By Clarke Canfield Associated Press
PORTLAND, Maine - More than 150 Green Party candidates nationwide ran for their state legislatures on Election Day. Only one was victorious.
John Eder, a 33-year-old house painter, was the only Green to win a seat in a legislature this year, and is only the second ever to do so. His victory is a sign of the party's growing strength, Green Party officials say.
Besides Eder's victory, they point to the more than 500 Greens who ran for local, state and federal offices this year, up from 267 candidates in 2000. A candidate running for Congress in Pennsylvania got 22 percent of the vote - the greatest percentage ever for a Green running for federal office.
The party has nearly 250,000 registered voters, more than twice that of four years ago, and is the only national party with increasing enrollment, said Dean Myerson, national political coordinator of the Green Party of the United States. Still, the party has had a tough time getting candidates elected to posts higher than town council, making Eder's victory all the more meaningful.
"As a party that has been electing people to local offices for years, one of our key goals was to put people into office on the state level," Myerson said. "And John did it with flying colors."
Eder, who grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Maine six years ago, decided to run after volunteering for Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential run.
The odds were against him. After all, only one Green Party candidate had ever been elected to a state legislature, and she withdrew from the party shortly after winning a seat in California in 1999.
It helped that Eder's only competition was a Democrat. The Republicans didn't bother to field a candidate in his liberal Portland district.
It also helped that he received nearly $5,000 in public Clean Elections funding, which allowed him to focus on campaigning rather than fund-raising.
The district is also small enough so Eder could run an effective grass-roots, door-to-door campaign. On Tuesday, he won with 67 percent of the vote.
<http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/11082002/maine/33395.htm> -- Yoshie
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