Political party
In United States politics, the Green Party has been active as a third party since the 1980s. The party first gained widespread public attention during Ralph Nader's presidential runs in 1996 and 2000. The FEC-recognized national committee of the party is the Green Party of the United States (although there remains also a mostly-defunct separate Green national political organization, the Greens/Green Party USA).
Unlike Green parties in other nations, Greens in the United States have won elected office mostly at the local level; most winners of public office in the United States who are considered Greens have won nonpartisan-ballot elections (that is, the winning Greens won offices in elections in which candidates were not identified on the ballot as affiliated with any political party). The highest-ranking elected Green in the nation is currently John Eder, a State Representative in Maine. At the federal level, third parties generally poll poorly in the United States. This is largely due to the fact that the United States is not a parliamentary democracy, so third parties cannot form coalitions after an election to gain power. The reason third parties poll poorly may also be due to the country's use of first-past-the-post voting and concerns of third party votes causing a spoiler effect, circumstances predicted by Duverger's law.
Greens emphasize decentralization and local autonomy, in keeping with the Green commitment to non-hierarchical participatory democracy, so it is perhaps not surprising that the strength of the Green Party does not derive from a central national organization.
History
Founding
Largely inspired by the success of the German Green Party, political activists in the United States formed the Committees of Correspondence in 1984, later to be known as the Green Committees of Correspondence (GCOC). The GCOC adopted the Ten Key Values as their philosophical basis, loosely based on the Four Pillars that most European Greens use. They organized themselves around bio-regional lines.
The GCOC held national gatherings of Green activists in 1987, then annually starting in 1989. At the 1991 national gathering, the GCOC was disbanded, and a new structure was put into place, named the Greens/Green Party USA (G/GPUSA), which was organized with delegates from local and regional green groups, in addition to individual members.
In 1986, the Wisconsin Greens elected two members, David Conley and Frank Koehn, to county boards in the north woods. In 1990, Jim Sykes ran as a Green for governor in Alaska. He received 3.3% of the vote, enough to grant official ballot status to the Green Party of Alaska. The California Green Party would follow, attaining official ballot status in 1991. From 1992 to 1995, the number of candidates in local and statewide elections identifying themselves as Greens grew, in addition to the number of organized local and state-wide Green groups. Hawaiian Greens, including the notable Keiko Bonk, have achieved repeated success in county-level elections.
National organizing and campaigns
At a 1995 national gathering of Greens from many organizations in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a measure to put a candidate for president on 40 states was adopted. Those who wished to run a candidate for president continued to pursue this possibility. Working within their state parties, as well as through an independent organization called Third Parties 1995, they convinced Ralph Nader to accept placement on the Green Party of California's primary ballot, and eventually he accepted placement on more ballots, but ran a limited campaign with a self-imposed campaign spending limit of $5,000 (to avoid having to file a financial statement with the FEC). He chose Winona LaDuke as their vice-presidential candidate. The pair were on the ballot in twenty-two states and received 685,128 votes, or 0.7% of all votes cast. [1]
In the aftermath of the 1996 election, representatives from thirteen state Green Parties joined to form the Association of State Green Parties (ASGP). The ASGP, while still including issue activism and non-electoral politics, was clearly more focused on getting Greens elected. In the years from 1997 to 1999, more local, regional, and state-wide Green parties continued to form. Many of these parties affiliated themselves with both the ASGP and the G/GPUSA.
In the year 2000, the ASGP nominated Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke for president and vice-president again. This time, the pair were on 44 state ballots and received 2,882,897 votes, or 2.7% of all votes cast [2].
In October of 2000 (during the campaign), a proposal was made to alter the structures of the ASGP and G/GPUSA to be complementary organizations with the ASGP focusing on electoral politics and the G/GPUSA focusing on issue advocacy. The Boston Proposal (so named because it was negotiated at Boston in the days before the first presidential debate) was passed by the ASGP at its next annual gathering, but did not pass at the G/GPUSA Congress in Carbondale, Illinois (although the rejection was controversial for a number of reasons, and lead to the exodus of a significant number of prominent G/GPUSA activists to the GPUS, who later formed The Green Alliance as a vehicle for "movement" politics within the Green Party). The ASGP then changed its name to the "Green Party of the United States," adopted some of the G/GPUSA's structures (identity caucuses, for example), and was granted status as the official National Committee of the Green Party by the FEC in 2001. Today the G/GPUSA survives as a small membership organization, led by the few Greens who opposed the Boston Proposal. Though for a time they represented themselves otherwise, today they describe themselves as "a national non-profit membership organization," not as a political party.
In 2002, John Eder's election to the Maine State House of Representatives marked the first Green Party state legislator in the United States elected in a regular election. (Audie Bock had won a special election as a state legislator in California, but left the party and eventually became a Democrat.) John Eder's party designation on the ballot in 2002 was "Green Independent." Eder was personally congratulated by Ralph Nader on election night. In 2004, despite redistricting in Maine that threatened to unseat Eder, he nevertheless won re-election.
In the Spring of 2003, as the 2004 elections loomed, Greens began an often-heated debate on party presidential strategy. Democrats, liberal activists, and liberal journalists were counseling and pressuring the Green Party and Ralph Nader not to run a presidential ticket. In response, a diverse cross-section of U.S. Greens issued "Green & Growing: 2004 in Perspective" a statement initiated by national party co-chair Ben Manski. Green & Growing's 158 signatories declared that "We think it essential to build a vigorous presidential campaign," citing as their chief reasons the need to gain ballot access for the Green Party, to define the Greens as an independent party, and the failures of the Democrats on issues of foreign and domestic policy. Other Greens, most prominently Ted Glick in his "A Green Party Safe States Strategy", called on the party to adopt a strategy of avoiding swing states in the upcoming presidential election. A third, intermediate "smart states" position was drafted by Dean Myerson and adopted by David Cobb, advocating a "nuanced" state-by-state strategy based on ballot access, party development, swing state, and other concerns.
On Christmas Eve, 2003, Ralph Nader declared that he would not seek the party's nomination for president in 2004. Six weeks later, in February, 2004, Nader announced his intention to run as independent, reiterating his decision not to seek the party's nomination. Two months later, Nader seemed to reverse course, stating that he would accept the "endorsement" rather than the "nomination" of the Green Party, as well as of other third parties. Several Greens, most notably Peter Camejo, as well as Lorna Salzman and others, endorsed this plan (Camejo would later accept a position as Nader's vice-presidential running-mate).
The most notable opposition came from lawyer and activist David Cobb, who promised to run a campaign focused on building the party. On June 26, Forward 2004! The Green National Convention nominated David Cobb on the second round of voting, with 408 delegates voting for Cobb, 308 voting for "No Nominee", and 51 delegates voting for other candidates or abstaining. The majority of "No Nominee" delegates supported endorsing Nader's independent candidacy, although some of them advocated not backing a presidential candidate at all. After nominating Cobb, the convention nominated Pat LaMarche of Maine for vice-president. Many Greens (on both sides of the argument) saw the Nader/Camejo vs. Cobb dispute in terms of a strategic difference about whether to ask for votes even in "swing states" where this could potentially push the election to Bush, with the perception that the Nader/Camejo ticket supported a campaign independent of its impact on Kerry's votes, where Cobb supported a "safe states" strategy. Other Greens dispute that this was at issue in the debate over which candidate to nominate.
Two supporters of Camejo wrote one of a number of articles printed by dissident Greens after the convention, alleging that the convention elections had been undemocratic. Their article, Rigged Convention; Divided Party states,
Cobb’s amazing rise from 12% in the primaries against 83 % for pro-Nader candidates, to a majority at the convention was due to a well organized campaign to turn a minority view in the Green Party into what appeared as a “majority” decision at the convention.
A vigorous debate continues within the Green Party regarding the place of the party in what many see as a dysfunctional electoral system.
National party co-chairs
The co-chairs of the party are currently: Marc Sanson, Gwendolyn Wages, Jody Grage Haug, Steve Kramer, Rebecca Rotzler, and Pat LaMarche. The co-chairs of the Green Party, together with the secretary and treasurer, are called the Steering Committee. They are elected from the delegates, representing the affiliated member states, that serve on the Green National Committee (GNC).
The Steering Committee announced that Tom Sevigny (Connecticut) had filled the remaining co-chair position after elections at the annual national meeting in Tulsa, OK. This has been questioned and there have been calls for further investigation of the election results, which if counted under a different system of Single Transferable Vote would have elected Kristen Olson (Minnesota).
Geographic distribution
The Green Party has shown its strongest popular support on the Pacific Coast, upper Great Lakes, and northeastern United States, as reflected in the geographical distribution of Green candidates elected [3]. Californians have elected 67 (all of them in nonpartisan-ballot elections) of the 204 office-holding Greens nationwide as of January, 2004. Other states with high numbers of Green elected officials include Pennsylvania (27), Massachusetts (23), Maine (13), and Wisconsin (19). Wisconsin has the highest per capita number of Green elected officials in the country, and the highest victory rate at over 60% over the state party's 20 year history.
In California in 2000, the Green Party's nominee for president (Ralph Nader) received 405,722 votes; In the 2002 Governor's race, the city of San Francisco gave more votes to the Green Party candidate, Peter Camejo, than to the Republican candidate. Matt Gonzalez, who served as president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and who came close to winning the San Francisco mayoral contest in 2003, is a Green Party member (although these city offices in California are elected by nonpartisan ballot). Jason West, mayor of New Paltz, NY, attained national prominence in 2004 by performing a series of 25 same-sex marriages in that city. John Eder is the highest-ranking Green in the U.S., elected to the Maine state house in 2002 (and re-elected in 2004). The Alaska Green Party has the highest per capita proportion of Greens, receiving 10% of the votes statewide in the 2000 presidential elections.
One challenge that the Green Party (as well as other third parties) face is the difficulty of overcoming repressive ballot access laws in many states. This has prevented the Green Party from reaching a point of critical mass in building party-building momentum in many states.
2004 national ticket
In the 2004 presidential election, the candidate of the Green Party of the United States for President was Texas attorney and GPUS legal counsel David Cobb, and its candidate for vice-president was labor activist Pat LaMarche of Maine.
In 2004, Ralph Nader, the Party's 2000 candidate for President, after a dismal response from green leadership, announced that he would run as an independent candidate. Mr. Nader explained that he was not seeking the Green Party's nomination. Mr. Nader's position was confusing to some Greens, because Nader's campaign also said that Nader was seeking to gain the Party's "endorsement," but Nader had also stated he would not accept the party's nomination after his review of tghe ambivalence of the leadership to mount an agressiver campaign. One point that made this situation especially confusing was that an "endorsement," unlike "nomination," does not have the kind of legal significance resulting in ballot access. After David Cobb received the Party's 2004 presidential nomination at the Green National Convention in Milwaukee, Nader's Vice Presidential running mate, Peter Camejo, said, "I'm going to walk out of here arm in arm with David Cobb."
The Cobb-LaMarche ticket in 2004 appeared on 28 of the 51 ballots around the country; down fromn 44 in 2000, the Nader-Camejo ticket in 2004 appeared on 35 ballots. In 2004, Cobb was on the ballot in California (and Nader was not), whereas Nader was on the ballot in New York (and Cobb was not). Political strategists in 2004 used aggressive tactics to remove Nader and Cobb's names from several state ballots. The Cobb-LaMarche campaign also endorsed the NOTA (None of the Above campaign) in Oklahoma, as a means of protesting the exclusion of all third party candidates for President on the state's ballot in 2004.
Although some Green Party members were upset and some expressed "embarrassment" that Nader was not the party's 2004 candidate, others believed that a serious presidential campaign could be waged with a "home-grown" figure such as Cobb, running away fornm the spoiler effect. Still other Greens pointed out that the presidential contest should not be the focus of a grassroots party that emphasizes organizing at the local level. According to this view, the party would benefit in the long run by concentrating on building the party at the local level, instead of focusing energy on the rough-and-tumble race for the presidency. Many Greens further argued that Ralph Nader's decision not to seek the Green nomination in 2004 might help the Green Party overcome a widespread mistaken perception that the party was based on a "cult of personality" with Ralph Nader as its central figure.
The voting results from the 2004 presidential election were considerably less impressive than the results of the Green Party's Nader-LaDuke presidential ticket in 2000, which had garnered more than 2,882,000 votes. In 2004, running in most states as an independent (but with high-profile Green Party activist Peter Camejo as his running mate), Ralph Nader received 465,650 votes; the Green Party's 2004 nominees, David Cobb and Patricia LaMarche, mustered 119,859 votes. Some Greens were not discouraged by the relatively low presidential vote yield in 2004 for Cobb and for Nader. They pointed out that the numbers were not alarming because the Green Party continued to grow in many parts of the country, increasing Green Party affiliation numbers and fielding Green candidates for congressional, state, and local offices.
