Great points, Tom. Third parties do need to get with the program and nominate early, especially with the way the deck is stacked against them.
The issue of early nominations seems to come up every four years in the LP and then promptly ignored. I don't even bother to wonder why anymore.
I can submit one reason not for early nominations. Given the presumed unlikelihood of any third party getting elected President (going by recent history and the general awareness level of the MSM as well as the average American), why not allow many candidates to promote themselves over many months? Wayne Allen Root may not have warmed up my cup of tea, but he has accomplished a bit of awareness work for the LP. There is no silver bullet when it comes to the perfect time for presidential nominations. May of election year is as good a month as others. Anybody who wants to be a Green or Libertarian nominee can run for a great many other offices and do as good a job in promoting their third party of choice as they could do running for president (maybe even more).
if the LP's "mission" has become "run to get elected" (as many seem to claim) ... it is a waste of time to worry about the Presidential race, or when nominations are held.
if that mission is as stated in the Bylaws (the one thing that has NOT so far been bastardized by the alleged "moderate" newbies?), then the timing of conventions should be for our purposes, not those of the media or the "get us elected" throng ...
There was a time when it made sense to hold conventions in odd-numbered years, off the line of the big party circuses. The Browne Cloud folks mostly changed that ... there is no reason to keep that change
I was a party activist in the '90s, and the reasoning for changing from year-before to year-of was that two summers before the general election was so early that most people weren't in the mode of thinking about elections.
Now that the BOYN Party candidates' electioneering seasons have stretched back as far as they have, such reasoning is, in Washington-speak, now inoperative.
And when one considers that the change utterly failed to prevent the downward trend in election returns for 2000 and 2004, it seems clear in retrospect that the change was at best irrelevant.
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