Above: Northrop, 2008 ; Below, Steve Michael
Ann Northrop, 1948 (Hartfort, Conn.) -
VP candidate for AIDS Cure Party (aka Independent) (1996)
Running mate with nominee: Steve Michael (1956-1998)
Popular vote: 408 (0.00%)
Electoral vote: 0/538
The campaign:
Steve Michael was a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and ran for President initially in the Democratic primaries and then later on the AIDS Cure Party. During the primaries WMUR in Manchester, NH yanked two of Michael's TV ads. He sued them-- and won.
Michael's campaign style was frank and direct. In 1992 he was noted for being one of the activists who heckled and confronted Bill Clinton during the 1992 election season. In 1996 he was holding Clinton to account for promises made but not delivered concerning AIDS.
His running-mate was Ann Northrop, a New York-based television and print journalist who was also an activist with ACT UP. She had been arrested numerous times in acts of civil disobedience before she was nominated for VP.
The campaign was poorly covered by the media even though the AIDS pandemic had been around for over a decade and a half by 1996.
The Michael/Northrop ticket's 408 popular votes placed them 9th out of 10 on the Tennessee ballot, the only state where they were listed, with 0.02% of the votes there.
In a tragic postscript that gained the Party more news coverage than they received during the campaign, Steve Michael died on May 25, 1998 as a result of AIDS (so in the event of their victory Northrop would have assumed the Presidency at that time). The funeral procession consisted of a demonstration, complete with Michael's body in a casket carried by pallbearers, taken to the front of the White House. Northtrop commented, "Bill Clinton is a murderer, and this death, and tens of thousands of others, must be laid at his doorstep ... He is a liar, and he is letting people with AIDS die on purpose. We will not rest until this crisis is over ... Steve's finest hour was when he was hounding and haunting the president. And I remain secure in the knowledge that he will haunt this president forever."
It should be noted the first HIV-infected Gay activist on a Presidential ticket who also would have died in his term was Harold Franklin Moore, who was Lenora Fulani's running-mate in the State of Oregon in 1988 under the New Alliance Party banner.
Election history: none
Other occupations: television and print journalist, lecturer, board of directors at the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, AIDS and homosexuality educator for Hetrick-Martin Institute for Lesbian and Gay Youth, member of the NY delegation at the 1992 Democratic Party convention
Notes:
Sometimes called Anne Northrop
Vassar, class of 1970
Came out as a lesbian in 1976
Washington State trivia alert: Steve Michael was born and raised in Longview, Wash. and lived in
Seattle.
