Yetta Bronstein For President

By | April 24, 2022

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There are things people may not know about the 1964 presidential election. Yes, it’s true that the two main candidates in the election were Lyndon Johnson and the Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. There was, however, another candidate most people have never heard of: Mrs. Yetta Bronstein.

Mrs. Bronstein was a Jewish housewife from the Bronx. Although she lost in 1964, she ran a second time and in 1968, and also ran for a seat in Britain’s Parliament and for mayor of New York. She also wrote a book called The President I Almost Was by Yetta Bronstein while preparing for her second run for President. One other thing to know about Mrs. Bronstein: she was completely fictional.  

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She Was A Creation Of Alan And Jeanne Abel

Mrs. Bronstein was the creation of Alan and Jeanne Abel, a husband-and-wife team of pranksters. Over his career, Alan Abel has been a writer, lecturer, actor, filmmaker, jazz musician, and comedian. Together with his wife, he produced two feature films. And the two of them came up with Mrs. Bronstein while they were doing a nightclub act. Once they created her, they decided she should run for president, and so they registered her as a write-in candidate. Her party affiliation? The Best Party. She, of course, had a particular platform, which included national bingo and lowering the voting age to 18 (the 26th Amendment was not ratified until 1971). Mrs. Bronstein’s argument was that lowering the voting age would give juvenile delinquents something to do. She also wanted to put a truth serum in the Senate drinking fountain, and she wanted a “mental detector” to be installed along with the metal detector.