Parachute candidate

Term for political candidate with little connection to district
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A parachute candidate, or carpetbagger in the United States, is a pejorative term[1] for an election candidate who does not live in the area they are running to represent and has little connection to it. The allegation is thus that a desperate political party lacking reliable talent local to the district or region is "parachuting" the candidate in for the job, or that the party (or the candidate themselves) wishes to give a candidate an easier election than would happen in their home area. The term also carries the implication that the candidacy has been imposed without regard to the existing local hierarchy.[2]

Australia

Australian Labor Party

Due to its factions (Labor Left, Labor Right, and Independent Labor), Labor often has arrangements in place for preselections, which would often result in parachuting candidates.[citation needed]

Coalition

Canada

Federal

  • In the 2008 Canadian federal election, in Newfoundland and Labrador, the New Democratic Party nominated Phyllis Artiss, who lived in St. John's, for the northern riding of Labrador. Artiss was nominated in the absence of any local candidate, and admitted that she found her candidacy to be not ideal: "It would be much better to have someone from Labrador who has lived there all their lives or much of their lives and worked there, and I haven't done that."[1] Artiss was not successful in her bid.
  • Former Prime Minister Joe Clark, an Albertan, was seen as a parachute candidate when he ran for election in the Nova Scotia riding of Kings—Hants at a by-election in 2000. Clark had been elected leader of the Progressive Conservatives for the second time and was seeking a seat in the House of Commons; incumbent Tory MP Scott Brison had stepped aside for Clark.[25] He was elected, but in the 2000 federal election, he instead sought election in the Alberta riding of Calgary Centre. He won in Calgary Centre, making it the only constituency to flip to the PCs.
  • Chrystia Freeland faced accusations of being a parachute candidate after the Liberal Party nominated her for the safe seat of Toronto Centre at a 2013 by-election (which its former interim leader Bob Rae had represented), as she was born in rural northern Alberta and lived in New York City at the time. She ultimately won the seat.[26]
  • Kellie Leitch was accused of being a parachute candidate when she sought the Conservative nomination in the Ontario riding of Simcoe—Grey in 2011. Leitch was born in Winnipeg and worked in Toronto at the time of her nomination.[27][28] Leitch won the seat over candidates including Helena Guergis, the former Conservative Member of Parliament whom she defeated for the nomination and who ran as an independent.
  • In 2021, the Conservative Party nominated Lea Mollison for the riding of Northwest Territories. Mollison was a resident of Thunder Bay, Ontario, and reportedly never visited the Northwest Territories.[29] Mollison's campaign ignored local media requests, including an invitation to a candidates' forum, which drew widespread criticism.[29][30]
  • Lester B. Pearson, who was born and raised in Toronto, served as MP for Algoma East, in rural Northwestern Ontario, during his parliamentary career, which lasted from 1948 to 1968. In his memoirs, Pearson admitted he did not have "any earlier connection" to the riding;[31] Pearson had been seeking entry into the House of Commons and the seat had been made vacant for him when Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King recommended that its sitting member, Thomas Farquhar, be appointed to the Senate.[32] Pearson nevertheless won election eight times before retiring from Parliament, culminating in his own premiership of five years.

Provincial

Municipal

  • In Ontario, Patrick Brown, who had previously been MP for Barrie and MPP for Simcoe North, was criticized as a parachute candidate when he announced his campaign for Mayor of Brampton in 2018.[33] Brown ultimately succeeded in his mayoral bid.[34]

Ireland

New Zealand

In 2017 Deborah Russell won selection for the safe Labour seat of New Lynn, in south-east Auckland, despite being from Whangamōmona, a small town in the Manawatū-Whanganui region. She beat out Greg Presland, a New Lynn resident for 30 years who had the backing of the local members. However, Labour's Council backed Russell because of her finance expertise and a pledge to have more women in electorates. Upon winning selection, Russell moved to the electorate.[45][46] She was elected in the national election.

Taiwan

Han Kuo-yu was a successful parachute candidate for Mayor of Kaohsiung at 2018 Taiwanese local elections.[47][48] He has served previously on the Taipei County Council[49] and as a member of Legislative Yuan elected by Taipei County.[50]

United Kingdom

Parachute candidates are common in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The Westminster system historically emphasizes party discipline over responsiveness to constituencies. For example, Margaret Thatcher, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for over eleven years, represented Finchley despite living in Chelsea, London.[51]

A 2013 YouGov survey found that support for a hypothetical candidate rose by 12 points after voters learned that his opponent had moved to the area two years earlier, and by 30 points if the opponent lived 120 miles away. The percentage of local MPs rose, according to Michael Rush of the University of Exeter, from 25% in 1979 to 45% in 1997; Ralph Scott of Demos calculates that as of 2014[update] 63% are local.[51]

According to surveys, public trust in all MPs has decreased but trust in the local MP has increased, making pre-existing connections to seats more important. Election advertisements emphasize local connections more than they mention the candidate's party or its leader. Such a change produces MPs who are more attentive to local issues, but may be detrimental to Britain's first-past-the-post voting system designed to create broad parties that party whips stabilize.[51]

  • Roy Jenkins was so unfamiliar with Glasgow, he later wrote, that on his arrival to campaign at the 1982 Glasgow Hillhead by-election its skyline was "as mysterious to me as the minarets of Constantinople" to Russian troops during the Russo-Turkish War.[51] Campaigning as a Social Democrat, Jenkins won the election, taking the seat from the Scottish Conservatives.[52]
  • Shaun Woodward, who was first elected as a Conservative MP in 1997, defected to the Labour Party in 1999. He faced much criticism from former Conservative colleagues, particularly when he refused to resign and fight a by-election.[53][54] In 2001, Woodward did not contest his safe Conservative seat of Witney in Oxfordshire, instead being selected for the similarly ultra-safe Labour seat of St Helens South in Merseyside. During the early days of the 2001 general election campaign, Labour minister Chris Mullin wrote in his diary that "the New Labour elite ... parachut[ing] [Woodward] into one of [its] safe seats ... [was] one of New Labour's vilest stitch-ups", and that listening to him campaigning as a Labour candidate "made my flesh creep."[55]
  • Luciana Berger was a middle-class southerner whom Labour parachuted into one of its traditional heartland seats, in her case the north-western working-class safe seat of Liverpool Wavertree. She was heavily criticised for having no connection to the Wavertree constituency or Liverpool when she first ran in 2010. When a local radio station asked her basic questions about the culture of Liverpool she could not answer them, and during the candidate selection process she stayed at the house of retiring local MP Jane Kennedy rather than resettle permanently in the area. Some figures in the media suggested that she was only selected for the seat because of her close connections to the family of former Prime Minister Tony Blair.[56] Despite her initial publicity gaffes, Berger won the seat in 2010 with a slightly larger majority than Kennedy had in 2005, against the national trend, then retained it in 2015 and 2017. After joining the Liberal Democrats in 2019, she unsuccessfully contested the Greater London seat of Finchley and Golders Green in the 2019 general election. She chose to stand there because of the seat's large Jewish population and Remain vote, as well as her affinity towards living in London and choice to raise her children there, rather than in Liverpool.[57][58]
  • David and Ed Miliband were selected to fight safe Labour seats in northern England, South Shields and Doncaster North respectively, despite being Oxford graduates who were born, raised, and living in London whilst working as political advisers. David was elected for the first time in 2001 and Ed in 2005. Both would later serve as ministers under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and fight against each other in the 2010 party leadership election.
  • Douglas Carswell defected from the Conservatives to the UK Independence Party in 2014, in turn displacing the existing UKIP candidate for the forthcoming general election in his constituency of Clacton. As Carswell was living in London at the time, the former UKIP candidate accused him of carpetbagging.[59]
  • George Galloway was expelled from Labour in 2003 over Iraq War-related controversies and, despite previously representing Glasgow Kelvin, did not contest a Glasgow seat in 2005. Instead, he stood for the Respect Party in the Greater London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow, where he used his opposition to the war and the local Muslim population to gain the seat from Labour. Tottenham MP and Constitutional Affairs Minister David Lammy said he was a carpetbagger who had whipped up racial tensions.[60] After standing down from Bethnal Green and Bow in 2010, he had a two-year hiatus from parliament. In a 2012 by-election, he stood for Respect in the West Yorkshire seat of Bradford West, also with a high local Muslim population, where he made a point of not drinking and again gained the seat from Labour.[61] He lost Bradford West in 2015 to Labour's Naz Shah, after a divisive campaign.[62] Since then, he has made further attempts to parachute himself into constituencies to return to parliament. As an independent, he unsuccessfully contested Manchester Gorton in 2017 and West Bromwich East in 2019.[63][64] He also attempted to be selected as the Brexit Party candidate in the Cambridgeshire seat of Peterborough in a 2019 by-election, but the party selected local businessman Mike Greene.[65][66] Galloway eventually returned to Parliament by winning the 2024 Rochdale by-election, having formed the syncretic Workers Party of Britain, by exploiting a variety of problems with the major-party candidates, low voter turnout and running a single-issue anti-Israeli campaign over the Israel–Hamas war.[67][68][69][70]
  • Boris Johnson's selection for the ultra-safe Conservative seat of Henley in 2001, after the party's central office parachuted him in,[71] was described by senior local Tory Mike McInnes as "a disaster for the integrity of modern politics" and "arrogant in the extreme", Johnson having "blustered in with no knowledge about the constituency". McInnes commented that he could not see him supporting a hypothetical local old lady who was having problems with her housing benefit and asked, "Are people going to feel comfortable going to him?" Likewise, Johnson's main rival, Liberal Democrat candidate Catherine Bearder, gave him a withering assessment. She said: "In Henley, you can put a blue rosette on a donkey and it will get elected. And that’s what happened in 2001... He clearly just wanted to be an MP. As soon as London (the 2008 London mayoral election) came up, he was off out."[71]
  • In 1974 Enoch Powell left the Conservative Party and joined the Ulster Unionists, becoming the Westminster MP for South Down, despite having no Ulster connections. In 2002, when ex-Tory MP Andrew Hunter (who had family and Orange Order connections with Northern Ireland) joined the Democratic Unionist Party, the UUP accused him of being a carpet-bagger. It was pointed out the criticism was "a little hollow" considering the UUP's prior acceptance and promotion of Powell.[72]

United States

U.S. Senate

U.S. House of Representatives

See also

References

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