[GPRI] FW: [usgp-dx] Towards a realistic Green Party strategy for 2008 (Re:

Tue Mar 27 13:01:14 PST 2007

hello all,

i couldn't agree more with Scott, and have been touting the same opinion 
here in RI.

however, in RI we have a lot of work to for voter credibility on the local 
level, especially in communities of color. many voters don't understand what 
the Green Party is and/or don't think we can win.

we don't have the name "branding" that the major parties have, and truly 
need more grassroots efforts for voter education and outreach (i would love 
to discuss this in more detail and i have some professional experience).

it's especially hard in RI as we have Straight Ticket voting (we're one of 
only 17 states that still uses it in some form). one mark on the ballot and 
you can vote for all Dem. or all Rep. candidates. Greens don't currently 
quality for S.T. in RI due to ballot access laws, but even when we did 
qualify, we simply don't have the name recognition and viability for most 
voters.

many voter in my community thought that Straight ticket voting was their 
only option due to lack of understanding and "help" from poll workers. so 
from my experience, voter education on the most basic level is desperately 
needed for our growth as a party.

for those interested, i have a breakdown of the vote for my past election. i 
won the vote by name, but lost due to the "Straight Ticket."

thanks,
Jeff Toste

____________

>From: Greg Gerritt <gerritt at mindspring.com>
>To: pcsc <pcsc at gp-us.org>, CCC list <ccc at lists.gp-us.org>,GPRI Forum 
><gpri-forum at greens.org>
>Subject: [GPRI] FW: [usgp-dx] Towards a realistic Green Party strategy for 
>2008 (Re: Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate)
>Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:32:34 -0400
>
>
>------ Forwarded Message
>From: Scott McLarty <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
>Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 13:26:12 -0700 (PDT)
>To: <natlcomaffairs at green.gpus.org>, <dcsgp at yahoogroups.com>
>Subject: [usgp-dx] Towards a realistic Green Party strategy for 2008 (Re:
>Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate)
>
>(I wrote this after reading a Z Magazine review
>of Howie Hawkins' book 'Independent Politics: The
>Green Party Strategy Debate'
><http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=12407>
>that was forwarded on some Green Party discussion
>lists.)
>
>In my opinion, the major challenge of 2008 for
>the Green Party has little to do with the
>presidential race.
>
>In order to prove ourselves a growing political
>party with a real future, we need to win
>elections.  If we don't rack up victories, then
>the public's perception of us will be that the GP
>has hit a ceiling, that we'll occasionally win a
>couple of City Council seats here & there, but
>Greens are too small & marginal to have any kind
>of traction or effect on the political direction
>of the US.  We'd be permanent members of the
>political space also inhabited by the Libertarian
>Party, the US Constitution Party, etc., and votes
>cast for Greens are mostly wasted.
>
>This unfortunate perception will be correct...
>unless we begin making real electoral gains.
>
>While the presidential race is important, our
>biggest (and most achievable) goal in 2008 should
>be to place candidates in important state and
>municipal offices.  We should aim to get 4 or 5
>Greens into state legislatures, at least a half a
>dozen more Greens onto the City Councils of major
>cities, and a dozen or more Greens on smaller
>City Councils & County Commissions.  And maybe a
>few new Green Mayors of small & medium sized
>cities.
>
>We can accomplish these goals, because we've
>already succeeded at different times in electing
>Greens to these offices.  But it will take some
>preparation: recruiting excellent candidates;
>raising money for them; helping them build
>campaigns; promoting them publicly.
>
>Our strongest national committee right now should
>be the Coordinated Campaign Committee.  Greens
>who are serious about seeing the GP advance in
>2008 should either be joining or offering their
>services to the CCC, or should be making
>arrangements to get some CCC help for their local
>& state parties & candidates.  We should be
>holding Green Campaign Schools throughout the US
>as 2008 approaches.
>
>There's no doubt that our participation in the
>presidential race is important: it gets us a lot
>of press & public attention; it helps state
>parties win ballot access; the Green nominee
>serves as a sort of figurehead for the GP's
>platform & principles.  But the presidential race
>is also the most irrelevant when it comes to
>gauging the GP's actual progress, since it's the
>race in which we're most vulnerable to factors
>over which we have no control.  Overwhelmingly,
>voters in 2004 who agreed with the GP on the Iraq
>War and other issues decided that their main goal
>was to defeat Bush -- even if this meant voting
>for a dreary pro-corporate pro-war Democrat like
>Kerry.  Very few voters made it their priority in
>2004 to support a growing antiwar third party.
>The result was that both Cobb & Nader got small
>fractions of one percent.
>
>The GP can run the best candidates & campaigns
>possible, but we can't mandate what voters'
>priorities are.  Despite all the heated internal
>debate over choices of candidate & campaign
>strategy, the major factor in the 2004
>presidential race was that we were irrelevant to
>over 99% of voters, and would have been
>irrelevant regardless of nominee (or endorsee) or
>campaign strategy.  In fact, we were already
>irrelevant early in 2004, even to many GP
>supporters: Brent McMillan noted in a recent
>posting titled "Overview of Green Party national
>planning for 2008" that "Before we even got to
>the convention approximately 70% of the national
>party's donor base either went ABB, Anybody But
>Bush, or didn't want us to run a candidate at all
>for other reasons.  We then proceeded to fight
>over the scraps."
>
>(Someone will probably write back and note that
>Ralph got over four times the number that Dave
>got.  Here's my response: (1) Of course -- Ralph
>is famous.  (2) A discussion about how we could
>have received a larger fraction of 1% in 2004 is
>not worth our time.)
>
>This dynamic repeated in 2006, when we ran some
>of our strongest candidates & most well-organized
>campaigns ever for seats in Congress -- people
>like Rae Vogeler, Aaron Dixon, Kevin Zeese, Howie
>Hawkins, Byron DeLear, Bill Paparian, etc. etc.
>They mostly pulled numbers in the 2-4 percent
>range, not through any fault of their own, but
>because voters who opposed the Iraq War & other
>Bush Administration horrors were determined to
>transfer control over Congress from Repubs to
>Dems.  As in 2004, to most voters the GP was
>irrelevant at the congressional level.  With
>Howie Hawkins' campaign for the US Senate in New
>York, there was no reason for any sincere antiwar
>voter to vote for warhawk Democrat Hillary
>Clinton, since her reelection was inevitable, but
>most voters who claimed to oppose the Iraq War
>still voted for her.
>
>On the other hand, in some important
>gubernatorial races, which were not affected by
>this sentiment, Greens did fairly well, with Rich
>Whitney (Illinois) & Pat LaMarche (Maine)
>receiving about 10%.  Pat might have drawn 20-25%
>or even more if a progressive Democrat hadn't
>also run as in independent, turning it into a
>four-way race with the progressive vote split.
>Rich's unprecedented numbers in Illinois, after a
>vicious Democratic effort to keep him off the
>ballot (Gov. Blagojevich spent $800,000 in
>taxpayers' money on legal strategems), were
>especially good news.
>
>The GP might get 5% in the 2008 presidential
>race, or we might get a tiny fraction of 1%
>again.  Either way, we should not allow ourselves
>to make our performance in the expensive and
>fickle spectacle of the presidential race the
>sole or chief determinant of GP progress, and let
>it eat up all our time & mental energy as in
>2004.  Placing all our eggs in the presidential
>basket is like someone deciding to pursue a
>career in the music industry, and then staking it
>all on winning American Idol.
>
>Furthermore, we should remember that a lot of
>voters may decide to vote Democrat in the
>presidential race, but will still be ready to
>vote Green in state & local races.  An absolutist
>ideal of Green politics would find this
>unacceptable: if a voter is 'Green' (supports the
>GP platform & positions, is registered Green),
>then naturally the voter will vote for every
>Green on the ballot, especially the presidential
>nominee.  But that's not how real electoral
>politics works.  Voters decide who to vote for
>based on a variety of reasons.  It's extremely
>naive to believe that a typical voter does some
>research to determine which candidate best
>represents his or her own positions on major
>issues and then casts a vote accordingly.  If
>this were the case, the GP would already be a
>major US party.
>
>In reality, voters (even registered Greens) often
>make decisions based on all sorts of criteria,
>some of them irrational or inconsistent.  The
>important thing for the GP is that all votes are
>valuable to us, even the ones we think are
>irrational & inconsistent.  If a voter decides to
>support Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or even
>George W Bush or John McCain for president, we
>still want his or her votes for Green candidates
>running for state legislature, city council,
>school board, etc.  In other words, we need to
>hold our noses sometimes and respect voters'
>choices.  If we expect to grow, we'll have to
>welcome support from people who've made some very
>non-Green choices.
>
>Will we have a strategy in 2008 for winning back
>all those self-defeating antiwar types who voted
>for Kerry in 2004?  Will we have a strategy for
>persuading progressives who decide to vote
>Democrat in the presidential race to vote Green
>in state & local races?  Are we mature enough not
>to treat politics as a zero-sum game, and craft
>our campaign messages in a way that doesn't allow
>the national campaign to smother our chance to
>win a lot of down-ballot races?
>
>We should absolutely run an aggressive
>presidential campaign in 2008, competing in every
>state, and with every state GP pledged to support
>the national nominee.  (If we don't want our
>nominee to run aggressively in every state, or
>some state GPs decide they'd rather place a
>different name on their ballot line, we probably
>shouldn't bother to run a presidential campaign
>at all.)
>
>But Greens should be realistic about what we can
>and can't accomplish, and we should anticipate
>that external forces will affect how well our
>national nominees do on Election Day in ways that
>we can't foresee.  Here's one example: we might
>witness the first billion-dollar presidential
>campaign in 2008; will this work to the GP's
>advantage (evidence of how money has corrupted
>corporate-party politics), or will it simply
>crush us?
>
>It's the state & local victories, along with new
>registrations & more state GPs with ballot
>status, that will demonstrate the GP's permanence
>and steady growth.  If we place 4 or 5 Greens
>into statehouses, a bunch of new Greens onto city
>councils, etc., then it won't really matter if
>the Green presidential candidate gets 5% or 3% or
>1% or 0.05% in 2008.  It'll also set the GP in a
>stronger position for winning a seat or two in
>Congress during the next five years.  When we
>finally get a Green or two into Congress, it'll
>change the whole political landscape of the US,
>signaling the beginning of the end of the
>two-party system.
>
>Scott
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>____________________________________________________________________________
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