The Race for Last Place
Robby Wells is a former football coach who has picked up a habit of running for president. He made his first bid for the job in 2012, aiming initially for the nomination of the remnants of Ross Perot‘s Reform Party and then seeing if the conservative Constitution Party was interested. (It wasn’t.) In 2016 he tried for the Democratic nomination, then switched to running as an independent when he wasn’t invited to any Democratic debates. (“The consensus,” his website claims, “was that he was blocked out of fear of his debate skills.”) He took another shot at the Democratic nomination in 2020, and this year he ran as the nominee of the Party Party, a group inspired by the rock singer Andrew W.K.
Wells was on the ballot this month in exactly one state: Rhode Island. According to the current count at Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, he has 358 votes; the Rhode Island Board of Elections puts his winnings slightly higher, at 359. Either way, he’s in last place.
There is a chance that could change, as Wells is running just barely behind Bill “Doc” Stodden of the Socialist Party USA, whose current total at Leip’s site is 361. Stodden’s party is descended from the famous Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, though strictly speaking it wasn’t born until that group broke into three competing factions in the 1970s. But neither Stodden nor his running mate, Stephanie Cholensky, is a democratic socialist in the Debs-Thomas mold: Both of them are anarcho-communists. And anarcho-communists traditionally do not vote, which may help explain why Stodden is just a hair away from finishing last.
For now, though, the last-place medal belongs to Wells and his philosophy of “Eaglenomics,” which—I am quoting again from his website—takes “the best ideas from the Left Wing and the Right Wing to restore Prosperity to the United States and to allow every c
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