Socialist Dan La Botz Surpasses 25,000 Votes in Ohio

The Socialist Party’s Dan La Botz has surpassed the 25,000-vote mark in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race. With all but fourteen of Ohio’s 9,910 precincts reporting, the former history and Latin American studies professor and ex-journalist is unofficially garnering 25,311 votes. 

La Botz is the first member of the Socialist Party to actively campaign for the U.S. Senate in Ohio since 1940 when Socialists in that state waged a forlorn write-in campaign for the party’s presidential candidate Norman Thomas. Ohio Socialists also conducted a write-in campaign that year for the party’s statewide ticket headed by gubernatorial candidate Paul Jones, a longtime pacifist who had been removed as the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Utah more than two decades earlier due to his opposition to World War I.

Little-remembered Louis Golden, an isolationist running on an antiwar platform, was the party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate in that election, but his votes were never counted.

The 65-year-old La Botz, who has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate on the Socialist Party ticket in 2012, campaigned vigorously against corporate domination of American politics in his uphill struggle against Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Lee Fisher.

Working people make the country run and working people should run the country, declared the good-natured La Botz throughout the campaign.

In a message to his supporters posted yesterday on Facebook, La Botz said that he was humbled and encouraged by the outcome. “We got 25,000 votes for socialism in Ohio,” he wrote.