By Gemma Q. Casas
Variety News Staff

THE next gubernatorial election will be held in 2009, but four Democrats are already seeking their party’s nomination.
Manuel C. Sablan, the acting party chairman, said he cannot “name names yet.
“It’s too early,” he said. “The good part is I’m hearing a lot of good things and there are four people who are interested in running as the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial candidate,” he added.
According to Sablan,
“My main concern is to get the party up and running. Our ultimate goal is to win the 2009 election and we have to start now.”
He admitted that the Democratic Party doesn’t have “enough people from the younger generation getting into the political process — there’s going to be a big gap later on. We don’t want to be a government of old people. We have to start getting our younger people into the political process.”
Sablan said they want to groom younger politicians.
Of the eight gubernatorial elections held in the Northern Marianas, the Democrats have won only two — in 1977, when Carlos S. Camacho was elected to be the CNMI’s first chief executive; and in 1993, when former Washington Rep. Froilan C. Tenorio defeated Republican Gov. Lorenzo I. Deleon Guerrero.
The Democrats were split in the 1981, 1997 and 2001 elections.
In 2005, its nominee, Tenorio, placed last in a four-way race.