Changed name to “Literally Anybody Else” and runs for election in the USA – NRK Urix – Foreign news and documentaries

A maths teacher from Texas has changed his name to “Literally Anybody Else” and is running for president of the United States in the autumn elections.

Or in good Norwegian: “Literally anyone else”.

The name change is an attempt to show how dissatisfied he is with the two candidates in this year’s presidential election, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

– It is not necessarily about me as a person, but about anyone else as a concept, he says to the TV channel WFAA.

The 35-year-old was previously called Dustin Ebey, but has changed his legal name. On his driver’s license you can see that he now has Literally Anybody as his first name and Else as his last name.

– Difficult, but not impossible

To officially be a candidate and get his name on the ballot, Else needs 113,151 signatures from voters in Texas.

It is unlikely that he will be able to do that. Therefore, a campaign can now be carried out to get voters to enter his name manually when they vote.

– I don’t suffer from wrong positions. I know this will be very difficult, but it is not impossible, he says to the channel.

The committed man believes that Americans do not have any good candidates to choose from.

– People vote for the lesser of two evils, not for someone they actually believe in or support, he says further.

Historically unpopular candidates

– We talked a lot about it in 2016, that there were historically unpopular presidential candidates with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Now there is a new record; both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are incredibly unpopular.

So says Sigrid Gårdsvoll, political commentator at Amerikanspolitikk.no and in Vårt Land.

Surveys show that more people are dissatisfied than satisfied with the two candidates. She is nevertheless clear that both have enthusiastic supporters in their parties.

But there is no doubt that there is a lot of dissatisfaction among voters.

– Is it an American thing that they are dissatisfied with all candidates?

– Both yes and no. We can see over time that the dissatisfaction has become greater. It has become much more common for presidents to be unpopular than it was 30–40 years ago, replies Gårdsvoll.

Not least, she says it’s about how polarized the US has become.

USA expert Sofie Høgestøl supports what Gårdsvoll says about unpopular candidates.

– I think Else reflects something that many people are aware of right now. That these are not candidates for whom people have a particularly large appetite.

A larger discussion

She points out that what Else is doing also leads to a larger discussion about whether it works to have a two-party system like the US has.

– There is a larger discussion about what can be done to get a party system and a political system that to a greater extent actually produces candidates that people want to vote for.

– Can he manage to become an official presidential candidate?

– Then he has to work on it. One of the ways the party in the US has made it difficult for others to run for president is that you have to get on the ballot. And all the states have slightly different rules on what is required for that. Then you have to try to get to the polling station in 50 different states, with 50 different processes, says Høgestøl.

She emphasizes that this is difficult to achieve unless you have a lot of money and a large device.

– You may be able to get on the ballot in one state, such as Texas. But doing it in the whole of the United States, it’s quite difficult. And that is one of the reasons why you see that it is the two major parties that win the presidential election.