The Green Party Electoral Strategy is a Failure

'Future Hope' Column

By Ted Glick 

I received an email from a friend of mine, Howie Hawkins, a few days ago indicating that he is planning to run for the Presidential nomination of the national Green Party for 2020. Howie’s a good man, a dedicated, intelligent, long-distance runner for transformational change, but this is a really bad idea. I’m against him or anyone running as a Green Party Presidential candidate in 2020.

Why is he doing this? Here’s how he describes the main reasons: “In my discussions with Greens who are encouraging me to run, we have conceived of a campaign that would center around two purposes: building the Green Party and advancing an ecosocialist platform.”

So in an election 19 months from now that could lead to the most dangerous man in the world being re-elected President for four more years, Howie and the Green Party aren’t even concerned about what that result would mean for the disrupted climate and the world’s peoples? They continue to believe that Bernie Sanders is getting nowhere with his tactical decision to run within the Democratic Party and have no problem with the very real possibility that they’d be running against him? It’s mind-boggling.

This problematic approach that the Green Party has been following for 20 years, failing every time, even on their own terms, led me to leave the Green Party about a year and a half ago. I continue to believe that there are a whole series of electoral reforms needed to open up the US two-party, corporate-dominated, political system so that a genuinely progressive, mass-based, independent political party can emerge and become viable, but the GP is not such a thing, and I don’t see it doing much to get us to one.

I would have left the GP many years ago but for the fact that, in the early 2000’s after the Ralph Nader/Winona LaDuke Presidential campaign and my subsequent 2002 US Senate Green Party campaign in New Jersey, an effective local GP group in my area came together. We focused not on running candidates but on doing community organizing, primarily, as it evolved, around the issue of the climate crisis.

In 2003, I was one of the leading proponents of an approach to running Green Party Presidential campaigns that took into account the fact that we do not have proportional representation in the USA. Because we don’t, and because it is worse to have someone like Trump, or Bush, or Reagan in the White House, I urged the Green Party to use a “safe states” strategy as a way to build up its strength. Using this strategy, and taking into account that Presidential elections are actually 50 separate elections to the Electoral College, the GP would focus its campaigning in those 35-40 states where it was virtually certain which of the two corporate parties would win. In those states the GP could argue that progressive-minded people should not waste their vote and should vote for the party whose values and positions were most progressive.

 

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Source: tedglick.com