Talk:Endorsements in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries/Archive 1

Michael Savage
In the article he's endorsing Ted Cruz AND Rand Paul. Is it really an "endorsement" if one is voicing support for two competing candidates? The Moose  is loose ! 10:26, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Dan Bilzerian
Dan Bilzerian is currently listed as having endorsed Rand Paul. However, at United States presidential election, 2016 it says that Bilzerian is expected to enter the race himself on June 24. These can't both be correct; if he starts his own presidential campaign, then any previous endorsement of another candidate can no longer be considered to be in effect. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 02:58, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Sarah Palin, Dan Bilzerian
I removed Sarah Palin from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul's endorsements because Palin's comments, while favorable to those two candidates, did not constitute an endorsement. From the quoted source (http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/03/07/sarah-palin-ted-cruz-rand-paul-top-my-2016-list/):


 * Appearing on Fox News’s On The Record with Greta Van Susteren the night before she closes out CPAC for the second time in three years, Palin was asked if a potential candidate was emerging as her favorite.


 * “No, not yet,” she answered without hesitation.


 * Van Susteren then asked if there were candidates who were at the top of her list.


 * “I appreciate those who have fought for America like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY),” Palin answered before saying that, perhaps, the best candidate may not even be a politician.


 * “It doesn’t have to be someone who has a title today, someone who’s in office today,” Palin said. “In fact, some would say we need to stay clear of those who have followed a conventional political path. Maybe they are a part of the problem.”


 * “There are businessmen and women and strong family men and women who understand what it is that makes America exceptional, and they want to protect that, they want to get back to that; maybe someone like that will rise and be the 2016 candidate, maybe that’s what we need,” she explained.


 * When asked if she would run in 2016, Palin gave the same answer she always gives: “You never say never.”

If no potential candidate was emerging as Palin's favorite, if she "appreciated" two candidates but did not express a preference between those two, if Palin was open to the possibility of supporting yet someone else, and if she was unwilling to rule out running herself, I don't think we can consider Palin to have endorsed the two candidates she mentioned. And, I have to emphasize, an endorsement should be for one candidate, not two.

I've also removed Dan Bilzerian as an endorsement for Rand Paul, because he is now listed as running for President himself as an independent at United States presidential election, 2016. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 14:10, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

will the REAL endorsement, please stand up?
The word "endorse" is defined by analogy to what you do when you sign your name to the back of the cheque, which is to say, put your assets behind the piece of paper you just signed. Full endorsements are the virtual equivalent of big-name endorsment-givers writing their signatures on the backs of the political candidates they endorse, with the impliciation their the assets of the endorsement-giver are fully behind the candidate (piece of paper) in question. Typically, in real life, endorsement-givers do in fact back the candidates they endorse monetarily, not just with their name/brand.


 * Endorse, sense#1. to approve, support, or sustain:  to endorse a political candidate.
 * Endorsement, sense#1. approval or sanction:  "The program for supporting the arts won the government's endorsement."


 * Political endorsement is the action of publicly declaring one's personal or group's support of a candidate for elected office.
 * ...or for one or more of their policies
 * Endorsement, sense#6: support from an important, renowned figure (celebrity/politics/sports/etc).  "I'm not sure whether an endorsement from Donald Trump will help or hurt."   Translation:  French soutien, meaning sense#2, psychological/emotional support.
 * Endorsement, sense#5: monetary sponsorship by a company/business/enterprise:  "After the Olympics, he was hoping to get an endorsement deal."

That said, the meaning of the endorsement isn't primarily about monetary tranfers; there are plenty of monetary transfers without accompanying public endorsement, and also plenty of endorsements without accompanying monetary transfer. The dictionary definition is purposely vague, and can be as weak as generic approval, or as strong as support (but still vague about the specific nature of that support), or even with connotations of sanction (aka something akin to brand-sharing).

Endorsements are about social networking, either in the  modern  sense of FaceTwit, or more usually in politics, in the old-fashioned sense of political cliques, or broadcast media. Sarah Palin endorsed Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, as a way of saying that she would happily encourage her 4 million facebook fans to back those candidates for the nomination. Ditto for Michael Savage and his 4 million radio-broadcast listeners. Political endorsements by sitting (and especially by former) elected officials are similar: they indicate that the politician giving the endorsement, will in the future be using their network of donors, activists, volunteers, and so on and so forth, to help boost the campaign of the endorsed candidate.

By contrast, Bilzerian was giving an endorsement which turned out to merely be 'approval' in the end, without the usual connotations of monetary and/or social-network-based backing; his monetary support and his social-networking-support will doubtless be going into his own campaign, for the most part (though he might still max-contribute to the Rand Paul campaign depending on how wealthy he is). Even further down the endorsement-spectrum: Mattingly is giving a physical display of support (weak but unmistakable) to the Jeb Bush campaign, by making an appearance at the announcement rally... but has not publicly committed to an endorsement, aka to backing the Jeb Bush campaign with his monetary and/or his social-networking assets in Georgia and DC. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 17:01, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Rule#2.1 endorsements must be unequivocal, and Rule#2.2 endorsements must be singular
Agree with the "must be unequivocal" goal, but the illustrations are not correct. "I will vote for candidate X" has two very distinct meanings, as used by pundits (and also as used by polling-firms for that matter). Commonly, there is a polling-question that goes something like this: "If candidate X is the republican nominee, will you support them / vote for them?" This is a conditional probability, in other words: given that they ARE the party nominee, will you be happy, or unhappy. The question measures general-election enthusiasm, for a particular candidate X, versus the democratic nominee. There is a very different question, also very commonly asked, which is usually like this: "If the republican primary were today, and the candidates were X, Y, and Z, which would you vote for?" The top pick a person makes, roughly correlates to their endorsement of that person, to *be* the nominee. This is distinct from whether the person in question would support X, given that X was the nominee. Ditto for Y, ditto for Z.

The confusion is caused by the fact that, generally speaking, if a person has X as their top pick aka endorsement-to-be-nominee, that same person will also support/voteFor/beEnthusiasticAbout the general election featuring X as the nominee. But this isn't true more generally -- some republican voters with endorse X, yet still be happy to support any of X or Y or Z as the nominee, come November. Other endorsement-givers will exclusively be happy with X, and should it come to pass that Y or Z instead becomes the nominee, will NOT support that person in the general election. For a specific example, look at the endorsement of Scott Walker R-WI by the senator Ron Johnson who is also R-WI, where he specifically says that he'll be backing Walker in the Wisconsin republican primary, but is careful not to imply that he will *only* be happy with Walker as the nominee -- he leaves open the likelihood of support for the eventual nominee, whoever they might be, even though he's backing his home-state governor in the home-state primary-process. This subtlety is probably not worth trying to encode into the text of the article; we can honestly say, in the article, that Walker was endorsed by Johnson, period. However, the overall issue of would-vote-for-them if they were the nominee, versus endorse-them-as-the-nominee, has wider consequences, especially with multiple-name-endorsements.

As another example, and segue into the question of multiple-name-endorsement-expressions, look at the Michael Savage endorsements; back in February he explicitly said "as of right now" that he was "endors[ing] Ted Cruz and Rand Paul"; later, somebody deleted those endorsements from wikipedia, and moved Michael Savage to the Donald Trump category, based on a quote where Savage says "I would vote for [Trump]". From the surrounding context, it is clear that the original endorsement of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul was non-exclusive (there were two of them) and also conditional on who might later enter the race ("as of right now"). That doesn't mean it isn't WP:NOTEWORTHY as a preliminary endorsement, just that we should treat it differently than a singular-and-purportedly-final-for-all-time sort of full endorsement. Also, again from the surrounding context, it is clear that Savage was NOT endorsing Trump in the radio show this June, in the sense of singling him out the top choice (and implicitly de-singling-out Cruz && Rand), but rather was expressing the weaker conditional-endorsement-concept, namely that Savage *would* support slash voteFor slash beEnthusiasticAbout the republican nominee GIVEN that it happened to be Donald Trump, come July 2016. Savage specifically mentioned that his general-election support of Trump would be conditional on him running as the republican nominee (aka not third-party), and on picking a conservative veep ("such as Ben Carson"), which makes it even clearer that i-would-vote-for-Trump is not always the same as fully-endorse.

So, to solve these problems, I think we most definitely ought to keep reliably-sourced multiple-name-preliminary-endorsements (Cantor: Bush Walker Christie Rubio ... Palin:  Cruz Paul ... Koch:  Walker Bush Cruz Paul Rubio), because they are obviously WP:NOTEWORTHY expressions of some sort of endorsement. Deleting reliably-sourced material is almost never a good idea, once again. However, I suggest these multi-name and otherwise-non-full quasi-endorsements definitely do need to be in a separate section of the article, not the main one, because normally these are the if-candidate-X-is-the-nominee-can-you-support-them type of conditional preliminary endorsements, as opposed to the I-stand-by-candidate-X-as-the-best-nominee-my-top-pick-forevermore type of full endorsements.

Furthermore, we should probably be dating the endorsements of both types; Palin multiple-endorsed Rand && Cruz as her top two picks back in January 2014. It was news then, and it is historically important for wikipedia to retain that tidbit of WP:NOTEWORTHY info about the very early stages of the race, but Palin will almost certainly make a more-definitive endorsement sometime in the future -- likely before the end of 2015. Wikipedia should also record that 2015 expression for posterity, assuming it meets the WP:NOTEWORTHY policy, but that doesn't mean we ought to delete the historical multiname-endorsement Palin voiced in 2014. We should instead move it to a "preliminary endorsements" section, or more weasel-worded-ly perhaps a "preliminary expressions of support" section, which gives us leeway to include multiple-name-endorsements there, and exclude multiple-name-endorsements in the main-slash-current section, without any need to delete reliably-sourced material from mainspace. Here is what I suggest:


 * Preliminary Expression of Support: I would vote for candidate x. (Note use of future tense, implying that they would support the person in the general election, or as the nominee.  However, this might be a full endorsement, albeit only if it was an answer to a very specificly-phrasd question, such as "who do you endorse in the 2016 republican primary race" or similar.)
 * Endorsement: I am standing with candidate x.
 * Endorsement: I back candidate x for the nomination.
 * Preliminary Expression of Support: I would support either candidate x or candidate y.
 * Preliminary Expression of Support: I need to hear more from candidate y, but I really like candidate x. (N.B.  only x is getting preliminary support in this statement ; y is neither being endorsed, nor getting preliminary support, in this statement.)
 * Not an endorsement: I've heard good things about plenty of candidates, especially candidate x, but I need to learn more about them.
 * Not an endorsement: Candidate x is a good person.  (Unless followed by a much more specific and-I-endorse-them-for-president type of phrase, or unless it is the sole name mentioned, no qualifiers and no but-also-clauses, in response to a very-specific who-is-your-top-pick-for-president sort of question.)
 * Not an endorsement: evidence, especially non-WP:RS evidence, of money being donated by a person-or-group to a candidate-or-related-PAC.  (Many megadonors will donate money to most or even ALL candidates; see Access to power.)
 * Could be full-/preliminary-/non-endorsement, depending on context: I like candidate X.  (Depends on if the answer is in response to a question about support for the presidential nomination, and furthermore, if that is the only candidate they mentioned, plus of course, did not later clarify.)

Some specific examples from this article: Kid Rock definitely endorsed Ben Carson when he said "I like Carson" in repeated responses to suitable questions, whereas Dave Mustaine only sounded like he was endorsing Santorum in 2012, but later officially retracted. Kid Rock should be listed under the "endorsements" section, and Mustaine should be listed under the "Preliminary Expressions Of Support" section in the 2012 election (and not listed at all in the 2016 election article we are discussing now... despite flawed journalism to the contrary). Along the same lines, Mack Mattingly gave a preliminary expression of support for Bush by appearing at the latter's announcement rally, but has not yet publicly voiced an endorsement, so he belongs in "Preliminary Expressions Of Support". Same story for Mick Mulvaney and Mark Sanford, both of whom voiced preliminary support of Rand Paul, but have not yet "officially" anounced anything.

Wikipedia should prolly record the evolution of the endorsement-landscape, in the sense that we can give the dates when preliminary support was announced, and the dates when official endorsements were announced, and if applicable, the dates when endorsement-givers changed their minds from x to y to z. See my suggestion for rule#3 above, that month and date of the preliminary-and-full-endorsements do matter; Palin in Jan'14 was obviously expressing multiple-name preliminary support, not giving a full-endorsement (too early for that). Same for Michael Savage in Feb'15 and later expanded in June'15, preliminary endorsements-slash-support only. Same for Bilzerian, he gave preliminary support in MM/YYYY, then changed his mind in MM/YYYY and ran on his own ticket; however, it might be the case that he is still endorsing Rand Paul for the republican nomination specifically, yet endorsing himself for the general-election-contest (something much like that happened in 2012 with Gary Johnson for example). Having two subsections gives us the infrastructure we need to properly categorize the various relevant cites, so that we can move them to their correct location, rather than deleting them from mainspace.

I realize that trying to keep track of the broader preliminary-expressions-of-support dataset, in addition to simplistic final-sole-endorsements, could enlarge the size of the article dramatically; I think it would make sense to have a bluelinks-only rule for the preliminary-support-subsection, but per my suggested rule#1_B above, to still allow WP:NOTEWORTHY redlinks (albeit only with WP:RS) in the main full-endorsement subsection of the article. Alternatively, we could use a wait-and-see approach, and allow redlinks in both subsections for the moment (suitably grouped by type to keep them compact), and defer the decision on whether to have a local-article-specific bluelink-only rule for one or both of the subsections, until some unspecified future date. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:11, 28 June 2015 (UTC)
 * 75.108: While I believe you have raised some interesting issues, I would prefer not to try to cover preliminary expressions of support here. Wikipedia already covers the recent U.S. presidential elections with great intensity, and I don't think that every time a notable person says something favorable about one of the candidates without expressly endorsing them, we need to put that into the encyclopedia. The equivocal favorable statements are just not that important in the context of the election. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:24, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Metropolitan90, the gist of my argument is that wikipedians shouldn't be deciding, as wikipedians, which specific expressions of support (whether full-fledged endorsements or otherwise) are permitted to be in the encyclopedia.  We should reflect what the reliable sources say, and summarize it as well as we may.  If you are saying that, instead of having the quotes from Palin/Bilzerian/Koch/Cantor/etc here in this article, you think they make more sense in the other articles on the individual campaigns, then that is something that could be made to work.  I think it's redundant to have five articles mention the Koch quote, when we could instead centralize that info here, and have the campaign-articles point here, but the decision would depend on what the goal of the article here is:  in-depth coverage of endorsements, or just a comparative summary of the major ones (by some consensus definition of "major"), with the individual campaign-articles having more in-depth endorsement-and-preliminary-support info.  My primary aim here is to avoid people deleting reliably-cited material outright -- as opposed to moving that material from one article over to a more appropriate article which is often just fine of course -- because deleted sourced material is bad for wikipedia generally speaking, and especially counterproductive in the context of endorsements, where the 'big' endorsement-givers (per WP:RS) are not necessarily going to have their own bluelinked wikipedia article, and where deletions of cited material can easily lead to edit-warring.  Do you like the idea of using grouped-bullet-points, to keep the redlinked lists more compact, and to keep the home-state-endorsements mostly together?  Or are you still leaning towards this specific article being bluelinks and only bluelinks?  Thanks.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:22, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't have an answer at this point; hopefully other people will have some suggestions. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 17:35, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

is Scott Walker declared-enough yet, to be unhidden from the article-html-comments? same question for Kasich
Scott Walker created an exploratory 527 group back in January, and as of July has filed 'form 1' with the FEC, contrast with 'form 2' (etc). Here is a headline: "Scott Walker formally enters 2016 presidential election"  On first glance that looks like RS, though I've never heard of the source myself.

However, looking at the actual contents of the filing, it is ambiguous (aka the headline above has a large hunk of journalistic-slash-artistic license). "While I have not yet announced whether I will be a candidate... I have received contributions of more than $5000 within the last 15 days... [s]hould I formally announce, I will seek the Republican nomination [for potus]... a statement of organization (fec form 1) is also being filed today...."

Raising more than 5k for your presidential-run is a 'trigger' that forces you to file with the FEC. However, Walker seems to be hedging, and trying to reserve the right to NOT run, aka by announcing that he will not be a candidate at some future date (at which point he would presumably refund the money contributed up to that point to his 2016 campaign committee).

For the purposes of this article, he has received several endorsements, including one federal senator, and his endorsement-set is already being tracked by WP:RS such as and. Those suggest Walker belongs in this article; any objections to unhiding him, at this point?

p.s. The other candidate who is listed by some WP:RS as having endorsements already, but is currently excluded from this article on grounds of being "not declared yet" is John Kasich. He is explicitly waiting to officially announce, because he doesn't wish to appear in the first televised debate, or rather, because he doesn't yet have the nationwide name-recogition to be invited to the debate. I also think this article should list him, but the case based on WP:RS is far less strong than for Walker (who has the polling to be in the debates and more/bigger/better endorsements than Kasich at this point). 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:57, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

contentious endorsement of Trump by Anglin
Recently, User:FiredanceThroughTheNight added this endorsement for Donald Trump:


 * Andrew Anglin, neo-Nazi blogger
 * ref#1, rawstory == http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/donald-trump-has-some-enthusiastic-new-admirers-white-supremacists
 * ref#2, Ring of Fire (radio program) == https://www.ringoffireradio.com/2015/07/white-supremacist-organizations-officially-endorse-donald-trump

I'm changing it to say "white supremacist blogger" since that is how the sources describe him in the titles. Anglin describes himself as more of a white nationalist, which is subtly different, but probably too subtle for wikipedia's purposes, and in any case we should reflect what the sources say. I note that Anglin currently fails the bluelinks only test -- his wikipedia bluelink is a redirect to the article about his blogsite. I also note that this information is seemingly WP:THETRUTH -- the blogsite does endorse Trump, unambiguously.

As for the quality of these WP:RS, looking at the author of the blog-piece by Ring Of Fire, the author uses his real name, and has written plenty of blogposts for the site, plus one for the online newspaper San Francisco Sentinel; Ring Of Fire the publisher is a very-strongly-progressive-oriented blog-n-radio-site ("...started as a weekly syndicated radio show in 2004 for the purpose of exposing Wall Street thugs, environmental criminality, corporate media failure, and political back stories that you will rarely find from any other source... a multi-media outlet for the latest Progressive news, commentary and analysis"), with their primary vehicle being talk radio weekend-shows on 23 AM stations and 6 FM, with 3+ local broadcasts in multiple states with legit-looking contact info. There does NOT seem to be any editorial-board, per se, which makes this a borderline source, that that's the only big flaw I noticed. It does seem unlikely that the anglin-endorses-trump piece was broadcast on the radio-show, since the author of the blog-piece isn't one of the radio-hosts, but as I understand things the publisher hosting the article on their official website as a news-item is sufficient, if barely, to satisfy WP:RS.

As for rawstory, the current wikipedia article about it says it "describes itself as progressive, bringing attention to stories that it sees as downplayed or ignored by other media outlets" and quotes newsweek: the site is described by Newsweek as, "Muck, raked: If you're looking for alleged GOP malfeasance, the folks at rawstory.com are frequently scooping the mainstream media."[4]

Summarizing... the sources are just good enough for WP:RS, but when I looked I couldn't find anything more mainstream than those two (and both sources explicitly say they 'cover stories the other media will not'). I would lean towards saying that wikipedia has to reflect what the sources say, but these sources are pretty borderline. There are WP:BLP issues, since obviously the reason these two particular progressive sites are publicizing the info, is to make Trump and his campaign look bad, and Trump is a WP:BLP. There are also WP:BLP issues with respect to Anglin; wikipedians should only call him what reliable sources do, and not come up with our own terminology. If anyone has suggestions for how best to deal with Anglin-endorses-Trump, I'd like to hear them. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 21:30, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Somebody deleted this endorsement, I noticed. After taking another look at the search engines, I see plenty of places where Donald Trump has been in the news, and a reasonable number of places where Anglin has again been in the news (there is some alleged text-analysis-based linkage between the murders in SC and the website he runs).  There have been a couple of websites that specifically noted the connection between Trump and Anglin:  there was a blog post at and Anti-Defamation League site, which specifically says that Anglin and others like him as "[e]ager to exploit the sit­u­a­tion" to get publicity/traffic/etc for their white supremacist websites.  That's probably WP:RS for our purposes, and it is thus probably WP:NOTEWORTHY in the same way that the RawStory and RingOfFireRadioProgram sources qualify, if barely so.  However, the ADL raises the problem of WP:SPIP ... they don't want to give press to the white supremacists, except to note that the white supremacists are attempting to use Trump as a means of getting more attention for themselves.  Besides that ADL blogger (who was anonymous 'staff'), the only other newly-penned hit I ran across was a 'daily diary' entry at the DailyKos, which is basically a user-specific-blog-portion of that usually-WP:RS website, and I believe has zero editorial oversight in that specific portion.  The diary-entry in question vaguely referenced the endorsement:  "[Trump]'s already drawing support from fans who blog regularly on a neo-Nazi site called the Daily Stormer (sorry, not giving a link)."  It didn't name the blogger as Anglin, and it didn't even link to the site, so even if it was WP:RS, it would need some WP:SYNTH to make it happen.  Anyways, at the end of the day, despite my usual inclination never to remove sourced material from mainspace, I'm going to let the removal of the Anglin-endorses-Trump stuff stand.  There are WP:BLP concerns, since the RawStory and RingOfFireRadioProgram groups are admittedly biased, and Trump is a BLP they are targetting; wikipedia doesn't want to be in the middle of that, until and unless we have IMPECCABLY reliable mainstream sources to prove the endorsement is WP:NOTEWORTHY.  There are also WP:SPIP concerns, that Anglin and the other white supremacist/nationalist folks are just exploiting Trump's campaign as a means to promote themselves and/or their websites; this is not just my gut feeling, this is the explicit assessment of the ADL staff-blogger.  On those grounds, I'm leaving the Anglin bit out of mainspace, should nobody object.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:24, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Tom Ridge as governor versus cabinet, and subsection ordering in general
He's listed as a 'former cabinet official' rather than as a 'former governor'. The difference is not merely being elected, rather than appointed, but also that the appointment was most probably by a family-member.


 * Tom Ridge, former Secretary of Homeland Security, former Governor of Pennsylvania, and former U.S. Representative

Shouldn't Ridge be moved into the governor-subsection, rather than cabinet? Along the same lines, what is the logic behind the ordering of subsections? I understand that for "fairness" wikipedia alphabetizes candidates by last name (in opposition to some reliable sources which order the listing by raw endorsement-counts in descending order), but there doesn't seem to be a consistent system for ordering subsections. I would think that they ought to be ordered by the impact the endorsement has: governors first, senators second, usreps third, early-state-lawmakers fourth, ambassadors and international endorsements (e.g. Nigel Farage) fifth, endorsements by family relatives second-to-last, then activists and celebrities and miscellaneous endorsements very-last. Does somebody have a suggestion on whether that ordering makes sense, or if there is some kind of traditional ordering-convention that I'm missing here? Thanks. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 18:47, 28 June 2015 (UTC)
 * I moved Ridge into the guv-subsection, and moved guvs&sens to a more prominent location, too. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:26, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Chuck_Larson, Michelle Malkin, etc.
Somebody added Pamela Geller and Michelle Malkin under Ted Cruz; I found a cite for Gellar to prove it is WP:NOTEWORTHY, but I think Malkin only endorsed Cruz'12 (for Senate not POTUS), and has not made a committment for the 2016 race. Suggest we take Malkin out of mainspace for not, unless somebody knows different about her status. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:14, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

97.125 added Chuck_Larson under Jeb Bush, but the cite was to a May'15 forum-post by a since-forum-banned-user WildOnion, on a blog. :-)     Larson is a pretty big name:  former Ambassador to Latvia under GWB, fmr IA st sen, and fmr IA GOP chair.  The only WP:RS quote I ran across was "If Jeb Bush decides to run for president, I believe he will be incredibly well received by conservatives in Iowa," back in Dec'14.  Any better ref exist?  As with the failed-verification-cites for Mattingly of Georgia, I would hesitate to yank Larson from mainspace, as opposed to leaving him there with prominent better-source-needed tagging, because even though the ref is imperfect, the endorsement is not merely plausible but 99% likely to have occurred; it just may not (yet) be wiki-verifiable.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:14, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Other backers, alleged by the same Iowa forum-blogger: I'll go ahead and add C.Rants for Fiorina, W.Rogers for Santorum, C.Lang for Paul. Point being, besides noting that wikipedia is still WP:NOTFINISHED, I see this as evidence that Larson should stay in mainspace, since all the other names check out. The forum-blogger seemed to know what they were talking about, aka they are an 'expert in the relevant field' of political endorsements in Iowa; too bad they got forum-banned, we could have used more facts from their posts as the 2016 season heats up. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:14, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Jeb Bush: Amb. Chuck Larson Jr (mostly checks out... see above), State Sen. Charles Schneider (verified && already in wikipedia), Rep. Ken Rizer (verified && sorta already in wikipedia)
 * Ted Cruz: former [iowa]SecState Matt Schultz (verified && already in wikipedia)
 * Rand Paul: Craig Lang, farmer and former chair of the Board of Regents and Iowa Farm Bureau (checks out but wikipedia didn't have it yet).
 * Rick Santorum: [state]Rep. Walt Rogers (checks out but wikipedia didn't have it yet).
 * Carly Fiorina: Speaker of the House Chris Rants (checks out but wikipedia didn't have it yet).

discussion of Rule #1, aka bluelinks-only
Hi ObieGrad -- while I agree with your goals of keeping the article reliable, I think your rules are problematic in the details. First of all, under rule#1 above, you've deleted a bunch of Fiorina endorsements, which were 99% reliably sourced, on the basis of them being "not notable" because there is currently no wikipedia article on the endorser (i.e. the person making the endorsement). This not an uncommon article-specific tradition for list-articles, per guideline WP:CSC, but it does violate policy WP:NOTEWORTHY, and in this particular case (lists of presidential party endorsements) I believe in a crucial fashion.

Wikipedia should reflect what the sources actually tell us, and not what other articles on wikipedia tell us, right? There are going to be plenty of reliably-sourced endorsements from swing-state and early-caucus-state legislators. Per WP:POLITICIAN guideline, these types of folks are quasi-inherently "notable" in the wikipedia sense; even though they might not currently have an article, because they are state legislators, elected in a public campaign, making laws with broad impact as their job, and often trying to get their name in the news, plus as part of their job getting their name in a multitude of government-website sources, they are presumed (under the guideline) to be wiki-notable. Thus, if you look at New_Hampshire_General_Court you will see that only about 10% of the state reps have a dedicated article, the rest being redlinks, and the vast majority of the bluelinks being stubs, with the exception of Gene Chandler and a couple others. That's not because articles on each NH rep cannot be written, but simply because they haven't been written yet.

Example#1, in particular, one of the dozen endorsements you deleted was cited material showing Will Infantine as an endorsee from Fiorina's list, because he does not yet have a wikipedia article. Even a cursory web-search shows that such an article could be written; he made national news in 2014 over comments he made about salary for women versus salary for men, and as a committee-chair in the state legislature he has about a dozen RS in local newspapers for other state-level stuff he has been involved with. There are a few cites on his involvement with presidential-level inside-baseball-politics during 2012 and 2016, where New Hampshire plays an oversized role, see United_States_presidential_primary. Somebody even noted the apparent dichotomy between Infantine's support of Fiorina, the only 2016 wiki-notable republican female potential-candidate besides Sarah Palin (cf Hillary Clinton and Warren plus kinda Gillibrand who are also noted for their gender in RS about the democratic potential-candidates), and his gender-related salary-comments from 2014. So to my way of thinking, if the New York Times and Weekly Standard and Boston Globe and Mitt Romney campaign think that Will Infantine in particular, and NH state reps in general, are WP:NOTEWORTHY ... then bluelinks-only is probably the wrong rule.

Example#2, you deleted the redlink to Phyllis M. Katsakiores, with the reliably-cited WMUR source that verified the data, as "non-notable". Again, though, the most cursory of googling shows that not only does she have at least as many RS as Infantine does (cf George Katsakiores in local Derry politics and Thomas Katsakiores who is another sitting NH state rep), she has had a wikipedia article since 2011.

Example#3, somebody not yet in the article is Iowa pastor Terry Amann, who is unlikely to have a dedicated wikipedia article (not an elected official or otherwise in the news), but who is identified by WP:RS as being a key influencer specifically for the 2016 presidential contest, and made WP:NOTEWORTHY endorsements in the past e.g. Sam Clovis in 2014. Unless we allow redlinks, we will elide this guy's endorsement, which is contrary to what reliable sources tell us. Not good.

Rather than insisting on a flat no-redlinks article-specific local policy as the rule#1, and thus deleting reliably-sourced material (which is almost always The Wrong Thing To Do), my suggestion to keep the article "under control" is that we merely alter the presentation-format. Instead of having one bullet point per endorsement, we should group "lesser" endorsements by state, or by profession; call this idea rule#1_B, to differentiate it from the bluelinks-only-rule#1. Grouping prevents a lot of redundant verbosity, as well as improving the clarity of how we represent the importance / gravity / wiki-notability of the endorsements themselves.

My suggestion is that we continue to list current-and-former presidents, governors, and federal senators line-by-line (aka with their own bullet-point), but that we collapse down the actors/rappers/entertainers into a single bullet point, we collapse down the NH usreps and NH state-sens and NH state-reps into a single bullet point, we collapse down the IA usreps and IA state-sens and IA state-reps into a single bullet point, and so on for other states and other professions. The groupings should be based on reliable-source-inspired categories where possible, e.g. in my reading most celeb-endorsements are clumped together in one news-cite, and the same firm will have another article on early-state-endorsements, and often yet another news-cite on governors/sentators/etc. Redlinked endorsees are kept, provided they are reliably sourced, but they are explicitly redlinked, to show the reader that 1) the name is not yet wiki-notable, and 2) give the reader a chance to write the corresponding article if they so desire. Here is what Fiorina would look like, under rule#1_B, with all her endorsements:


 * New Hampshire:   NH state reps:  Barbara Biggie, Gene G. Chandler (Deputy Speaker of the  House) , Yvonne Dean-Bailey , Marilinda Garcia (2007-2014) , Edmond Gionet , Joe Guthrie ,Bob Haefner , Joe Hagan , Will Infantine (Labor Committee chair) , Phyllis Katsakiores , Rick Ladd ,  Peggy McCarthy , Kim Rice ,  Jim Webb.
 * Celebrities, commentators, and activists: Bettie Lamontagne (pro-life activist and wife of Ovide M. Lamontagne).

Not only is this list visually shorter, and thus makes the article less cluttered (plus less susceptible to WP:SPIP), but it also provides important info to the reader: Fiorina has a *lot* of NH state reps, and several of them are bluelinks. Implicitly, it also provides other crucial info: so far, she *only* has endorsements (that are encyclopedic per WP:NOTEWORTHY at least) in the fine state of NH. Of course, Fiorina's listing will be even more compact once Bettie Lamontagne is removed... not because she is a redlink, but because the cite is non-RS, and thus probably WP:SPIP unless a better cite can be found. Rewriting the other candidates under rule#1_B format will I believe similarly improve their readability, and the usefulness of the article to wikipedia readers. One gotcha for rule#1_B is that it might cause too MANY spurious bluelinks to appear... Jim Webb is not the same as Jim Webb (New Hampshire politician) for instance, and most likely Peggy McCarthy (politician) is not the same as Peggy McCarthy, though of course they *could* be one and the same human.

And of course, we won't need to delete reliably-sourced material under rule#1_B, which I consider pretty paramount to keeping the article reliable -- particularly, political articles are NOT a good place to have individual editors deleting sourced info, because the appearance of bias is too easy to generate thataway, cf WP:NPOV. To be clear, I completely understand that ObieGrad was acting 100% in good-faith, trying to keep the article reliable and under control, and more generally  improve the encyclopedia. I just think the bluelinks-only rule is the incorrect rule, because it will end up deleting reliably-sourced endorsements that ought to remain, thus making the article less-reliable, contrary to the goal. The bluelinks-only rule will also lead to long-running edit-wars, back-and-forth deletions and re-insertions of cited material, I would predict. The way to keep the article under control isn't to delete "lesser" endorsements, but to group them more compactly, by type; no loss of reliability/truthfulness, less temptation to edit-war, less temptation to delete WP:RS from mainspace. If anyone has criticism or objections to rule#1_B, please let me know; I'll take a stab at editing mainspace using rule#1_B, if nobody has any complaints at the moment. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:11, 28 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Later update, it seems the removal of the Fiorina-links was already undone, and redlink-versus-bluelink was a concern both times.  I suggest we try and figure out a consensus here, rather than deleting them again per suggested rule#1, or rewriting them per my suggested rule#1_B.  Once we have a good idea of what will make people happy, we can implement the rules for all candidates in one fell swoop.  I've invited the other two editors to this page.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 17:50, 28 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Carly Fiorina


 * Businesspeople
 * Heidi Ganahl, CEO/Founder at Camp Bow Wow Corporate


 * Celebrities, commentators, and activists
 * Bettie Lamontagne (pro-life activist and wife of Ovide M. Lamontagne)
 * Marjorie Dannenfelser (president of Susan B. Anthony List). (from home-state of the candidate)


 * I've put together a draftspace grouped-bullet-point version of the article, which can be compared to the way mainspace looked at the time. The excerpt above just shows what the Fiorina-subsection looks like, but I converted the other candidates as well, and like the way that Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul and Jeb Bush are now more-readable-overall and more-understandable-at-a-glance to the readers.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:59, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

arbitrary section break, continuing discussion of layout-compaction approach versus bluelinks-only approach
After discussions with User:User2534 and User:Metropolitan90, I went ahead and bit the bullet, and compacted the article in mainspace. Diff here. Using Carly Fiorina as our running example, here is what the latest layout-scheme now looks like:


 * Carly Fiorina


 * Statewide officials
 * Indiana: Sue Ellspermann (Lt Governor).  (also former Indiana state rep)


 * State legislators
 * Two Iowa State Representatives: Steve Olson (2003-2015 including 2013-2014 as Speaker Pro Tempore) Mike Sexton.
 * Two New Hampshire State Senators: Sharon Carson, Jeanie Forrester.
 * Fourteen New Hampshire State Representatives: Barbara Biggie, Gene Chandler (Deputy Speaker), Yvonne Dean-Bailey, Marilinda Garcia (2007-2014),  Edmond Gionet, Joe Guthrie, Bob Haefner, Joe Hagan, Will Infantine (Labor Committee Chair), Phyllis M. Katsakiores, Rick Ladd, Peggy McCarthy, Kim Rice, Jim Webb,
 * Colorado State Representative: Perry Buck.
 * Delaware State Senate: Brian G. Pettyjohn.
 * Delaware State Representative: Deborah Hudson.


 * Businesspeople
 * Heidi Ganahl, CEO/Founder at Camp Bow Wow Corporate


 * Celebrities, commentators and activists
 * Iowa: Sara Kurovski, mayor of Pleasant Hill, Iowa
 * New Hampshire: Bettie Lamontagne, pro-life activist and wife of Ovide M. Lamontagne

I am not 100% satisfied with this version; I would like to make some further changes, specifically: Suggestions welcomed, on these three points, or any other layout-problem or layout-change. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:02, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
 * #1, change from having the header-title link to the BLP page Carly Fiorina, followed by a 'main article' note which links to the campaign-article, to instead simply linking the header-name straight to the campaign-article: Carly Fiorina. This will save a bit of space, and the link to the campaign, not the full BLP, is more logical for an article specifically about endorsements in that campaign.
 * #2, do something a bit less clunky about handling the parenthetical notes to home-state and birth-state and appointed-to-their-governmental-position-by-a-relative stuff. They are repetitive, and a bit clutter-y, at the moment.  I think the best thing would be a section-specific 'footnote' portion, with a brief two-word superscript that explains the footnote-contents.  I will see if I can get the wiki-syntax of this change figured out.
 * #3, the counts-per-bullet-group are allowed, per WP:CALC, but without the tables they don't stand out very well. I want to avoid using tables, because the wiki-table-syntax is fairly scary, and might keep people from adding endorsements (or cause them to mess up other endorsements accidentally if they fail to dot their i's and cross their t's when doing the additions).   Should we switch to numeric counts, something like "14 New Hampshire State Representatives" or maybe we can boldface the counts to make them stand out, either "14 New Hampshire State Representatives" or even "Fourteen New Hampshire State Representatives"?


 * Regarding the "home-state" and "birth-state" notes, I think they can largely be dispensed with. Some of them are not even grammatical, such as the following:
 * George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush, parents of the candidate, and former President and First Lady of the United States (birth-state of the candidate)
 * If you haven't mentioned Texas nearby, "birth-state of the candidate" has no antecedent. Also, "birth state" and "home state" should not be hyphenated. But, more importantly, I don't think those phrases are even needed in most of these entries, or maybe not even any of them. Nor, I think, do we need the "appointed by candidate's brother" parentheticals. I don't think we need the counts within the entries; we can expect that the endorsements will get added to faster as we get closer to the primary season, and we don't need editors to have to keep changing the numbers. Besides, readers can count the number of officials in each entry themselves. Finally, as in the case of Sue Ellspermann, I don't think we need to mention the lesser offices that the endorsers have held. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 15:07, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi User:Metropolitan90, yes, I found the favorite son and birthplace notes to be pretty awkward. It was especially painful for Jeb Bush, but Rand Paul was also a pain thataway.  I will try to hurry up and implement my idea#2 for the wiki-syntax, and see if that improves things enough to be worth keeping the annotations.  On a related matter, I used to have an explanatory paragraph at the top, with some cites about the home field advantage making endorsements from other politicians in the same state pro forma, but somebody deleted it without explanation.  They have not been responsive on their usertalk, so I was planning to put it back into mainspace.  Do you think that paragraph is helpful, or alternatively, too much clutter, here in this article?
 * As for your other points, I agree that the counts will be a pain to update, so we can take them out if you think it will improve overall reliability. I take your point about Ellspermann, but I'm hesitant to make a firm rule; for instance, Tom Ridge was governor, before getting appointed head of DHS, and was also a USrep.  Which is the 'lesser' office?  I think governor counts for the most, in terms of endorsement-power, but DHS is a cabinet-rank (albeit muted somewhat by being an appointee and further by being the candidate's kinfolk).  USrep is a federal office, and nothing to be sneezed at in terms of endorsements.  There are similar problems with e.g. Napolitano, who is best known as a legal & judicial teevee analyst, but is also a law prof, and formerly a judge; how do we decide which counts the most?  Anyways, in cases like Ellspermann where the relative importance of the positions is clear, we are probably okay to take out the lesser roles... but I'm worried that will give the appearance of NPOV violation, if we get too aggressive with using wikipedian-editorial-judgement to decide on where and whom to slim down.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:34, 26 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Okay, I've updated the Jeb Bush entry, for starters; since that one has the most annotation-clutter I suggest we start with that, and then once we're satisfied apply the final layout-standards to the other candidate-entries. Here is the superscript-style I just finished.  Here is the older compact-but-cluttered-with-parentheticals style that User:Metropolitan90 (and myself for that matter) found unsatisfactory.  Here is what the uncompacted-and-also-unannotated entry looked like, a few days ago before the revamp attempt.  Note that, at the moment, I've left the three 'notes' subsections appended to the bottom of the Jeb Bush subsection, because he's the only candidate using the 'feature' at present.  Once other candidates are converted over to superscript-style rather than parenthetical-style, the 'notes' themselves will be moved to the bottom of the article-page, out of the way.  Also, per suggestion from Metropolitan90, I changed the grammar from saying "home-state / birth-state" to instead using "home state / birthplace".  If somebody knows how to get rid of the trailing numeral in the superscript-prose, that would help make the superscript-style a bit more friendly to the eye.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 17:23, 26 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I have no problem with redlinks for people who might pass WP:GNG or even WP:BARE, but this list is getting to the downright obscure. Bearian (talk) 18:16, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

Clean up
I removed many names of people who are just not notable by any stretch of the imagination. Bearian (talk) 20:02, 30 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Hello User:Bearian, appreciate your help here. The question of whether the article should be bluelinks-only has come up before, see various sections higher up on the talkpage here.  I've never heard of WP:BARE essay, but it adds a third option that I had not considered before.  At the moment, my position is still that this page should strictly reflect what the sources say, and that our standard for inclusion of an endorsement-giver should be WP:NOTEWORTHY mention in a WP:RS.  The problem with insisting on bluelinks is, #1, that means putting wikipedia's (current) idea of wiki-notability ABOVE what the sources say, and #2, deleting reliably-sourced material is in principle usually a bad idea, and in practice nigh-always leads to mistakes.  In a political article, especially one that is likely to get overheated during the next year or so, and quite soon since August 6th (only a week away) when the first televised debates begin to get people interested in researching the candidates, I really don't want to see the behavioral-precedent put forth, that deleting reliably sourced material is peachy-fine, because that's a bad example to set.
 * Question, what are your thoughts on specific categories (guv/sen/rep/celeb/etc) of endorsement-givers? Should we always keep current and former RNC members e.g. state chair plus maybe national committeeman/woman, even when redlinked?  Same question for statewide officials, state legislators (esp in IA/NH/SC/NV), and for megadonors.  I can understand why it might seem wise to eliminate staffers from the list -- the alternative I would suggest is to break them out into their own subsection rather than lumping them in with celebrities (then maybe collapse-template the staffers or efn-template them).  I agree that celebrity endorsements should probably be under the bluelinks-only-rule, but in practice, I don't think we've had *any* celeb-endorsement inserted so far that was *not* already bluelink, simply because the WP:RS inherently don't tend to mentioning when a local garage band endorses (as opposed to a hollywood superstar). In other wods, even for celebs, we don't actually *need* a bluelink-only-rule, WP:NOTEWORTHY gives the same end result.  That is not true for staffers, and activists more generally, but I would rather see a layout-based fix than a delete-all-redlinks-based solution.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:49, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

some specific issues from the most recent good-faith cleanup attempt
Here is the diff of what Bearian changed.


 * removed Ben Carson 'other staffers' bullet-point, which was a work in progress that I tagged because I needed to finish going through the html-commented-politico-cite.  I believe specifically that Jeff Reeter probably needs to be listed as a key-Carson-staffer, for instance.  Nothing wrong with removal, I'll cite before I put anybody back... but we need a consensus on redlinked staffers, and whether the normal wiki-policy of WP:NOTEWORTHY is good enough to keep the article neutral and reliable, or if we want to apply a special page-specific standard of WP:BARE (would require consensus here on exactly what that would mean for this article), or alternatively, a page-specific standard of plausible WP:N (which is not uncommon per WP:CRC but which I believe is wrong for endorsement-related articles).
 * removed Christie NJ-GOP-county-chairs bullet-point, keeping bluelinks to Bob Yudin and Jose Arango.  Yudin is not more wiki-notable than any of the others.  He is only a bluelink by accident of circumstance.  From experience in the real world aka WP:OR, though, I can say that support from GOP county chairs is the most indicative factor that predicts grassroots success.  These are, by definition, political "activists" at the local level, and in presidential elections where national convention delegates are largely selected based on rules and procedures implemented by GOP county chairs, this might just matter come July 2016. My point here is not that Rudin probably needs to be sent to AfD (though he does), but that the bluelinks-only rule is prone to mistakes, even when experienced editors make the edits.  As for cases when *beginners* try to imitate those types of edits....
 * removed Cruz SC-activists, including state-co-chair LaDonna Ryggs who is a wiki-redlink but in real-life-is-important to the campaign prospects.  Also deleted the 'others' category, which I had hidden away in a ref-note so that it would not clutter up the bodytext of the article, but so that WP:NOTEWORTHY mentions could still be mainspaced.  In particular, I had a hunch that Steven Long (South Carolina) might be the same human as Steven S. Long who is a bluelink, and had left a hidden html-comment to that effect.  If we delete all the bluelinks, then one of two things will happen:  either an actual bluelink will be deleted as a redlink, because per WP:DBTF the person who inserted the name was trying not to accidentally bluelink to the wrong human who happened to have the same name, or alternatively, in order to *keep* their endorsement-givers from being summarily deleted, editors will err on the side of bluelinking from Steven Long and thus very likely BUILD the frankenstein, exactly as the essay cautions against.  (Another deletion as a redlink was county treasurer Mary Pearson... but again, through caution I left here marked as  because I didn't want to build the frankenstein.  Once her redlink is deleted, no other editors -- such as one actually FROM the state of South Carolina -- can help correct these kinds of subtle details.)
 * removed Cruz NC-activists, including by mistake the bluelink'd state-campaign-co-chair Bill Cowan (retired USMC Lieutenant Colonel, covert mission field operator, and Vietnam veteran), .  The point is not that mistakes are fatal to wikipedia.  The point is that, if we have a culture of removing reliably-sourced endorsements, mistakes are far more likely to occur, and that goes double once we get an inrush of beginning-contributors.  Another of the particularly-WP:NOTEWORTHY endorsements was Clarence Henderson (activist for several universities and the Boy Scouts, civil rights activist throughout the 1960s including the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in).  They are a redlink, so the removal was "on purpose" per WP:BARE... but I might argue that this person Clarence Henderson satisfies WP:BARE, and try to force them back into mainspace, since I have two refs, and the parameters of WP:BARE are decidely fuzzy.  The result is either a ton of talkpage threads about whether This Gal or whehter That Guy is potentially-wiki-notable-by-a-leap-of-imagination, which I do NOT think we want.  I'd rather stick to WP:NOTEWORTHY, fairly applied to all candidates at all times.  If it makes sense, I am happy for the redlinks to be (by default with exceptions made on a one-by-one basis per talkpage discussion) to be "hidden away" as a part of some kind of Notes section involving Template:efn.  That would keep the main bodytext less cluttered, but at the smae time not set the precedent of deleting reliably sourced material -- instead just *moving* it from bodytext to notes-footnotes, or vice-versa.

The point of the long list of complaints, some of them more valid than others (and some of them quite nitpicky I will freely admit), is not to give Bearian a hard time, but simply to demonstrate that if experienced good-faith editors like Bearian have trouble doing clean-up with precision and exactness, what are we going to see happen when inexperienced editors also happily deleting reliably sourced material, imitating what they see other wikipedians doing? I suggest we come up with some kind of rule for moving redlinked-endorsement-givers (certain kinds only -- not IA/NH/SC/NV state legislators specifically) to the Template:efn subsection (which will of course have to be created). That way, we can de-clutter the main bodytext, but also still fully comply with WP:NOTEWORTHY, so there is no need to delete reliably sourced material (by anybody whether experienced or otherwise). Thanks. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:49, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
 * removed Michelle Malkin, which was almost certainly correct, she endorsed Cruz'12 for Senate but has not given any 2016 endorse that I found.
 * removed uncited Rafael Cruz, which is almost certainly "incorrect" per WP:THETRUTH, but is perfectly valid revert since in fact there was no cite that the father has endorsed the son in WP:NOTEWORTHY fashion. This is a bit silly, really, but if it helps de-clutter the bodytext of the article, then I am not one to LOUDLY complain.  Either I'll find a cite, or I'll just let the factoid go into the big bitbucket in the sky.
 * did *not* remove Tom Corbett ... this one might also need to be yanked.  Point being, since it is uncited, it can be removed at any time somebody feels like WP:PROVEIT 'challenging' the info.  See also Mack Mattingly for Jeb Bush, Asa Hutchinson for Mike Huckabee, and a few other citation-neede folks.  Further point being, I really really don't want to see reliably sourced material, treated in the same hit-and-miss fashion that uncited stuff is treated.  I think, based on WP:THETRUTH, that Mattingly has effectively endorsed Jeb Bush.  Ditto for Rafael Cruz endorsing Ted Cruz.  I'm much less confident about Corbett, and about Hutchinson, but they are *plausible* and nobody has been deleting them, so I'm content to leave them  for now.  In other words, I do not have any argument with the way some  stuff was kept, and some  stuff removed.  That is the nature of uncited stuff.  What I am saying, is that I do not want reliably-cited stuff to be treated in that same hit-or-miss fashion, becasue I see that as a recipe for edit-wars.  We *do* need to clean up and/or declutter the main bodytext, but we have options at our disposal which don't violate the normal wp:noteworthy wiki-policy, such as collapse-tags (as used in the endorsement-sections of the campaign-specific articles) and such as Template:efn mentioned earlier.
 * removed Graham staffers in SC. These were all cited to politico, which has dedicated articles on most of the campaign-staffers.  Sure they are redlinks.  But is wiki-notability of the staffers, reason to question the wiki-reliability of Politico?  I think not.  Especially when wiki-notability is subject to gamemanship, see Bob Yudin.
 * removed Jindal staffers, including one who was also on Romney'08. Again, wiki-notability (as shown by bluelinks) is being used to trump WP;NOTEWORTHY as evidenced by WP:RS publisher Politico.
 * last but not least, removed Kasich megadonors, again in hit-or-miss fashion. These three are interesting for several reasons.  Lexlie(sic) Wexner, Lindner family, and Boich family.  Technically speaking, ALL THREE of those are redlinks.  The only one that was *visibly* a redlink, and thus the only one that Berian deleated in their initial clean-up attempt, was Boich.  The middle link was visibly blue, but is actually just a link to Carl Lindner, Jr. which is the patriarch who recently passed on an inheritance to several recipients.  The WP:RS source just say 'Lindner family' without further details, but that is the correct bluelink.  Similarly, there was a *typo* in the WP:RS source, claiming that "Lexlie Wexner" was backing Kasich.  I corrected the name, turning redlink Lexlie Wexner blue as Leslie Wexner, which is the correct bluelink... but is technically in violation of reflection what the sources say.  The point here is twofold:  first, it shows that deleting redlinks is not easy to do properly, and second, if we are spending all our time trying to keep beginners from deleting reliably-sourced  endorsements because WP:IDONTLIKEIT (because they are improperly and incorrectly immitating clutter-cleanup-related deletion of reliably sourced material by mimicing experienced editors like Berian), we won't have time to be careful about details like Lexlie-versus-Leslie.

Additional notes
I just want to make it clear that the notes under Jeb Bush's endorsers that say "The person giving this endorsement is from the candidate's home state of Florida; see favorite son and home field advantage"; "The person giving this endorsement is from the candidate's birthplace in Texas; see favorite son and donor network"; and "The person giving this endorsement was appointed to (one of) their political positions by the candidate's brother, George W. Bush." were not made at my request. As I stated above, I don't even think these items need to be in the endorsement list at all, whether for Bush or for the other candidates. (And I don't think we should tell readers here to see home field advantage, a sports-related article with no political content which is only applicable here by analogy, or donor network, an article that doesn't exist yet.) --Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:03, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, agree the redlinks and the explanatory-portions of the notes need work. But the larger question is, should we have the annotations at all, and if yes, what form ought they take?  Options:
 * * #1A, no annotations, just let the readership figure out that the reason Christie has a lot of endorsements from NJ, Paul from KY, Cruz from TX, Bush from FL, and also Paul-and-Bush from TX, is because those are their home states and birthplaces, respectively. This is the usual way that endorsement-list-articles have worked in the past, for instance:  "Lou Barletta, U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania" gives no indication that Rick Santorum is also from Pennsylvania.
 * * #1B, no annotations, but group endorsements by the state of the endorsement-giver, for instance: "Pennsylvania: Lou Barletta"
 * * #1C (new), no annotations, but give introductory sentence, and group endorsements by the state of the endorsement-giver, for instance: "Background:  the candidate was U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania .... Pennsylvania: Lou Barletta"
 * * #2A, plain text inline annotations, for instance: "Pennsylvania, home state of the candidate: Lou Barletta"
 * * #2B, plain text end-paren annotations, for instance: "Pennsylvania: Lou Barletta (home state of the candidate)"
 * * #3A, superscript inline annotations, for instance: "Pennsylvania:  Lou Barletta."
 * * #3B, superscript end-note annotations, for instance: "Pennsylvania:  Lou Barletta. "


 * * #4A, superscript inline single-letter-footnotes, for instance: "Pennsylvania:  Lou Barletta."
 * * #4B, superscript end-note single-letter-footnotes, for instance: "Pennsylvania:  Lou Barletta."


 * At the moment, in mainspace the entry on Bush is using #3B layout-style, and the other entries are still using #2A-or-#2B layout-style, depending on the specific bullet-point. User:Metropolitan90, what do you think mainspace ought to look like?  I gather you don't like #3B, but I'm not sure if it is because you want the explanatory sentences re-worded, or if you find the superscript-annotations themselves objectionable for some reason.  Beyond the question of what layout-style ought to be used, is the question of which things need annotations:  birthplace, home state, kinfolk, appointed by a relative, and possibly others.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 09:47, 27 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I can do without 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 4A, or 4B. Perhaps we could go with 1B, but with a prefatory note at the beginning of each entry to note where the candidate made their career (which is not necessarily their birth state, nor where they live now). If at the top of Jeb Bush's endorsements, it said "Jeb Bush is the former governor of Florida", that would help explain to readers why he has a lot of endorsements from Florida, without needing to repeatedly emphasize to readers that each endorser from Florida is from Bush's home state. A candidate's birth state, if different from where they made their career, may be much less relevant and doesn't need to be mentioned here. I doubt that Scott Walker (born in Colorado) or Rand Paul (born in Pennsylvania, not Texas) were able to make a lot of political allies in their birth states which they left before enrolling in first grade. (As it happens, not since 1996 has either party's presidential nominee made their political career in the state where they were born.) Also, I don't think we need the "appointed by a relative" notes. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:34, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Okay, we can do it thataway. I'm really only firmly against #1A, which makes the endorsements look 'inflated' for the pro-forma in-state-stuff.  I didn't realize Rand Paul was born out-of-state, sorry about that; his father was born in Philadelphia, and later moved to Texas before getting into politics, funny that the son was also born in PA.  Rand Paul was raised in Texas, however, and went to college there, and this early-life-experience did specifically impact his endorsements in 2016, e.g. Rand Paul first met Steve Munisteri while they were both in their 20s via Young Republicans of Texas (I believe that was the name of the org).  So I suggest that we go with your layout-plan, which I will call #1C, which uses grouping-by-state, and has a brief intro-note as a preface of sorts which indicates the endorsement-back-story of the candidates.
 * My suggestions would be something like "Jeb Bush was raised in Texas where his brother was Governor 19xx-1999 (before becoming President 2000-2008); later Jeb Bush was Governor of Florida from 1998-2002 (or whatever the years were)." Then, along the same lines:  "Rand Paul was raised in Texas where his father was U.S. Representative from 19xx-2012 (ran for president in 1988/2008/2012 with Rand Paul as campaign staffer); later Rand Paul was Senator from Kentucky 2010-present."  Or we can flip the ordering, and say job-title first followed by family connections second.  Similar short phrases for the other politicians (albeit usually without the family-connections-part) which point out where their "political base" of volunteers/donors/etc come from: Kasich is OH guv 20xx-present, Christie is NJ guv 20xx-present, Rubio is FL sen 2010-present, Cruz is TX sen 2012-present, and so on.
 * What do you suggest we say for candidates like Fiorina / Carson / Trump? Fiorina lives in VA now, worked in CA and NY/NJ, ran for Senate in CA, was born somewhere else, and is concentrating on getting endorsements in NH.  Hard to write a good preface-sentence for her.  Maybe like this:  "Carly Fiorina was CEO of HP 19xx-20xx in CA, and ran for sen there in 2010; she now lives in VA and runs UP NGO, plus sits on the CIA External Relations Board."  (corrected bluelinks TBD.)   I think that explains her main political bases, and politics-related-experience.  Should we mention her dad was a strict-constructionist judge?  She has told the story to the press a few times.  Trump is not too hard to write a sentence about; Carson is a bit harder, but I think we can give a one-liner about his rags to riches story, and his books/speaking tours, plus his recent rise on the political scene.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 12:30, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I took a stab at it, with this preface. "Background:  the candidate was Governor of Florida (1999-2007). Born in 1953, he was raised in Texas, where his brother was governor (1995-2000 then president 2001-2009) and his father was a representative (1967-1971 then vice president 1981-1989 and president 1989-1993); his grandfather was a senator, see Bush family."  16 words about the candidate, then 36 more about the family connections.  Look okay? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:33, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Background sentences

 * The rest have also been converted to match, and I upgraded the sentences for Jeb Bush to parallel what was written for the other candidates. I ended up deciding to put their main claim to fame first; for Carson/Fiorina/Trump, that is their careers in medicine/business/realEstateInvesting respectively, and for the others is their governor/senator job-titles.  I also put lesser roles in, to parallel the entries, so Cruz/Graham/Santorum/etc are mentioned as being lawyers, Jindal/Walker/etc are mentioned as going straight into politics, Bush/Kasich are mentioned as bankers, several candidates are mentioned as authors, and so on.
 * Bush. Background: the candidate was Governor of Florida (1999-2007). Born in 1953, he was raised in Texas, where his brother was governor (1995-2000 then president 2001-2009) and his father was a representative (1967-1971 then vice president 1981-1989 and president 1989-1993). He was a Texas banker (1974-1979) and Florida real estate developer (1980-1986) before entering politics.
 * Carson. Background: the candidate was a Maryland brain surgeon and professor (1984-2013). Born in 1951, he was raised in Michigan. He is an author/speaker, and runs a scholarship fund.
 * Christie. Background: the candidate is Governor of New Jersey (2010 -present). Born in 1962, he was raised in New Jersey. He was a New Jersey lawyer (1987-1994) before entering politics.
 * Christie. Background: Chris Christie has been Governor of New Jersey since 2010.
 * Cruz. Background: the candidate is U.S. Senator from Texas (2012-present). Born in 1970, he was raised in Texas. He was a Texas lawyer (1997-1998) before entering politics.
 * Fiorina. Background: the candidate was California CEO of HP/Compaq (1999-2005) and an east coast[vague] manager at AT&T/Lucent (1980-1999). Born in 1954, she was raised in multiple states. She led the CIA External Advisory Board (2007-2009), was the 2010 U.S. Senate nominee in California, and runs several organizations.
 * Graham. Background: the candidate is U.S. Senator from South Carolina (2003-present). Born in 1955, he was raised in South Carolina. He was an lawyer (USAF overseas 1982-1989 then in South Carolina privately 1989-1992) before entering politics.
 * Huckabee. Background: the candidate was Governor of Arkansas (1996-2007), and ran in 2008. Born in 1955, he was raised in Arkansas. He was a minister (1980-1992) before entering politics, author (1997-2015), and television host (2008-2015).
 * Jindal. Background: the candidate is Governer of Louisiana (2008-present). Born in 1971, he was raised in Louisiana. He was a Rhodes Scholar in political science before entering politics.
 * Kasich. Background: the candidate is Governor of Ohio (2010-present), and was U.S. Representative from Ohio (1983-2001). Born in 1952, he was raised in Pennsylvania. He has an Ohio degree in political science before entering politics, then was a television commentator and banker (2001-2008).
 * Pataki. Background: the candidate was Governor of New York (1995-2006). Born in 1945, he was raised in New York. He was a New York lawyer (1970-1981) before entering politics.
 * Paul. Background: the candidate is U.S. Senator from Kentucky (2010-present). Born in 1963, he was raised in Texas, where his father was U.S. Representative (1976-1985 then 1997-2013) and presidential candidate (1988/2008/2012). He was a Kentucky eye surgeon (1993-2010) before entering politics.
 * Perry. Background: the candidate was Governer of Texas (2000-2014). Born in 1950, he was raised in Texas. He was a Texas-and-overseas USAF pilot (1972-1977) and Texas farmer (1977-1984) before entering politics.
 * Rubio. Background: the candidate is U.S. Senator from Florida (2010-present). Born in 1971, he was raised in Florida (and Nevada). He was a Florida lawyer (1996-1998) before entering politics.
 * Santorum. Background: the candidate was U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania (1995-2007). Born in 1958, he was raised in Pennsylvania (and West Virginia). He was a Pennsylvania lawyer (1987-1990) before entering politics.
 * Trump. Background: the candidate is a real estate CEO (1971-present), with investments in New York and several other states. Born in 1946, he was raised in New York. He is an author (1987-2011) and television personality (2003-present).
 * Walker. Background: the candidate is Governor of Wisconsin (2011-present). Born in 1967, he was raised in Wisconsin (and Iowa). He was at Marquette in politics and economics before entering politics.
 * These were pretty painful to get cut down to size, but I believe they are pretty close to what is needed, respect WP:NPOV, and not so long as to be a distraction from the endorsement-giver-listings. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 05:56, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi again User:Metropolitan90, I noticed your suggested rewrite of the background-sentence on Christie. I don't even disagree with your fix, per se... but I want us to keep the background-sentences ALL roughly parallel. Analysis of the differences. Now, as was correctly pointed out by User:Metropolitan90, Christie was born, raised, (not university-educated but that factoid was one I specifically omitted ... for ALL candidates equally ... as non-crucial to endorsements), worked in the private sector, and first entered politics, all 100% in the great state of NJ. Thus, the removal of the redundancy is easy to justify: why keep repeating what the reader can presume for themselves? And the answer is, because to satisfy NPOV, the background sentences must be fair and balanced. Christie worked in the private sector, as a lawyer, in his home state, before becoming a politician. So did Cruz/Rubio/Graham/maybeMore. If we cut out Christie-was-a-lawyer, we have to cut the others out too, per the Manual Of Style (consistency) if not per the non-negotiable pillar (neutrality). But we cannot cut Graham; his JAG Corps experience is fundamental to understanding what kind of a candidate Graham is, and where his endorsement-base comes from (aka the topic of this article).
 * old: Background: the candidate is Governor of New Jersey (2010–present). Born in 1962, he was raised in New Jersey. He was a New Jersey lawyer (1987-1994) before entering politics.
 * new: Background:  Chris Christie has been Governor of New Jersey since 2010.
 * Minor changes: say "Chris Christie" rather than "the candidate", same wikilink and thus either way is fine we me, but I do strongly believe we need all the background-sentences to be roughly parallel to each other, per pillar two.
 * Another minor change, say "has been... since 2010" instead of "is ... (2010-present)", again I care not which convention we use, active voice or passive voice, as long as we pick one and implement it for background-sentences of each of the candidates, even-steven.
 * Medium-significant change: removal of birthyear, and wikilink to Timeline of United States history (the year Christie was born -- other candidates are roughly parallel.  Age does matter, and generation does matter, in presidential elections, I can did up some WP:RS to back those assertions up if need be.  I'm not wedded to the birthyear factoid, though I do believe it improves the encyclopedia to have those history-wikilinks.  (Christie is "peak/prime" age for becoming the nominee, based on my historical WP:OR concerning past repub potus races.)
 * Major change, since it makes Christie's entry fail to match the others in a way that can be perceived as having a POV, to my eyes at least. This is the snippet removed, with wikilinks to the proper explanations elsewhere on the pedia.  "...he was raised in New Jersey. He was a New Jersey lawyer (1987-1994) before entering politics."

The problem gets even worse when we look at the non-politicians. Carson is a brain surgeon, but his most important *political* experience was as a conservative speaker. There are many brain surgeons in the USA, with no presidential campaigns, for the simple fact that those other brain surgeons never gave a prayer breakfast speech at the whitehouse. If we cut out Christie-was-a-lawyer, then to satisfy NPOV we should also cut Carson-was-a-neurosurgeon (aka make the rule no private sector stuff can be listed), or instead, we should cut out the Carson-is-a-conservative-speaker (aka set a rule that only the 'main' career be listed). Both are wrong, I would say. Thus, having sweated blood to write the background-sentences as fairly as I could manage (grin), I respectfully request that we put the stuff about Christie's upbringing and early law career back into mainspace. Or if not, what do you suggest we do, for keeping the entries roughly parallel, in particular what should the Ben Carson entry say, t'were it to be cut down as you cut Christie's down to size? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:38, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Regarding the "major change", where Christie's background doesn't resemble the other candidates' backgrounds in formatting, that was just because Christie was the first one I tried to edit. I will probably offer suggestions (or make edits) as to other candidates later, unless other people get to it first. I would like to hear from some other editors as to how much detail they want in such entries. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 01:20, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Please, just edit directly. I tried hard to make them roughly parallel, because I could not figure out how to otherwise make the background-sentences even-handed.  If you think you can do it, and also make them more terse, please go for it, I will cheer you on.  :-)      Do you have a preference on the minor-stylistic stuff?  Do you care if I put back in the bit about "born in 1963, he was raised in NJ" for Christie?  Thanks 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:00, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

subsection ordering, or, do RNC state chairs come before or after statewide officials?
Here is what we have now, or at least, had recently:

The numerals indicate the ordering, aka "1" means that subsection was first in the list of endorsements for the candidate in question, "2" means the subsection was second in the list, and so on. Blank means the candidate did not have any of those types of endorsements, at the time of this comment (e.g. only Jeb Bush has endorsements from former Presidents his brother and father). A few places are marked with "was" which indicates that they were out of order when I made this charge, and have since been corrected.

Questions: is this the correct ordering, that we should try to follow as standard? Prez, guv, sen, rep, cabinet, ambassador, state chair, statewide ofc, state legislators, academia, business, celeb/activist/staffer/etc. In particular, does the state RNC chair (aka head of the statewide party and member of the national RNC which controls the republican presidential process rules) belong above statewide officials (aka Attorney General of Iowa + Secretary of State Of Iowa plus similar positions in Iowa and other states). Third question, should we separate out staffers from celebrities? Most celebrities are bluelinks and nationwide, and most staffers are redlinks and state-specific. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 07:31, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Update: I've taken a stab and making all the subcategory titlenames&capitalization consistent, and also used a consistent ordering, which is roughly from most-valuable-slash-important to least-valuable-slash-important. New names:
 * U.S. Presidents (former). Bush.
 * U.S. Governors (current and former). Bush, Christie, Huckabee.
 * U.S. Senators (current and former). Bush, Christie, Cruz, Graham, Kasich, Paul, Walker.
 * U.S. Representatives (current and former). Bush, Christie, Cruz, Graham, Kasich, Paul, Perry, Rubio, Santorum, Walker.
 * Cabinet Officials (current and former). Bush.
 * U.S. Ambassadors (current and former) and International Figures. Bush, Christie, Graham, Paul.
 * Republican National Committee members (former). Bush, Christie, Cruz, Paul, Rubio, Walker.
 * Statewide Officials. Bush, Christie, Cruz, Fiorina, Huckabee, Kasich, Paul, Rubio, Walker.
 * State Legislators. Bush, Carson, Christie, Cruz, Fiorina, Huckabee, Kasich, Pataki, Paul, Perry, Rubio, Santorum, Trump, Walker.
 * Academia. Temporarily removed, until we have more such endorsements; lone economist so far (for Paul) was merged with the businesspeople-subcategory. Re-create someday, as the season rolls onwards.
 * Businesspeople. Bush, Christie, Cruz, Fiorina, Graham, Kasich, Paul, Perry, Rubio, Santorum, Trump, Walker.
 * Celebrities, Commentators, and Activists. Bush, Carson, Christie, Cruz, Fiorina, Graham, Huckabee, Jindal, Kasich, Paul, Perry, Rubio, Trump, Walker.

Questions: there is a newly-added category (only for Walker at present), which has had a few titles:  Mayors and Municipal Officials, Mayors and Local politicians, and most recently Local Politicians and Officials. Currently, other candidates with endorsements from mayors/similar list those endorsements under the activists subcategory. Should the local-politicians-and-local-officials subcategory be merged back into the activists subcategory, or should we split the other candidates with county and municipal endorsements out into the newly-proposed dedicated subsection? If we do keep the mayors-subcategory, should it be placed above megadonors (aka the businesspeople-category) and closer to State Legislators, or instead placed below megadonors-aka-businesspeople and therefore closer to the activists-subcategory? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 18:29, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

summary of existing clean-up proposals, and request informal talkpage-poll
Some relatively-long-winded analysis of the various alternatives I am aware of.

Proposed rule#1_A, suggested by User:ObieGrad on June 12th: "Notability is established by the existence of a Wikipedia article about that person or group specifically." Downside, this puts wikipedian's current collective opinion above what the wiki-reliable sources actually say, and in particular, means the removal of a large number of New Hampshire General Court endorsements and Iowa State Legislature endorsements (specifically Bush 4/6, Carson 1/1, Christie 0/0, Cruz 5/21, Fiorina 6/19, Gilmore 0/0, Graham 0/0, Huckabee 0/0, Jindal 0/0, Kasich 1/1, Pataki 1/1, Paul 3/38, Perry 1/1, Rubio 2/3, Santorum 1/1, Trump 1/9, Walker 2/4). Per the WP:NPOL guideline, such people are quasi-inherently wiki-notable, and common sense tells us the totals matter (especially the relative-to-other-candidates totals), which should not be skewed because wikipedians have yet to write the article on e.g. Will Infantine who has several state-newspaper sources plus a strong burst of nationwide coverage when I checked him out. The bluelinks-only rule is common per WP:CSC, but seems to asymmetrically violate WP:NPOV when applied to this particular endorsement-oriented article. Also, requires that individual wikipedians regularly go about deleting reliably-sourced material from mainspace, which is a bad precedent to set, especially since beginning editors might will incorrectly mimic that behavior.

Proposed rule#1_B, suggested by User:75.108.94.227 on June 28th: "Instead of having one bullet point per endorsement, we should group 'lesser' endorsements by state-of-the-union." This idea was implemented on July 25th, and condenses the visual layout (and also de-dupes the repetitive "NH State Rep... NH State Re ... NH State Rep" entry-labels) so that the State Legislator subcategory and U.S. Representative subcategory and so on are not given undue weight, especially when the candidate is a favorite son (or favorite daughter) and has a lot of endorsements in their birthplace and/or their home state and/or the early caucus states. I also had hopes that grouping-by-state would permit us to stick with the usual WP:NOTEWORTHY site-wide policy, rather than a page-specific consensus-rule, and avoid deletion of reliably sourced material. The downside is that, especially amongst the activists/volunteers/staffers subcategory, we get some extremely lengthy collections of redlinks-grouped-by-state, because quite often the statewide newspaper will publish the names of the top fifty campaign-volunteers for *each* presidential campaign in *each* state-of-the-union. This was noticeably unwieldy, even with activist-lists from only a handful of states, and would soon get VERY cluttered with activist-lists from dozens of states (per campaign). Furthermore, about 80% of megadonors (who are usually listed under the Businesspeople subcategory) are redlinks, and about 90% of staffers, which Politico and The Hill and other DC-oriented magazines tend to list exhaustively, are redlinks-and-very-likely-to-remain-thataway. So the grouping helped, but not enough.

Proposed rule#1_C (not to be confused with layout#1C which is related to per-candidate-background-sentences as an improvement over per-endorsement-giver-footnote-annotations), suggested by User:Bearian on July 30th: "I have no problem with [keeping] redlinks for people who might pass WP:GNG or even WP:BARE, but this list is getting to the downright obscure."  I found this a very reasonable suggestion, and in particular the idea that using "might pass WP:BARE" as our loose-but-not-too-loose page-specific-standard, seems like it would allow us to keep all the endorsements from New Hampshire General Court district-elected officials, and all the statewide-activist-elected Republican National Committee members, and eliminate most other clutter. Unfortunately, the WP:BARE essay is a bit of a fuzzy standard; while I believe it would be conceivable (in theory) to come to consensus on each reliably-sourced redlink-endorsement, as to whether or not that particular endorsement-giver "might pass WP:BARE" and thus could be retained on this page, I fear that in practice we would still be regularly deleting reliably sourced material from mainspace, and that this would set a bad precedent that beginning editors (some of them making their first edits to wikipedia after watching the televised debates for instance) would mimic incorrectly. I also believe that it is just flat hard to make these kind of judgement calls, even for experienced wikipedians like Berian and ObieGrad and Metropolitan90 and myself (let alone beginning editors), because there are just too many local activists/megadonors/staffers, in too many states, for even a well-informed-about-politics editor, well-versed in the wiki-policies, to delete precisely what should be deleted, and keep what should be kept. I could probably do a pretty good job on pruning the list of the local volunteers/staffers/megadonors from *my* home state, but that sounds suspiciously like WP:OR... and for local-to-North-Carolina volunteers/staffers/megadonors, and ditto for *most* other states I have little personal familiarity with, I'd rather rely on reflecting what the sources say (and by the same token would VERY MUCH prefer to do just the same for my home state -- per WP:NPOV broadly interpreted -- which is to say that I would vastly prefer we stick to what the sources actually say).

Proposed rule#1_D, suggested by User:75.108.94.227 on July 31st: "For endorsements that are reliably-sourced per WP:NOTEWORTHY, but by consensus, if they cannot-pass-the-WP:BARE-page-specific-minimum-standard-for-inclusion, we should relegate those list-of-redlinks to a footnote-section using Template:efn, and in my view, this would be specifically including the bulk of state-specific-staffers and state-specific-activists that Berian removed, instead relegating them to footnotes -- and also in my view, specifically keeping-as-non-footnotes ALL members of these definitely-WP:NPOL and thus quasi-inherently-WP:BARE-compliant subcategories: state legislators, statewide officials, international figures that are members of foreign legislatures, U.S. representatives, U.S. senators, U.S. governors, and U.S. presidents. The remaining politics-specific subcategories, most of which fail to satisfy WP:NPOL but do in my mind satisfy WP:BARE, are the ambassadors, judges, cabinet officials, RNC state chairs (or perhaps we could widen this to more broadly include RNC members). Most ambassadors and cabinet officials will 'naturally' be bluelinks, but I do not think we should shove the redlinks into footnotes; by contrast, most RNC state chairs (and even more so for national committeeman and national committeewoman) are going to be redlinks, and yet these people are crucial to the presidential election, since they often have a large sway over how the statewide delegate selection rules are set, and explicitly since the 2012 rule-change at the national level have the power to (at any RNC meeting) alter the presidential nomination rules for the 2016 republican national convention. Such people should definitely not be relegated to footnotes, I strongly believe. Other than that, we have academia and businesspeople and celebrities; with the exception of businesspeople, who tend to be in the reclusive-megadonor-category and have redlinks far too often, I would be fine with a bluelinks-only rule for profs and celebs (relegating redlinked members of academia and hollywood to the footnotes).

Similar variation, kicking myself for not thinking of this before, suggested by User:75.108.94.227 on August 2nd: "For non-bluelinked endorsements (either redlinked or non-specific-redirects) that are reliably-sourced per WP:NOTEWORTHY (or are not yet reliably-sourced but are unlikely to be challenged]), per [[WP:PRESERVE such non-bluelinked list-entries should be moved from the list-of-endorsements article, to the endorsements-subsection of the article about tate specific candidate's presidential campaign, except when the non-bluelined entry satisfies WP:NPOL (for instance elected state legislators) or when consensus to include the non-bluelinked entry is achieved."  Those campaign-specific-endorsement-subsections already exist, and are collapsed to keep them  visually non-intrusive.  It makes sense to me that staffers and local redlinked activists should appear in the campaign article, rather than in this all-key-endorsements-article.  For any specific non-bluelink, for instance Joni Scotter was repeatedly called a 'key'/soughtAfter/superActivist/etc by a bunch of WP:RS cites, we can see if there is consensus to have that specific redlink here in this comparative-endorsement-lists article.  My preference would be to retain the "top three" or maybe the "top five" staffers and activists and businesspeople-slash-megadonors in Iowa/NH/etc, here in this article, and then relegate the remainder to the collapsed-subsection of the campaign-specific article.  The disadvantage here is that we no longer have a simple and direct duplication-rule for transferring endorsements back and forth between the campaign-articles and this comparative-list-article, but I see that as a minor loss.  The advantage is that we can stick with WP:NOTEWORTHY as a basic policy (no deletions of reliably source material are needed -- rather the reliably sourced material is sometimes MOVED to another more-specific wikipedia article in mainspace).  As with the suggestion for rule#1_D, this rule#1_E exempts some subcategories from getting moved of this page.  Rather than specifically go subcategory by subcategory, though, rule#1_E is simpler because it simply says that the content must either be a bluelink per WP:CSC *or* must satisfy WP:NPOL, and if neither holds the leftover WP:NOTEWORTHY non-bluelink is merely moved-not-deleted to a more specific article.

Here are the shortened descriptions, in my own paraphrasing mostly, if I mis-stated anybody's position please just ping my talkpage and I'll try to fix it post-haste.
 * Proposed rule#1_A, keep direct-and-specific-bluelinks only, otherwise delete.
 * Strong Oppose, (unless modified). The most common WP:CSC criteria, satisfies WP:N but cannot satisfy WP:NOTEWORTHY/WP:PRESERVE nor even WP:NPOL in many cases (unless final action is changed to hideInFootnotes-or-moveToDifferentArticle). Candidate-asymmetrical elimination of ~90% of state legislators violates WP:NPOV.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:56, 2 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Proposed rule#1_B, compact the layout by grouping 'lesser' endorsements by state-of-the-union, keep all redlinks.
 * Weak Oppose, (though I still want to retain group-by-state). Satisfies WP:NOTEWORTHY/WP:PRESERVE, but fails WP:LISTCRUFT with respect to the staffers-and-activists subsection. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:56, 2 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Proposed rule#1_C, continue(?) to group-by-state, keep bluelinks, keep redlinks for people who might pass WP:GNG or even WP:BARE, otherwise delete.
 * Neutral, (unless modified). Satisfies an especially-lenient version of WP:CSC, satisfies potentially-WP:GNG/WP:BARE, but in a few cases cannot satisfy WP:NOTEWORTHY/WP:PRESERVE (unless final action is changed to hideInFootnotes-or-moveToDifferentArticle).  I actually like this one, but think it will probably require too much consensus-building-per-list-item to be efficient for a politics-related article.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:56, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Support as discussed above. Bearian (talk) 23:36, 3 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Proposed rule#1_D, continue to group-by-state, keep direct-bluelinks, keep non-bluelinks that satisfy WP:NPOL (state legislators etc), keep non-bluelinked ambassadors/cabinetOfficials/judges/rncMembers as conceivably-WP:BARE, hide move remaining non-bluelinks in Notes section.
 * Support, as easiest to implement. Satisfies WP:NOTEWORTHY/WP:PRESERVE, and hides away WP:LISTCRUFT.   75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:56, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Support as discussed above. Bearian (talk) 23:36, 3 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Proposed rule#1_E, continue to group-by-state, keep direct-bluelinks, keep non-bluelinks that satisfy WP:NPOL (state legislators etc), move remaining non-bluelinks to the campaign-specific-articles.
 * Support, as maximally wiki-policy-compliant. Satisfies WP:NOTEWORTHY/WP:PRESERVE, and also WP:LISTCRUFT (at least for *this* article if not necessarily for the campaign-specific articles).  75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:56, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

I would be appreciative if other folks could add their bangvotes, so we can get a rough idea of what the people active on the page nowadays are leaning towards. I understand that consensus is not determined by voting, on wikipedia or even for that matter in real-life politics. :-)       Discussion of the proposed wording, or of new proposals (or proposal variations), is also welcome.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:56, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Per usertalk with Bearian, I'm going to start implementing the two-way consensus in support of rule#1_D in mainspace. I understand that two people, do not a strong consensus make, but I don't think much more input is forthcoming at this point.  I will be happy to re-engage here on the talkpage, if somebody wants to further discuss the ways in which we ought to handle redlinked RNC members, redlinked celebs, redlinked state legislature reps, and so on and so forth.


 * However, at the moment mainspace is getting significantly out of joint: some candidates have dozens of local staffers and activists, others list none.   Some candidates are group-by-state, others are not.  We need to stay consistent in our treatment of candidates and their list-o-endorsements, not just for ease of readability by the readership, but also to preserve WP:NPOV.  We don't want some candidates getting special layout-treatment, that makes them "look better" than other candidates.  We don't want some candidates getting poor layout-treatment, for exactly the same reasons.  Anyways, I'm going to try and impose some consistency on mainspace-as-of-now, using rule#1_D.  Anybody that is not a bluelink, is going to be relegated to a footnote, which pops up when you hover over it.  Exceptions:  redlinked folks that pass WP:NPOL, or that are RNC members, are retained as non-footnote-listings.  Similarly, on a case by case basis, if demonstrable evidence that a particular endorsement-giver would pass WP:GNG, but wikipedia does not yet have their article, we can make an exception and list them.
 * In thinking further about the detailed mechanics of rule#1_D today, I believe that it does not make sense to put redlinked names into footnotes, until and unless the candidate's list of names is getting unwieldy in the ease-of-reading sense. Thus, I will probably leave the "top three" names a candidate has listed per state (IA/NH/etc) and relegate the "excess" redlinks to footnotes.  Possibly I will try some collapse-templates, as used currently at the campaign-specific articles, for instance Donald Trump.  Please ping my usertalk if you have any suggestions that need prompt attention, aka that would better be made before I've finished converting mainspace to rule#1_D or a close approximation thereof.  Thanks, 75.108.94.227 (talk) 00:40, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

This page is a mess
This page looks like a mess. The grouping by state, abundance of red links and especially the horizontal listings make it seem very unorganized and a lot of listed people who seem un-notable. The Democratic endorsements page looks much cleaner and more presentable than this. 50.27.101.171 (talk) 00:39, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Please see subsection immediately above. It is not yet clear what the page should look like.  I'm going to attempt a consistency-cleanup.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 00:41, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Instructions
Would someone mind writing a summary of the "what is an endorsement" and "which endorsements are listed in the article" and put them in a faq box at the top of this talk page? I know endorsements are a bit slow in coming now, but as we get closer to the caucuses and primaries, it'll be good to have clear guidance where casual editors can find it quickly. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 23:11, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
 * User:Philosopher, there are multiple opinions on what this article should contain. I will paint it here in my summary-of-current-status-comment more starkly that things actually stand, to avoid needing to clarify every sentence with nuance.  But go ahead and insert plenty of weasel-words and vagueness, after each of the sentences to come in this comment I'm making here; there is little clarity about inclusion-standards, at the moment.  "Everybody" agrees that (current and former) presidents, 1st ladies, governors, federal senators, and u.s.reps belong here.  Most people, but not all editors, believe that u.s.reps ought to be grouped by state, to avoid puffing up the visual look of candidates who have a lot of home state endorsements, for instance.
 * &nbsp: There is agreement that cabinet officials and ambassadors and wiki-notable international figures belong; there is disagreement about whether we should annotate such folks, in cases where they were appointed to their job by kinfolk of the candidate. There is agreement that statewide officials (LtGov/AG/etc) belong, but at least one person disagrees that these should be grouped by state, and there is potentially disagreement (not discussed that I know of anywhere yet) about whether redlinked statewide officials ought to be footnoted rather than bullet-point-listed, for instance, some states have statewide judicial figures and/or positions of relatively low political visibility like Auditor.  Also, apparently there is some resistance to grouping these folks by state (to avoid repetitive "of the great state of Xyz" prose and to avoid puffing up the visual look of the candidate's endorsement-list).
 * Republican National Committee members have there own section; this is relatively new, and many of them (especially national-committeefolk) are redlinks, so they have a not-especially-strong-consensus to exist as non-footnotes. It is also questionable whether the current positioning, where RNC state chairs and such are placed below statewide officials but above state legislature members, is the proper location/emphasis.  As for the state legislature members themselves, there is reasonable (but not unanimous) local consensus that these names belong, but that to avoid making the article massively long, these folks should definitely be grouped by state.  There is also weak consensus for ordering the state-legislature-endorsement-givers by the chronological schedule of the primary&caucus season, i.e. putting IA/NH/SC/NV/etc first as early states, rather than putting AL/AK/AR/AZ/etc first as alphabetically ahead of other states.
 * There is a category for 'academia' (aka professors -- usually of economics but others are also included) which is traditionally maintained, but at this early stage in the proceedings is largely empty. There is a subheading for 'businesspeople' which is usually a euphemism for megadonors.  There is a reasonable amount of controversy over what 'counts' as support here, whether megadonors can 'endorse' multiple candidates (e.g. Mercer has given six or seven figure cheques to at least two campaigns the WP:RS tell us).  There is also a catch-all subcategory called 'celebs/commentators/activists' which includes those folks, as well as paid staffers (a special type of activist) and local mayors (an elected type of local activist), when their names are WP:NOTEWORTHY mentions in the WP:SOURCES.  The questions here are, first of all, should redlinked professors/businesspeople/activists/staffers be footnoted when they satisfy WP:NOTEWORTHY, or should such folks instead be moved to the campaign-specific-article per WP:PRESERVE?  There is tacit consensus that non-bluelinked celebs and commentators, are prolly not worth listing here in this comparative-article, but I'm not sure that has actually been tested.
 * So the short answer to your question is, standards for inclusion are still evolving. If you would be willing, it would be appreciated if you could stick around, and help us hammer out the details.  As part of getting the details worked out to achieve local consensus, we could then collaboratively author the FAQ you are requesting.  But at the moment, we have many Q, and not many answers to those Q.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 00:27, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
 * This is certainly too long for a FAQ section, I agree. Still, I think I saw some highlights that might be appropriate.  I don't have time to create a draft-FAQ today, but will try to get back here before too much more time has passed. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 19:25, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

David Duke
This article states that Trump was endorsed by David Duke yet in the given citation is says "Duke, who previously served in the Louisiana statehouse and ran for U.S. Senate in that state, did not endorse Trump and said Trump remains untrustworthy for his "deep Jewish connections" and support for Israel." WP:Source The way this was included going at length to detail all of Duke's controversial associations smacks of WP:POV Here is the citation given http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/25/politics/david-duke-donald-trump-immigration/index.html John D. Rockerduck (talk) 09:08, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Endorsements for the Republican Party presidential primaries, 2016
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Endorsements for the Republican Party presidential primaries, 2016's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "thewrap.com": From Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, 2016:  From Endorsements for the Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2016:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 21:18, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Endorsement Rules
As we move through the election season, I expect that we will see more and more endorsements roll in. We should try to keep this article under control and reliable. Therefore, I'd suggest the following rules, can we build consensus on them?

1. Endorsements should only be included in the article if they are from notable people or groups. Notability is established by the existence of a Wikipedia article about that person or group specifically.

2. Endorsements must be unequivocal. To be included, the person/group must clearly choose the candidate above all others. Therefore, a single person/group cannot endorse multiple candidates and cannot be simply leaning towards a candidate.

Illustrations:

Endorsement: I will vote for candidate x.

Endorsement: I am standing with candidate x.

Not Endorsement: I would support either candidate x or candidate y.

Not Endorsement: I need to hear more from candidate y, but I really like candidate x. ObieGrad (talk) 13:50, 12 June 2015 (UTC)
 * I would generally agree with what ObieGrad has written here. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 03:00, 14 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Please see discussion of suggested modifications to rule#1 and rule#2 below. I also suggest we add rule#3:  endorsement-entries should specify the month and year they occurred.  Early endorsements are considerably more predictive-slash-valuable than later ones, and very-late ones (after April 2016 or so) are almost meaningless in most election-years, although I suspect in the tightly-packed republican race of 2016 the very-late-endorsements might actually matter more than they do in most cycles.  75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:14, 28 June 2015 (UTC)
 * There are a lot of red links in this list. We need to start trimming them out now. Bearian (talk) 18:13, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

One point of disagreement: even State Senators will occasionally not have pages. I don't know that the page criteria makes sense. If a person is in an elected post, it seems reasonable to include them as they have at least some kind of clout. PotvinSux (talk) 01:50, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Daily Stormer (Andrew Amblin) endorsement of Donald Trump
@User:User2534 I have restored the June 28th Daily Stormer endorsement of Donald Trump persuaded by the fact it has been covered in The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, etc., and cannot (to my mind) be dismissed merely because the organization has been involved in unpleasant trollishness in the past. While Trump might not particularly welcome this organization's endorsement, he has not repudiated it, either, and it is not for us to make an editorial call on his behalf. Could you please weigh in here with your arguments for excluding it, so we can perhaps find some NPOV consensus? Many thanks Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 13:22, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * We should not include "endorsement" from extremist groups unless there is a clear connection to the candidate. Even if a candidate doesn't take care to repudiate such an "endorsement", it kind of goes without saying that no candidate, unless extreme themselves, will accept or appreciate endorsements from nazi groups. Not including their "endorsement" is also compliant with Wikipedia's general principle of not including opinions from extremist/fringe individuals and groups unless they are clearly relevant to the topic. Iselilja (talk) 16:32, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * The Daily Stormer's endorsement of Trump has been covered by mainstream media. Doesn't that make it "clearly relevant to the topic"? It seems strange that The New Yorker is reporting it yet it can't or shouldn't be referenced on Wikipedia. What specific Wikipedia policy supports this exclusion? Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 17:03, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * First, Vesuvius: Per WP:BRD, controversial/bold edits are to stay out until there is consensus to include it; so I will request that you remove your reinsertion of the controversial edit. Otherwise, I may have to do it. The article "political endorsement" should only include endorsements which are welcomed by the campaign; or where it is reasonable to believe the campaign will welcome it. The topic for the article (per intro) is how endorsements can give credibility and strength to a campaign; the topic is not unwelcome embracements that are just creating trouble for the campaigns. Also, we don't normally include opinions from extremists in our mainstream articles, even if those opinions are covered in media, see WP:Fringe which even if not directly applicable for this situation, can be used as a guideline. Mostly opinions from extremists are just included in articles explicitly about said extremists. It also follows from common sense and common decency that opinions from nazis etc should not be covered on equal footing as opinions form non-extremists. Iselilja (talk) 17:39, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I took it out, though not without misgivings, as I am an inclusionist and feel the MSM coverage of this particular endorsement gives it sufficient importance for Wikipedia inclusion. By the way, until he is asked, we can't necessarily assume Trump repudiates The Daily Stormer and its endorsement (that he's telling journalists "I don't know anything about" David Duke but "everyone likes me" seems, to me, extremely disingenuous given Duke's long political history). Trump has tossed journalists out of his press conferences, after all, for pressing him on immigration specifics and asking out of turn&mdash;"Go back to Univision!"&mdash;but he's yet to rebuke let alone throw anyone out of his rallies for shouting "White Power". Think about that. (And have a look at this 1990 Marie Brenner profile, in which Ivana Trump reportedly told her lawyer about Trump's fondness for Hitler speeches, and of a treasured copy of My New Order kept in Trump's bedside cabinet. "If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them,” Trump told the reporter. Chalk it up to an ugly divorce, but Trump's Nazi sympathies might be deeper than you think.)  Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 18:43, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I do think we can assume that Donald Trump will actually distance himself from Daily Caller (unless he simply ignores the "endorsement"). Having any kind of associations with nazis is pretty much social suicide for every person who has some kind of social standing. Your argument suggests that you want to include the "endorsement" to implicitly suggest that Trump has nazi sympathies. This actually highlights why we should not include extremists in this list of endorsements; as Wikipedia is not in business to implicit suggest such things (this is also a BLP issue). More generally, I will say that I don't think the inclusion critieries for this "list" is not totally clear; and once we go outside the typical political endorsements that are sought and embraced by the campaigns, we may get into muddy water (for instance celebrities and partly controversial groups). But the solution to a muddy water situation must be to use some kind of common sense; it can not be to give nazi groups political gravitas by including them in list of endorsements on par with mostly serious and respected people. My own rule of thumb would be: When in doubt, exclude. The important endorsements will be recognized by the campaigns anyway. As an example of other "endorsements" I believe are inappropriate for this list are "joke" endorsements, like that for Kasich and Sanders by the "politician" Deez Nuts . Iselilja (talk) 19:27, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Look, I admit my suspicions and concerns, bias if it comes to that. I don't know about Trump's possible Nazi sympathies; as I said, it may well be just an old wive's tale, as that Vanity Fair profile makes clear. (Obviously, if true, he would not acknowledge it openly; even admitting his family was German was verboten for decades.) Please take on Good Faith that I did move the issue to Talk and took the endorsement out per your request, but if he gets other endorsements like it, or these ugly "dog whistle" constituencies become an even bigger campaign issue, we'll have to re-evaluate. I'd like to think he'd take a stand. Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 21:01, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

I would like to take credit for re-inserting his endorsements from White supremacists David Duke and the Daily Stormer. The excuses used to remove them were frankly, arbitrary. David Duke is a well known politician, who himself has run for president, he has his own Wikipedia article and although he criticised Donald Trump for being "beholden to Jewish interests," he did clearly state that he thought his campaign was a "good thing". The Daily Stormer also has its own Wikipedia article, their inclusion clearly follows the endorsement rules established earlier for this page and they clearly support his race-baiting rhetoric. The fact that Trump supporters may be embarrassed by his White supremacist endorsements, and whether or not Trump wants these endorsements, is entirely immaterial. Chris-Gilmore77 (talk) 08:01, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
 * David Duke has clarified that he's not endorsing Trump because Trump is too "Zionist" for him . Please refrain from adding his name.--Cuckservative (talk) 11:19, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Clean up
After going through this article it occurred to me that a lot of the names on here were pushing the boundaries of promotion. In accordance with the suggestions above and WP:LISTCRUFT I have removed many names whose notability was not established. This was definitely a bold move but I felt it was necessary as this list was getting completely out of control. In addition, it was out of step with other endorsement lists from this and previous elections. My criteria for inclusion has been included as a note at the top of the editing window and is also below.

This list should only contain individuals who meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines. If the individual does not already have their own page notability should be established based on who they are. State level legislatures and above are notable. Local legislatures may be notable depending on who they are. Celebrities and activists are probably not notable unless they already have their own page. This is not the place to promote any individual who says they back a candidate on twitter or facebook. Questions of notability should be placed on the talk page for community assessment. --Stabila711 (talk) 23:09, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Jim Gilmore
I have commented out Jim Gilmore's section because he has no endorsements that have been added to the list yet. The section is still there, just commented out, so if he gets an endorsement it can be added and the section restored. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:53, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Citation needed
I removed all of the endorsements that did not have citations next to them. I feel like this is a "living persons" violation so I removed them. I have listed the entries below so that they can be sourced and reincluded if a reference is found. --Stabila711 (talk) 03:02, 25 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Jeb Bush
 * Florida: Willy Chirino, Cuban-American musician


 * Chris Christie
 * Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania (2011-2015)


 * Ted Cruz
 * Glenn Beck Conservative radio show host
 * Tennessee: Ben Cunningham, Dr. Lee Douglas, Steve Osborn, Mick Wright
 * Mississippi: Keith Plunkett, Steve Hopkins
 * Philadelphia: Michelle Malkin Conservative blogger and author
 * Arkansas: Bob Ballinger, Neil White
 * Oklahoma: Gary Stanislawski, Anthony Sykes, David Brumbaugh, Mark McCullough, Ken Walker, Justin Wood
 * Alabama: Lisa Andrews, Mike Parson, Stephen Phillips
 * New Jersey: Steve Lonegan
 * Arizona: Constantin Querard
 * Nevada: Michele Fiore, John Moore, David Hurd, Oscar Benavides, Darrell Porter,,Erin Phillips, Richard Ziser


 * Mike Huckabee
 * Four from Arkansas: Tim Griffin (LG of AR), Mark Martin (Arkansas Secretary of State), Leslie Rutledge (AG of AR), Dennis Milligan (Treas of AR).


 * Scott Walker
 * Ron Johnson, Wisconsin

David Duke
The claim that David Duke had endorsed Donald Trump was based on this article dated August 25, 2015. However, an article on The Daily Beast published the following day, August 26, quotes Duke as saying "I have not endorsed Donald Trump ...." While Duke has made some favorable comments about Trump, he denied endorsing him and so should not be listed as an endorsement for Trump. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 18:47, 27 September 2015 (UTC)