Maura DeLuca, September 24, 1978 -
VP candidate for Party for Socialist Workers Party (2012)
Running mate with nominee: James Edward Harris Jr. (b. 1948)
Popular vote: 1,796 (0.00%)
Electoral vote: 0/538
The campaign:
In keeping with what was becoming a tradition of nominating ineligible candidates, the Socialist Workers Party in 2012 selected James E. Harris with under-35 years of age Maura DeLuca as his running-mate. Alyson Kennedy, the 2008 VP nominee, was called in to act as the stand-in VP in a half dozen instances.
The SWP appeared to be in sort of a cryogenic holding pattern, not helped by the growing number of ex-members who charged the Party with using cultish methods of manipulation over their dedicated followers.
DeLuca, who moved to Lincoln, Neb. in early 2012, left her temporary job at Kawasaki Motors in order to campaign. A co-worker there had supplied her with an electioneering quote that does indeed capture the essence of the SWP: "Every four years the bus driver changes, but we need to change the whole road we're on." She went on a national tour, including visiting a labor strike in Longview, Wash., probably one of the few candidates on a Presidential ticket to ever show up in that city. On the same trip she visited a strike in Kent, Wash.
Washington has been a solid blue state in every Presidential election since 1988 and has voted for Democrats for Governor since 1984. As a result, broadly speaking, this means the Democrats take this state for granted in the general Presidential election and the Republicans write us off as a waste of energy. So when any member of a national ticket visits us at all that becomes big news.
"I'm a factory worker. I have worked in union and nonunion plants and have seen that our strength comes when we organize and come together, women and men fighting shoulder to shoulder, against speedup, cuts in wages, longer hours, whatever," DeLuca was quoted in The Militant. Although Washington is considered blue, labor unions have been watching their political clout diminish in rural counties and the political division here is now urban/rural = blue/red. This is a microcosm of what we have seen happen across the country and by 2012 that shift was well underway. So the SWP had their work cut out for them. But instead of turning to the SWP, working class blue collar rural counties like mine (logging, Pacific Ocean fishing, cranberries, oysters) who voted for McGovern in 1972, Carter in 1980 and didn't have a single Republican in county public office for the second half of the 20th century, are now deep Red, and I don't mean May Day Red but Republican Red.
The Harris/DeLuca ticket won 1,796 popular votes out of the 4,120 cast for the Party as whole (the lowest in their Electoral history). They were on the ballot in Minnesota (0.04%) and New Jersey (0.02%), and were write-ins for Connecticut. Shortly after the election DeLuca relocated to Omaha, Neb. and within a few months was running for Mayor.
Election history:
2006 - Governor of New York (Socialist Workers Party) - defeated
2009 - New York City Public Advocate (Socialist Workers Party) - defeated
2013 - Mayor of Omaha, Neb. (Nonpartisan) - primary - defeated
Other occupations: sewing machine operator, welder, union activist, Kawasaki Motors worker, writer, wind turbine factory, electrical power assembly worker
Notes:
Speaks Italian and Spanish.
Opponents in 2006 included Eliot Spitzer (winner) and Jimmy McMillan.
Winner of the 2009 election was Bill de Blasio.
Joined the SWP in 2005.
