None of the 13 candidates affiliated with the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC) headed by extremist Lyndon LaRouche succeeded in bids for state and federal offices but some made strong showings in Texas and Illinois races for the U.S. House of Representatives, early election results show. The NDPC fielded candidates in both Republican and Democratic races in eight states.
In Texas, NDPC candidate Susan Director, running on the Democratic ballot, won 28 percent of the vote for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In Illinois, where LaRouche candidates upset opponents earlier this year to win the Democratic primaries for Secretary of State and State Lieutenant Governor, another LaRouche candidate for the U.S. House, Dominick Jeffrey, won 27 percent on the Democratic ticket.
Janice Hart, candidate for Lieutenant Governor, garnered 16 percent running as a Democrat, and Mark Fairchild, also running on the Democratic ticket for Secretary of State picked up six percent.
The results in Illinois indicate that LaRouche candidates have lost the bulk of their support since the primaries last March. Adlai Stevenson 3rd, who originally ran on the Democratic ticket for Governor in the primaries, dropped his bid for the post after he discovered that two LaRouche followers would be his running mates.
OTHER RACES, OTHER LOSERS
In other races in Texas, Harold Kniffen, running on the Democratic ballot, received almost 12 percent of the vote for a seat in the U.S. House. Two LaRouche followers running for the State Legislature in Texas, George Larkin and Lester Dahlberg, got 25 percent and 27 percent, respectively.
In Ohio, another LaRouche candidate for the U.S. House running on the Democratic ticket, Clem Cratty, received 17 percent.
LaRouche’s organization had been labeled anti-Semitic by Jewish organizations. LaRouche himself, a three-time Presidential candidate, has called Queen Elizabeth II a drug trafficker, Henry Kissinger a Soviet agent, warns of a collapse of the banking system and supports legislation to quarantine AIDS victims.
Despite an intensive campaign by the Democratic party to expose LaRouche’s extremist ideology, the party suffered from LaRouche candidate victories in Democratic primaries.
Irwin Suall, director of research for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, tracked the LaRouche group’s performance in the primaries as well as Tuesday’s elections.
Suall said, “The better they’re known, the more they’re disliked,” indicating that the campaign to expose the LaRouche organization’s beliefs had been successful.
Suall said the substantial support for some of the LaRouche candidates in Texas and Illinois was due to the fact that many people vote habitually on party lines and probably had no knowledge that some of the candidates on the Democratic ticket in their states supported LaRouche.
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