JEFFERSON CITY — Two candidates who are running in a new independent party presented the Missouri Secretary of State with 25,000 signatures from registered voters across the state last week.
U.S. Senate candidate Jared Young and U.S. House of Representatives candidate Blake Ashby presented 15,000 more signatures than is required to run and secure their spots on the ballot in November.
"From here, the Secretary of State will go through their verification process and ensure that we have at least the 10,000 validated signatures that we need to establish the party and get both of us on the ballot," Young said in an interview with The St. Louis Record. "And we expect to get word back from the Secretary of State's office sometime in the next couple of months, they were noncommittal on a timeline, which is understandable as they have a pretty small staff, but we're excited for the day to hear when we're officially through."
Young said they initially started gathering signatures purely through volunteer efforts and then it became apparent that they could get it done that way, but it's going to take a really long time and they felt like it was really important for them to get on the ballot officially as quickly as possible in the campaign cycle.
"We went ahead and augmented our efforts by hiring a professional firm," Young said. "Those professional signature gatherers mostly focused on places with a lot of people, like town squares or shopping centers or anywhere where a lot of people are congregated."
Young said it was a relatively easy sell because people are looking for additional options beyond the two parties and are excited about the idea of having those additional options.
"We got through it pretty quickly," Young said. "I think the bulk of the process was completed in under two months."
Young said throughout campaigning it has been clear that there's just an exhausted, frustrated majority out there who are longing for something different, who are tired of just the angry, divisive politics.
"The Better Party is meant to represent that exhausted majority of people from varying ideological backgrounds," Young said. "We believe this party will have a much broader appeal than your traditional third parties because it's meant to have that broad appeal."
Ashby said he decided to run with the Better Party because he was frustrated with the two main parties.
"My frustration with the two main parties goes back literally decades," Ashby said in an interview with The St. Louis Record.
Ashby said nearly 30 years ago he co-authored a book titled "The Battle For America: The Re-Birth of the Individual" in which he and co-author Mack Holekamp discussed America's roots in democracy.
"The Republican Party back in the day recognized the need for an effective role of government and it was the business party," Ashby said. "But, what's happened over time is it's slowly backed away from that position and in a lot of ways just rejects the idea of government altogether. We've kind of gotten caught in this ideological battle between the left wing and the right wing, with each of those factions pointing their parties further and further away from the center."
Ashby said with the Better Party, it just kind of reached the point where the answer is that there needs to be a new party that is actually talking about the middle and talking about compromise and trying to offer an alternative to the two major parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.
"I'm running because we need to talk about democratic capitalism again," Ashby said. "We need to talk about that compromise, and we need to talk about a realistic role for government. Not socialism, not unfettered capitalism, but something in the middle where the government actually does its job and uses its regulatory power to extend equality of opportunity."