Mae Poulet, ca2009 (California) -
VP candidate for Bully Party (2012)
Running mate with nominee: Satchel (d. 2015)
Popular vote: ? (0.00%)
Electoral vote: 0/538
The campaign:
A bull terrier Presidential candidate in Tennessee named Satchel selected a hen in California named Mae Poulet to be his running-mate about a month before Election Day. Animals running for the White House was becoming sort of a tradition-- dogs, cats, hamsters, pigs-- but Mae Poulet is the first chicken as far as I know but not the first fowl. I believe that honor belongs to the parrots in the Beak and Freedom Party who have been running in every election since 2000. Of course we could predate that with fictional animals such as Opus the Penguin being a bird VP starting in 1984 with the National Radical Meadow Party, but that would be silly.
Poulet was under the care of Charlotte Laws, a Los Angeles community activist, television personality, and animal rights advocate. Laws, a vegetarian, acquired the hen via a "free chicken" advertisement in 2010 and added Poulet to her group of rescue animals. Apparently Satchel the standard bearer was also a rescue animal.
On her webpage, Laws acted as Poulet's spokesperson--
There are two primary components to Mae’s political platform.
The first is protecting animals, an area in which Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have a poor record. Romney strapped his dog to the top of his car and chose Paul Ryan, a hunter, for his ticket. Obama was graded a dismal C- by the Humane Society of the United States and broke a campaign promise to adopt a shelter dog if elected. Instead, he got a pure-bred pup from Ted Kennedy.
Four million dogs and cats are killed in U.S. shelters each year at a staggering cost of $600 million. This is not only heart-breaking for the animals, but a fiscally irresponsible situation. Mae wants people to spay and neuter their animals and to stop buying from breeders and pet shops. She and Satchel support policies that protect both animals and people’s pocketbooks.
Secondly, Mae wants third party voices and third party candidates to be heard. Some studies show that 40% of the people in this nation identify as independents, yet Democrats and Republicans talk about “bi-partisan” rather than “non-partisan” solutions. The concerns of independents are rarely, if ever, addressed.
“Not everyone is a donkey or elephant,” Mae says. “Some of us are chickens or even people. The two parties have fowled things up miserably. It’s time for real change.”
The animal ticket had a social media campaign with a serious side. Poulet's Facebook page outlined her platform point by point--
My platform includes the following.
a) Promoting logical national food safety/food importation safety.
b) Promoting a compromise between industrial food production needs and expansion of family farming and preservation of family farms and slowing the erosion of family farming.
c) Supporting logical and simple adjustments to availability of nutritional foods in markets that traditionally lack this access.
d) Promoting and advancing animal welfare concerns while maintaining the ability to produce mass consumption food products (and byproducts).
e) Promoting and maintaining a shift to healthier eating habits and exercise within our nation’s schools.
f) Promoting the expansion of availability and access to healthy foods in our nations urban and low income communities.
g) Looking for ways to increase food export markets, and to grow/build sustainable food production in troubled areas around the globe.
h) Promoting sustainability of our national and global ecosystem while addressing the needs of social/economic growth concerns of nations.
Satchel also ran for President in 2016 but it seems Poulet was not on the ticket on that campaign season.
Satchel died in Mar. 2015, meaning that in the event of their victory, Mae Poulet would have assumed the Presidency if indeed she was still living at that time.
Election history: none
Other occupations: chicken
Notes:
Poulet's VP run was a springboard into her continuing activism as an animal rights symbol.
