>Anyhow, can you cite any case in a capitalist democracy where a
>party kept running candidates only for local elections for decades
>and then eventually became a dominant political party?
Who said anything running only in local elections forever? Not me. What kind of straw man is this? You start locally - and I'm including congressional races in local elections too. The hope is to build name recognition and some kind of insitutional presence over time.
It worked well for the Swedish social dems - and they weren't afraid to do deals with established bourgeois liberal parties either. I haven't read the history myself, but I'm told the German social dems did something similar.
Doug