> Well I wasn't thinking of anything but local contests linked to a
> national struggle (and hell, why not an international one?). It's
> about the Green Party, after all. State and local races present much
> lower, almost manageable, financial and organizational obstacles to
> an independent party. The usual lesser of two evil argument applies
> with much less force than when the office at stake is chief executive
> of the world bourgeoisie. It can even happen in a place like NYC,
> where we have a (Red-)Green running a plausible campaign for city
> council. You can win one now and then, which always helps morale,
> create a network of Green elected officials, develop an armamentarium
> of campaign strategies, etc. Beats the hell out of running chimerical
> presidential campaigns, which guarantee Stassen-like results. The
> ground-up strategy worked for the Swedish social dems, and for other
> social democratic parties around the world too I'm told.
>
One would think that a party with Green in its name would take grass roots politics a bit more seriously.
In Massachusetts, the state Green-Rainbow party has decided that running
either lots of candidates for local and state district races, or running aggressively in strategically chosen races, is somehow inferior to the method that has made the libertarians so successful--contest about 5 out of 240 state House and Senate races, but run for every statewide office. That way, even when your candidate is informed and intelligent, anyone worried about putting Mitt Romney into office will vote Democratic anyway.
And when some enterprising person gets the ball rolling for fusion voting, which would let the party put the G-R seal of approval on progressive Democrats, come out against it.
And when the Republicans have fewer than 20% of the seats in the legislature, and the Democrats are split between those who support an autocratic and reactionary Speaker of the House, do not even bother with the kind of politics that would really make a splash--like running against the speaker in his district, or running aggressively against his cronies.
I know that in Maine, which has a semi-public financing scheme for elections (a history of electing independents; and major parties that are not too far apart on many issues, so tipping a 3-way election to the Republicans is not so major an ideological threat), the Greens have actually managed to get a legislator elected, and have done well in the last gubernatorial race. But even there, the Greens have failed to get more than a handful of candidates to run for the legislature.
--tim francis-wright