Re: Green vote?
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Howie Hawkins
The Greens have been following Ryan’s advice about focusing on local races. The Greens have won over 1200 elections over the years and have over 100 elected to local office currently. That can be scaled up from the hundreds to the thousands. A major objective of Green presidential campaigns is to secure ballot lines. In 40 of the 50 states, the presidential vote affects whether the Greens have a ballot line for the next election cycle. It is much easier to get on the ballot with a qualified ballot line than independent nominating petitions, which in most states require orders of magnitude more signatures. 2020 was a difficult year for the Greens given the big anybody-but-Trump vote. The Greens got wiped off the ballot in a number of states after this presidential election, including New York and North Carolina. Thanks to a new election law attached to the state budget by the Democrats in April while attention was focused on the pandemic, the number of votes was tripled and the frequency doubled from every four years to every two years to qualify for the ballot for the next election cycle. To get back on the ballot, NY now has the hardest independent nomination petition signature requirement of any state in the nation — 45,000 signatures in a six-week window, which means 90,000 signatures to withstand the inevitable Democratic petition challenge. It took the Greens 30 years of lawsuits, law changes, and petitioning to get ballot status in NC for the first time this year. The independent nomination petition in NC is now not as difficult as NY, but doing it will be a lot harder than having a ballot line and all the petitioning will drain time and money from the campaigns. Republican voter suppression is despicable. The failure of Democrats in charge as Secretaries of States and Governors in states like Michigan and North Carolina to restore the voter registrations of mainly black people purged by their GOP predecessors is just as bad. The Democrats complicity in this voter suppression seems to me to reflect two objectives on the part of Democratic leaders. One is the fear of white Democratic leaders of black competitors. The other is that it helps the corporate wing defeat progressive challengers in primaries. For the Greens, the Democrat’s party suppression efforts against the Green Party is another form of voter suppression. Most Green voters don't’ vote if the Greens are not on the ballot. Exit polls from 2016 showed that 61% of Jill Stein voters would have stayed home. Running for office is about as full of expression of 1st Amendment freedoms as there is — free speech, petitioning the government for redress of grievances, free press. The Democrats’ suppression of the Green Party by ballot petition challenges and rulings in the courts about the challenges by Democratic partisan hacks sitting on the bench is about as authoritarian as it gets. Changing the laws to kill the Green Party is another method. As the NY Times headline read when they got wind of the NY election law change that passed this year, “Democrats’ Secret Plan to Kill Third Parties.” The media narrative about the law change was that Cuomo was going after the party’s annoying progressive wing, the Working Families Party, that sometimes supports primary challengers but always puts the Democrats other line in the general elections, including Cuomo three times. But Cuomo came clean this weak in a radio interview where he said, "We always expected the Working Families Party to survive," he said. "It was set deliberately so. We always expected the Conservative Party to survive.” The Conservatives almost always run Republicans on their line. So New York now has two parties with two ballot lines each and no independent alternatives. Greens think Cuomo has been coming for us after we got 5% for governor in 2014 when he wanted to run up his vote to get ready to run for president, get more than his father Mario ever got, get more than he got when he was first elected in 2010. He got less and couldn’t take our 5% of the voters for granted. To compete for those voters, he adopted a number of our demands that he had not supported before, including a ban on fracking, a $15 minimum wage, and paid family leave. Cuomo was not happy about that. Greens will be back running local candidates in the next few years, even if it means more ballot access petitioning. Greens understand that building a political base and foothold in the political system through local elections is the foundation for winning seats in state legislatures and the House and advancing real solutions to the problem of climate, poverty, racism, and war.
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