Michelle Del Rosario

Talk about rush-hour traffic stress.

Michelle Del Rosario confronted it, both barrels, practically the moment she stepped off the plane from Maui Feb. 20, petitions to form the Hawaii Independent Party in hand. They were bound for the state Office of Elections in Pearl City, due at the end of business that day.

"I got caught, in a car, in stop-and-go traffic A, not knowing where I was going, and B, just the traffic I didn’t plan for," she said. "Our deadline was 4:30; I think we walked in the door at 4:22. On Maui, we just don’t have this kind of traffic."

Del Rosario, 47, is chairwoman of the new party, officially certified and currently best known as the party of choice for Mufi Hannemann, the former Honolulu mayor who recently declared his candidacy for the governor’s job. Del Rosario paired with Charmaine Tavares, former Maui County mayor, in starting the organizational work in January.

Ordinarily she spends most of her day running her own real-estate firm and spending time with the family (she and her husband, Vincent, have six adult children between them). But lining up the required petition signatures (700 half of1 percent of those voting in the last election) absorbed their attention. In the end, they had about three times that many.

Del Rosario was in town again recently for a party conference and said organizational tasks are gradually getting done. The party principles posted on its website (hawaiiindependentparty.com) reflect more basic values than adherence to specific positions: fiscal responsibility, environmental protection, gender equality and respect for diversity among them.

But Del Rosario said that the new party won’t be a one-hit wonder as new parties have been in previous election cycles. The purpose providing a home for centrist candidates seeking another path will outlast the 2014 campaign season, she said.

The former vice chairwoman of the Democratic Party on Maui said she became dissatisfied with the party over the personality clashes that overwhelmed more important work.

I think it’s about reframing the election process," she added, "and then, once candidates are elected, how they conduct themselves, moving forward."

QUESTION: What has been your political engagement, up to this point?

ANSWER: I’ve been active for the last five years on Maui, supporting a wide variety of candidates. 

I did support Mufi (Hannemann) when he ran for governor in 2010, and when he ran for Congress, I was his campaign manager for Maui County. …

I’ve worked in coordinated campaigns for slates of candidates, and so I’m going to bring that expertise here.

Q: Generally Democrats?

A: Democrats. I’ve always been a Democrat. 

Q: Did you have to think long and hard before you took this leap?

A: No, I really didn’t. Charmaine (Tavares) is a former Republican, though she ran nonpartisan, and I was a Democrat. We both had crossed paths numerous times. … We would talk periodically when she was no longer in office.

We both were really disappointed with the direction both parties were going in. We feel like we keep hearing a lot of discussion in our community, which is the island of Maui, about people not wanting to come out and vote, that they feel their vote doesn’t count, that they’re disengaged, that they don’t feel supporting any candidate is worthwhile, that activities that were effective in prior decades are no longer the tools to get candidates elected.

Q: For example?

A: Sign-waving activities. They question the effectiveness of that. Door-to-door canvassing, phone banking. The things that a lot of candidates traditionally have looked to.

And we looked at where is electioneering going on the mainland. Social media is a large piece of it now. Websites are a large piece of it now. Blogging, both by candidates and their supporters is a larger piece than it has been previously. …

Charmaine’s not interested in running for office again, and … the things that were bothering both of us were systemic issues within parties. So we started looking at, OK, well, what would it take to form a new party? And if we formed a new party, what would it be?

As we started to research, we found that you have the spectrum of voters, and you have that 10 to 15 percent on each end of the tail that is hard core Democrat, party people, hard-core Republican people. You really have that middle 70 percent that’s independent.

So we thought, what can we do to really invigorate that middle, moderate, centrist group? So that developed our discussions about our party. We came very late to the game.

Q: What’s the time frame here?

A: January! We were very late to the game. In a perfect world we would have started this exercise two years ago. We would have been able to have a strong organization in place and have everything laid out, ready to go.

We started collecting our signatures the first week of February, with a Feb. 20 deadline. We weren’t even sure we were going to be able to collect enough signatures. 

Q: How many?

A: It was 700. … It doesn’t sound like a lot. But when you go out and start talking to people about, "Hey, we want to form this new party that we kind of have named the Hawaii Independent Party, that we don’t have bylaws for, we don’t have a platform for, we don’t have a website, we don’t have any collateral to give you, but will you sign to help us form this party?" It’s very challenging.

Q: So (Hannemann) was not at the center of this from the start?

A: He was not in the center of this from the start. And that’s one of the things that’s been reported that was erroneous.

Q: Did you guys approach him? Obviously, you have a history with him.

A: I have a relationship with him. 

Before we started this exercise, I went to him as a mentor and said, "Hey, Char and I are kind of kicking this around; what do you think?" And he said, "Well, what are you thinking of doing?" And we kind of laid it out, and he was like, "You know what? You might have something there."

As we decided to move forward and we actually filed and had the petitions prepared, we were still struggling to get enough momentum going. And he would check in with me: "How are things going?" 

"Well, we’re getting there, but it’s going to be tight to the wire."

And then a few days before, I don’t know who he commented to, but he said something to some people in the community, and we started getting more interest: "Hey, can you send me a petition?" 

"Sure."

And then someone from one of the news stations asked him a couple of days before the filing, "Are you involved with this? Are you driving this?" …  And he said, "No, but if they’re successful, I’ll definitely take a look at it."

And we literally made (the 4:30 deadline)  by 10 minutes. … If Mufi was driving this, A, I would have known about the traffic, and B, he would not have left it to 22 after 4. …

That night I think one of the report-ers said, "There’s been this great drama created." It wasn’t intentional. It just happened. And it was really ignorance on my part. I’ve never lived here on Oahu. I know you guys have traffic. For me, rush-hour traffic is like 5 o’clock, 6 o’clock, 7 o’clock. I was here 3, 3:30, 4, and traffic was already stop-and-go. And I wasn’t on a freeway; I was on a street. …

Q: To what extent were the signatures from Maui? 

A: The bulk of the petitions came from Oahu. We had a sampling; I think we had 200 or 300 from Maui; I think we had 30 or 40 from Lanai, I think we had a sheet from Molokai. But we had from every single island.

And that was important to Char and I, that if we’re going to do this, we want this to be a grassroots party, that is from the bottom up, and we want it to be people who are independent thinkers — that is, a very inclusive party, and diverse.

So, not everybody’s going to agree; not all of our candidates are going to be on the same message. But we wanted to provide an option for independent candidates to get to the general election. …

Q: What is your goal for the number of races the party will be in?

A: We don’t have a hard number. We would like to field candidates at the county and the state level this election cycle. We felt like the federal level may be too big a task for us at this point. 

A lot of the county races, if not all, are nonpartisan. But people can choose to affiliate or identify themselves as an independent. So we’d be willing to look at county candidates.

But the crux of what we’re looking at is state offices. So it would be state House, state Senate, lieutenant governor, governor.

Q: What process would a potential party candidate go through?

A: We ask that they complete a one-page form. We ask for a resume, and we ask for a written statement of no more than 1,000 words, sharing with us why they want to run for the particular office they are, and why do they want to run as an independent candidate. …

Q: How would you distinguish the party from the others on the ballot?

A: We want to be a party of issues and solutions. So, issue-based and solution-oriented. We really are pulling in members who don’t fully align themselves 100 percent as a Democrat or 

Republican, because either issue-based concerns, specific platform concerns.

In Hawaii, Democratic candidates to this point have been held to really toe the line. And candidates like Mufi, who haven’t necessarily embraced all of the values of the Democratic platform, have not always received the full support of the party.

So we’re looking to be that middle, moderate, centrist party that can bring everyone together, that can bring a Republican that maybe identifies mostly as Republican but not 100 percent. Maybe that pro-choice 

Republican who’s fiscally conservative to the middle.

Likewise for the Democratic side. 

Maybe you have a Democrat who does not fully embrace banning of GMOs (genetically modified organism crops) but supports labeling of GMOs. That person. …

So we want to bring those people to the middle point and really have it be about the issues, fact-based and solution-oriented.