Endorsement of Presidential Candidates
80-20 holds its Endorsement Convention in the year of a Presidential election, after candidates for both the Republican and Democratic Party have been determined. Each delegate to the convention is an unpaid volunteer who pledges in writing to advocate for 80-20’s endorsed candidate. The delegates are one third each of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, all elected by dues-paying members, to ensure an objective nonpartisan deliberation.
In the 2004 and 2008 elections, 80-20’s main criterion for endorsement was the response to 80-20’s Questionnaire by the Presidential candidates. In both years, while the Democratic candidates for President answered 80-20’s questionnaire with all affirmative responses (after 80-20 revised the questions by request of the candidates), the Republican candidates did not respond to the questionnaire at all. 80-20 had initially issued a "call to action" to defeat Obame, citing "almost farcical reasons why he would not reply to OUR questionnaire". The call to action has since been deleted from the organization's sites.
80-20 has endorsed the Democratic candidate in the 2000, 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.
Read more about this topic: 80-20 Initiative
Famous quotes containing the words presidential and/or candidates:
“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)