The Forward Party’s slogan is “Not left. Not right. Forward.”
Two of its founding co-chairs are Andrew Yang, billionaire and 2021 New York City mayoral candidate, and Christine Todd Whitman, former two-term governor of New Jersey. The political party aims to be national. But, unlike No Labels, it does not seek to reform our politics from the top down by electing a president but from the grassroots up. As Governor Whitman has put it:
“Forward is a home for the politically homeless. It’s not a traditional party in the sense that will not adopt a platform at the national level, but we set the principles and they’re pretty darn simple: to respect and uphold the rule of law, respect the Constitution, be willing to work across the aisle, but, just as importantly, be willing to work toward changing the way we choose candidates. Until we break the stranglehold of the two major parties you won’t get people in office who can think and speak for themselves or their specific constituencies.”
The first politically prominent Pennsylvanian to align (doing so in 2022) with the Forward Party is Joe Sestak, retired two-star Navy admiral, twice-elected Congressman from the 7th District north of Philadelphia, who was narrowly defeated by Pat Toomey in the 2010 U.S. Senate contest.
In June of this year, two long-serving Democratic state senators, Lisa Boscola (representing parts of Northampton and Lehigh Counties) and Anthony Williams (parts of Delaware and Philadelphia Counties) announced their “affiliation” with the Forward Party. In doing so, they did not cease to be Democrats. Both senators have, however, been known to resist party leadership, occasionally anyway, in order to seek common ground “across the aisle.”
In the current election cycle, the Forward Party successfully conducted nominating petition drives to place two statewide candidates on the November ballot.
Eric Settle, a former Republican, is from Montgomery County and served as an upper-level lawyer in Governor Tom Ridge’s administration. He is the Foward Party candidate for attorney general.
Chris Foster, a former Democrat, is a businessman from Pittsburgh. He is the Foward Party candidate for state treasurer.
The Forward Party is not expecting to win either of these contests. Both men are running with the goal of garnering at least 2% of the vote which will, as the Forward Party is interpreting the ins-and-outs of Pennsylvania election law, obtain for their party actual legal political party status.
Thus, the Forward Party would no longer have to go through the much more arduous task of getting a candidate on the ballot, statewide or local, by getting registered-voter signatures on a nominating petition to the amount equal to 2% of the votes received by the winning candidate for the office in the previous election cycle.
A candidate of a recognized political party has a far-lower bar to meet in getting the requisite number of signatures on a nominating petition. The Forward Party is eyeing the future.
The Forward Party is also endorsing, in the current cycle, three “affiliated” candidates for the General Assembly. Two of them, in candor, don’t seem to have much chance.
Civics teacher Cameron Schroy, a Democrat, is running against State Senator Doug Mastriano, Republican, in the 33rd District (parts of Adams and Franklin Counties) where Mastriano won his last election by 37 points.
In the 92nd House District (part of York County), small business owner Dan Almoney is running as a Democrat for an open seat in which the previous Republican won by 40 points.
But the 44th House District (part of Allegheny County) is a different story. There, the Republican incumbent, Valerie Gaydos, who has affiliated with the Forwards, is seeking a fourth term. After the 2020 decennial redistricting, her district was one of the few in the commonwealth that was regarded as a political toss-up. Gaydos won it by nearly 10 points. She is one of the few House members to have recent experience of what it is like to have the general election matter as much or more than the primary.
The current (the 206th) Pennsylvania House of Representatives could not be more narrowly divided. When the Speaker, Democrat Joanna McClinton, was elected, it took all 102 Democrats to do so. The number 102 is important because, by the Pennsylvania Constitution, it takes an actual majority of the 203-member House to choose a Speaker and, again by the state constitution, a Speaker must be in place before the House can conduct legislative business. The 206th House had to make a special rule so that it could continue to function with the same Speaker even as the actual number of Democrats and Republicans in the chamber ebbed and flowed.
Despite the closeness in the overall composition of the House, it remains in the rules that each committee is comprised of 15 Democrats to 10 Republicans — hardly conducive to good will let alone getting things done in “regular order.”
It is reasonable to suppose the 207th House will be as narrowly divided as the 206th. In the last election cycle, only nine of the 203 seats were decided by an electoral margin of five points or less. Eighty of the seats, even after redistricting, were not contested between the two major parties. This time around, there are 93 districts in which a major party candidate is running opposed.
If the 207th House begins as the 206th did, each House member will once again matter in the selection of a Speaker and, by extension, to the passage of a set of House Rules. If she is re-elected, Representative Gaydos will bring into the chamber two-years additional experience in how the game is played.
I assume she affiliated with the Forward Party because she agrees with its goals. She may be in a position, alone or perhaps with one or two more like-minded colleagues, to incorporate into the House Rules the means to the kind of bipartisanship the Forward Party may not be so naively seeking after all.
Sources and Links:
Pennsylvania Forward Party website
Greg Salisbury. City and State PA, June 1, 2023, “A Q&A with Christine Todd Whitman.”