
GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party attained major party status in Minnesota in 2018 when their Attorney General candidate, who dropped out of the race to support the Democratic candidate, but whose name nevertheless remained on ballots, received 5.7 percent of the vote. [4]
In 2022, Minnesota GâLC resumed minor party status, when none of their candidates got 5% of votes, which is required for major party ballot access in the state. However their candidate for Minnesota State Auditor received more than 1% of votes, in 2022, maintaining minor party status for GâLC until 2026. [5]
In 2014, the GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party was established by Oliver Steinberg [6] because Steinberg and Chris Wright were unwilling to join the rest of the Grassroots Party when they merged with the Minnesota Legal Marijuana Now Party. [7] In the 2014 race for governor, Wright received 31,259 votes. [8] The party also ran a candidate for State Auditor, in 2014, who received 55,132 votes.
The GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party nominated their candidates by petition in 2018 to run for Governor of Minnesota, as well as in the race for Minnesota Attorney General, [9] the results of which earned the group major-party status in Minnesota. A few weeks before the election, the GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis candidate for Attorney General, Noah Johnson, dropped out of the race to support Democratic/Farmer-Labor candidate Keith Ellison [4] who was embroiled in scandal, [10] though Johnson's name remained on the ballot.
GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party founder Oliver Steinberg, who previously ran as a Republican candidate [11] and a Grassroots candidate, [12] had a background of violence discrediting the peace movement in the 1970s. [13] Steinberg was the GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis candidate for United States Senator in 2020. [14]
Perennial Republican candidate Rae Hart Anderson was nominated by GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party voters in the August 11 primary to run for United States Representative in Minnesota's 7th congressional district on November 3, 2020. [15] [16]
The GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party nominated their candidates by petition in 2014 to run for Governor of Minnesota. In the race for governor, Chris Wright received 31,259 votes. [8]
In 2018, Wright again was nominated by petition to run for Minnesota Governor, and received 68,664 votes in the November general election. Wright resigned as GâLC chairperson to seek Minnesota Legal Marijuana Now Partyâs nomination for Governor in 2022. [1] [17]
Steve Patterson, a Brownsdale, Minnesota, businessman and opponent of Governor Tim Walz' COVID-19 lockdown, who blamed these forced closings for hurting small businesses, including his own Rochester beer taproom startup, was nominated in the August, 2022, GâLC gubernatorial primary, and advanced to the general election, getting 22,598 votes, less than one percent, on November 8. In addition to legalizing cannabis for personal use, Patterson supported reducing income taxes for working class people. [18]
Even though GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis candidates have dropped out of running to support Democratic candidates in some tight races [4] and party leaders have withheld the state party's endorsement of some GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis candidates when they thought doing so might hurt the chances of winning for struggling DFLers, several times Democratic Party leaders have accused the GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party of making it hard for Democratic candidates in Minnesota. [19] However, a St. Cloud Times analysis of votes cast in the November 2020 election found that GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis candidates took at least as many, if not more, votes from republicans than they took from DFL candidates. [20]
In 2021, Kevin Shores told a FOX 9 television reporter that he was recruited to run for Congress from Minnesota's 7th district, where Democratic incumbent Collin Peterson lost the race to Republican challenger Michelle Fischbach, in 2020, by a Republican strategist who Shores mistakenly thought was a GâLC representative. Shores, who is blind and suffers from Gulf War syndrome, lost to Hart Anderson in the GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party primary. [21] [16]
When a Luverne man who had been endorsed by GâLC was unable to file before the deadline, attorney Haroun McClellan filed to run in the August 9, 2022, 1st congressional district special election as a last-minute replacement. McClellan, a graduate of Georgia State University College of Law and former Hennepin County public defender, is contracts manager of a Rochester construction firm. [22]
Before Minnesotaâs May, 2022, deadline to file such a change, a DFL activist, Marcus Harcus, who was 2020 GâLC nominee for District 59A state representative, attempted to hold a GâLC party meeting for the purpose of changing the state partyâs name to a name the activist thought might help the Democratic Party by attracting Republicans. [23] [24]
In May 2022, GâLC chair Steinberg told a Star Tribune reporter about being worried that voters âperhaps arenât quite as well-informed as it would be good for them to be.â [17] Later in June, 2022, Steinberg said in an interview that he was frustrated about having former Libertarian candidates running under the GâLC party banner. [24]
Minnesota GâLC Party held a gubernatorial primary on August 9, 2022, between Steve Patterson & Matt Huff and Darrell Paulsen & Ed Engelmann. Patterson was nominated by GâLC voters and defeated Paulsen, receiving 59% of the party's vote, to advance onto the November 8, 2022, state general election. [25]
The GâLC Party ran statewide candidates in 2020 and 2022 but none received 5% of votes required for major party ballot access in Minnesota. [5] The party got enough votes, more than 1%, in the Minnesota State Auditor race, in 2022, to retain official minor party privileges, including state public funding. [26]
Testifying in favor of Minnesota Senate File 73 to create a regulated commercial cannabis market, in front of the Public Safety Committee in January, 2023, that marijuana prohibition has not kept people from using the drug, but has "succeeded perhaps in terrorizing or intimidating citizens, in canceling civil liberties, blighting both urban and rural communities, all without eradicating the outlawed substance," said GâLC Party chair Steinberg. [27] in May 2023, Steinberg wrote "I salute DFL lawmakers who finally understood that cannabis prohibition never was necessary; always was unjust and unjustifiable; and always lacked moral authority because it was actually designed to serve as a legal mechanism for racial repression." [28]
According to political scholar William Labovitch, Minnesota's marijuana political parties, GâLC and LMN, are the ones responsible for the DFL party championing SF 73. [29]
Year | Office | Candidate | Popular votes | Percentage |
---|---|---|---|---|
2014 | MN Auditor | Judith Schwartzbacker | 55,132 | 2.87% |
2018 | MN Attorney General | Noah Johnson | 145,744 | 5.71% [30] |
2020 | MN Senator 5 | Dennis Barsness | 967 | 2.14% [31] |
2020 | MN Senator 20 | Jason Hoschette | 2,901 | 5.93% [32] |
2020 | MN Senator 22 | Brian Abrahamson | 1,947 | 5.04% [33] |
2020 | MN Senator 29 | Mary Murphy | 4,066 | 8.46% [34] |
2020 | MN Senator 43 | Doug Daubenspeck | 3,950 | 8.46% [35] |
2020 | MN Senator 63 | Chris Wright | 3,460 | 6.59% [36] |
2020 | MN Representative 59A | Marcus Harcus | 4,054 | 24.46% [37] |
2022 | MN Auditor | Will Finn | 44,270 | 1.80% |
2022 | MN Senator 25 | Bill Rood | 699 | 2.08% |
Year | Candidate | Lieutenant Governor candidate | Votes | Percentage |
---|---|---|---|---|
2014 |
Chris Wright |
David Daniels | 31,259 | 1.58% [8] |
2018 | Chris Wright | Judith Schwartzbacker | 68,664 | 2.65% [38] |
2022 | Steve Patterson | Matt Huff | 22,598 | 0.90% |
Year | Office | Candidate | Popular votes | Percentage |
---|---|---|---|---|
2020 | US Senator | Oliver Steinberg | 57,174 | 1.78% [14] |
2020 | US Representative 1 | Bill Rood | 21,448 | 5.81% [39] |
2020 | US Representative 4 | Susan Sindt | 29,537 | 7.59% [40] |
2020 | US Representative 7 | Rae Hart Anderson | 6,499 | 1.79% [41] |
2020 | US Representative 8 | Judith Schwartzbacker | 22,190 | 5.64% [42] |
2022 | US Representative 1 | Haroun McClellan | 873 | 0.70% |
2022 | US Representative 1 | Brian Abrahamson | 4,942 | 1.67% |
We used to be called the Grassroots Party, now we're the Legal Marijuana Now Party
The shooting in Madison occurred about 2:30 A.M., the police said, after hours of street fighting, when three policemen followed a car containing three students suspected of having planted Molotov cocktails near an insurance building. As the patrol car followed the car to the driveway of an apartment building at Dayton and Bedford Streets, eight shots were fired from the building, the police said. One policeman was wounded in the wrist, and the other twoâincluding John Halford, who was hospitalizedâwere wounded in the shoulder. The police returned the fire and flushed five men out of the building with tear gas. A 22âcaliber and a .25âcaliber pistol were found. The man charged with three counts of attempted murder was identified as Oliver W. Steinberg, former undergraduate. The three occupants of the car were charged with conspiracy to commit arson. Bail for Mr. Steinberg was set at $55,000, and for the other three at $10,000. All are Madison residents.
Shores lost to primary opponent Rae Hart Anderson, who had run for office twice before as a Republican.
"This kind of mischievous interference ⌠it spoils it for the electorate and the people who in good faith go to the voting booth and perhaps aren't quite as well-informed as it would be good for them to be."
Shores, who suffers from Gulf War Illness, used cannabis to get off pain killers. He told the FOX 9 Investigators he assumed he was being recruited by a member of the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party. ... Unknown to Shores, the man who called encouraging him to run was a Republican strategist, Kip Christianson, who at the time was on the payroll of the Republican National Committee, according to the Federal Election Commission. ... Shores said Christianson also paid the $300 filing fee ... Shores said he only learned Christianson was working for the Republican Party after the election. Christianson, a Harvard graduate from Monticello, has a resume that includes being a Trump delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, a treasurer for the Minnesota Young Republicans, and a candidate tracker for the MN Jobs Coalition. He also ran unsuccessfully for Minnesota Party Co-Chair. Christianson told the FOX 9 Investigators he never misrepresented himself as a member of the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party.
Steinberg said he was frustrated to have another candidate use the party's name for their own purposes.
GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party | |
---|---|
Abbreviation | GâLC |
Chairman | Oliver Steinberg [1] |
Founded | 2014 |
Headquarters | Saint Paul |
Ideology |
Marijuana legalization Democratic socialism [2] |
Colors | Green |
Senate | 0 / 67 |
House of Representatives | 0 / 134 |
U.S. Senate | 0 / 2 |
U.S. House of Representatives | 0 / 8 |
Website | |
grassrootsparty | |
The GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party (GâLC) is a political third party in the U.S. state of Minnesota created by Oliver Steinberg in 2014 to oppose cannabis prohibition. GâLC Is a democratic socialist party with a background branching from the Grassroots Party established in 1986. [2] [3]
GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party attained major party status in Minnesota in 2018 when their Attorney General candidate, who dropped out of the race to support the Democratic candidate, but whose name nevertheless remained on ballots, received 5.7 percent of the vote. [4]
In 2022, Minnesota GâLC resumed minor party status, when none of their candidates got 5% of votes, which is required for major party ballot access in the state. However their candidate for Minnesota State Auditor received more than 1% of votes, in 2022, maintaining minor party status for GâLC until 2026. [5]
In 2014, the GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party was established by Oliver Steinberg [6] because Steinberg and Chris Wright were unwilling to join the rest of the Grassroots Party when they merged with the Minnesota Legal Marijuana Now Party. [7] In the 2014 race for governor, Wright received 31,259 votes. [8] The party also ran a candidate for State Auditor, in 2014, who received 55,132 votes.
The GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party nominated their candidates by petition in 2018 to run for Governor of Minnesota, as well as in the race for Minnesota Attorney General, [9] the results of which earned the group major-party status in Minnesota. A few weeks before the election, the GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis candidate for Attorney General, Noah Johnson, dropped out of the race to support Democratic/Farmer-Labor candidate Keith Ellison [4] who was embroiled in scandal, [10] though Johnson's name remained on the ballot.
GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party founder Oliver Steinberg, who previously ran as a Republican candidate [11] and a Grassroots candidate, [12] had a background of violence discrediting the peace movement in the 1970s. [13] Steinberg was the GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis candidate for United States Senator in 2020. [14]
Perennial Republican candidate Rae Hart Anderson was nominated by GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party voters in the August 11 primary to run for United States Representative in Minnesota's 7th congressional district on November 3, 2020. [15] [16]
The GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party nominated their candidates by petition in 2014 to run for Governor of Minnesota. In the race for governor, Chris Wright received 31,259 votes. [8]
In 2018, Wright again was nominated by petition to run for Minnesota Governor, and received 68,664 votes in the November general election. Wright resigned as GâLC chairperson to seek Minnesota Legal Marijuana Now Partyâs nomination for Governor in 2022. [1] [17]
Steve Patterson, a Brownsdale, Minnesota, businessman and opponent of Governor Tim Walz' COVID-19 lockdown, who blamed these forced closings for hurting small businesses, including his own Rochester beer taproom startup, was nominated in the August, 2022, GâLC gubernatorial primary, and advanced to the general election, getting 22,598 votes, less than one percent, on November 8. In addition to legalizing cannabis for personal use, Patterson supported reducing income taxes for working class people. [18]
Even though GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis candidates have dropped out of running to support Democratic candidates in some tight races [4] and party leaders have withheld the state party's endorsement of some GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis candidates when they thought doing so might hurt the chances of winning for struggling DFLers, several times Democratic Party leaders have accused the GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party of making it hard for Democratic candidates in Minnesota. [19] However, a St. Cloud Times analysis of votes cast in the November 2020 election found that GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis candidates took at least as many, if not more, votes from republicans than they took from DFL candidates. [20]
In 2021, Kevin Shores told a FOX 9 television reporter that he was recruited to run for Congress from Minnesota's 7th district, where Democratic incumbent Collin Peterson lost the race to Republican challenger Michelle Fischbach, in 2020, by a Republican strategist who Shores mistakenly thought was a GâLC representative. Shores, who is blind and suffers from Gulf War syndrome, lost to Hart Anderson in the GrassrootsâLegalize Cannabis Party primary. [21] [16]
When a Luverne man who had been endorsed by GâLC was unable to file before the deadline, attorney Haroun McClellan filed to run in the August 9, 2022, 1st congressional district special election as a last-minute replacement. McClellan, a graduate of Georgia State University College of Law and former Hennepin County public defender, is contracts manager of a Rochester construction firm. [22]
Before Minnesotaâs May, 2022, deadline to file such a change, a DFL activist, Marcus Harcus, who was 2020 GâLC nominee for District 59A state representative, attempted to hold a GâLC party meeting for the purpose of changing the state partyâs name to a name the activist thought might help the Democratic Party by attracting Republicans. [23] [24]
In May 2022, GâLC chair Steinberg told a Star Tribune reporter about being worried that voters âperhaps arenât quite as well-informed as it would be good for them to be.â [17] Later in June, 2022, Steinberg said in an interview that he was frustrated about having former Libertarian candidates running under the GâLC party banner. [24]
Minnesota GâLC Party held a gubernatorial primary on August 9, 2022, between Steve Patterson & Matt Huff and Darrell Paulsen & Ed Engelmann. Patterson was nominated by GâLC voters and defeated Paulsen, receiving 59% of the party's vote, to advance onto the November 8, 2022, state general election. [25]
The GâLC Party ran statewide candidates in 2020 and 2022 but none received 5% of votes required for major party ballot access in Minnesota. [5] The party got enough votes, more than 1%, in the Minnesota State Auditor race, in 2022, to retain official minor party privileges, including state public funding. [26]
Testifying in favor of Minnesota Senate File 73 to create a regulated commercial cannabis market, in front of the Public Safety Committee in January, 2023, that marijuana prohibition has not kept people from using the drug, but has "succeeded perhaps in terrorizing or intimidating citizens, in canceling civil liberties, blighting both urban and rural communities, all without eradicating the outlawed substance," said GâLC Party chair Steinberg. [27] in May 2023, Steinberg wrote "I salute DFL lawmakers who finally understood that cannabis prohibition never was necessary; always was unjust and unjustifiable; and always lacked moral authority because it was actually designed to serve as a legal mechanism for racial repression." [28]
According to political scholar William Labovitch, Minnesota's marijuana political parties, GâLC and LMN, are the ones responsible for the DFL party championing SF 73. [29]
Year | Office | Candidate | Popular votes | Percentage |
---|---|---|---|---|
2014 | MN Auditor | Judith Schwartzbacker | 55,132 | 2.87% |
2018 | MN Attorney General | Noah Johnson | 145,744 | 5.71% [30] |
2020 | MN Senator 5 | Dennis Barsness | 967 | 2.14% [31] |
2020 | MN Senator 20 | Jason Hoschette | 2,901 | 5.93% [32] |
2020 | MN Senator 22 | Brian Abrahamson | 1,947 | 5.04% [33] |
2020 | MN Senator 29 | Mary Murphy | 4,066 | 8.46% [34] |
2020 | MN Senator 43 | Doug Daubenspeck | 3,950 | 8.46% [35] |
2020 | MN Senator 63 | Chris Wright | 3,460 | 6.59% [36] |
2020 | MN Representative 59A | Marcus Harcus | 4,054 | 24.46% [37] |
2022 | MN Auditor | Will Finn | 44,270 | 1.80% |
2022 | MN Senator 25 | Bill Rood | 699 | 2.08% |
Year | Candidate | Lieutenant Governor candidate | Votes | Percentage |
---|---|---|---|---|
2014 |
Chris Wright |
David Daniels | 31,259 | 1.58% [8] |
2018 | Chris Wright | Judith Schwartzbacker | 68,664 | 2.65% [38] |
2022 | Steve Patterson | Matt Huff | 22,598 | 0.90% |
Year | Office | Candidate | Popular votes | Percentage |
---|---|---|---|---|
2020 | US Senator | Oliver Steinberg | 57,174 | 1.78% [14] |
2020 | US Representative 1 | Bill Rood | 21,448 | 5.81% [39] |
2020 | US Representative 4 | Susan Sindt | 29,537 | 7.59% [40] |
2020 | US Representative 7 | Rae Hart Anderson | 6,499 | 1.79% [41] |
2020 | US Representative 8 | Judith Schwartzbacker | 22,190 | 5.64% [42] |
2022 | US Representative 1 | Haroun McClellan | 873 | 0.70% |
2022 | US Representative 1 | Brian Abrahamson | 4,942 | 1.67% |
We used to be called the Grassroots Party, now we're the Legal Marijuana Now Party
The shooting in Madison occurred about 2:30 A.M., the police said, after hours of street fighting, when three policemen followed a car containing three students suspected of having planted Molotov cocktails near an insurance building. As the patrol car followed the car to the driveway of an apartment building at Dayton and Bedford Streets, eight shots were fired from the building, the police said. One policeman was wounded in the wrist, and the other twoâincluding John Halford, who was hospitalizedâwere wounded in the shoulder. The police returned the fire and flushed five men out of the building with tear gas. A 22âcaliber and a .25âcaliber pistol were found. The man charged with three counts of attempted murder was identified as Oliver W. Steinberg, former undergraduate. The three occupants of the car were charged with conspiracy to commit arson. Bail for Mr. Steinberg was set at $55,000, and for the other three at $10,000. All are Madison residents.
Shores lost to primary opponent Rae Hart Anderson, who had run for office twice before as a Republican.
"This kind of mischievous interference ⌠it spoils it for the electorate and the people who in good faith go to the voting booth and perhaps aren't quite as well-informed as it would be good for them to be."
Shores, who suffers from Gulf War Illness, used cannabis to get off pain killers. He told the FOX 9 Investigators he assumed he was being recruited by a member of the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party. ... Unknown to Shores, the man who called encouraging him to run was a Republican strategist, Kip Christianson, who at the time was on the payroll of the Republican National Committee, according to the Federal Election Commission. ... Shores said Christianson also paid the $300 filing fee ... Shores said he only learned Christianson was working for the Republican Party after the election. Christianson, a Harvard graduate from Monticello, has a resume that includes being a Trump delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, a treasurer for the Minnesota Young Republicans, and a candidate tracker for the MN Jobs Coalition. He also ran unsuccessfully for Minnesota Party Co-Chair. Christianson told the FOX 9 Investigators he never misrepresented himself as a member of the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party.
Steinberg said he was frustrated to have another candidate use the party's name for their own purposes.