School Boards, State Houses, and Stein: The Green Party and Local Elections

President Barack Obama recently took to the Steve Harvey Morning Show to admonish listeners against voting for a third-party candidate in the upcoming presidential election, calling such a choice “a vote for Trump.” In a contest between two major party candidates with the highest unfavorable rankings in decades, the prospect of voters casting a substantial number of protest votes for third-party nominees has become a major concern for establishment politicians.

No third-party presidential candidate has won a state since segregationist George Wallace ran in 1968 and netted the electoral votes of five. Yet candidates outside the major party apparatus continue to fight for representation. Green Party nominee Jill Stein, making an overt play for the votes of Bernie Sanders holdouts, has been courting young progressives whom she hopes to draw away from the Hillary Clinton camp. After winning one-third of one percent of the vote in the 2012 race, Stein has established her intent to reach five percent in 2016 — a number that could both significantly disrupt the Clinton campaign and qualify the Green Party for partial public funding of their general election campaign in 2020. Even if Stein did manage to augment her popular support enough to clear this bar, however, her showing would remain largely symbolic. The Green Party’s electoral efforts, focused excessively on national presidential success, offer little chance of significant change in electoral outcomes (or subsequent policy outcomes) — particularly in off-election years — and are symptomatic of the larger American failure to value local elections.

Though Stein has received a fair amount of attention from disgruntled Sanders supporters, particularly in the wake of revelations that the Democratic National Committee attempted to undermine Sanders’ primary challenge to Clinton, the Green Party’s efforts to secure positions at the local and state levels are lackluster at best. Based on a rough count of candidates in the party’s database (which does not offer any numerical totals, only individual candidate profiles), the Green Party is running over 100 candidates for state and local offices up for election this November: a number brought into sharp relief when compared to the total 519,145 state and local elected officials in the United States. While not all these offices will necessarily be filled this November, the proportion of races featuring Green candidates remains meager.

In part, the many structural barriers to third-party participation in electoral contests dictate this state of affairs. In the winner-take-all, single-member-district American electoral process, significant incentives exist for parties to build broad coalitions before election day to garner enough support to field the winning candidate. Ballots at polling stations generally list major party nominees first, and even securing space on the ballot can be a challenge for third-party candidates. Alternative candidate supporters are more likely than voters who are firmly in the Republican or Democratic arena to feel too alienated from the political system to vote at all; televised presidential debates are restricted to candidates receiving at least 15 percent of support in the average of major polls. The barriers that Greens must overcome are substantial. Aside from Stein’s rising star power in an election that has left many voters dissatisfied with their two central choices, there is little reason why these challenges should be significantly less difficult at the national level. Hurdles to third-party candidacy exist at any stratum of the political battlefield, and a disproportionate presence at the national level stems more from Stein’s own promotional efforts than any ostensible accessibility of national contests beyond that of lower level elections.

Green Party national co-chair Andrea Mérida Cuéllar has forcefully denied accusations that the party has focused too heavily on the presidential race. She argues that presidential candidates garner popular attention for the Green Party on behalf of down-ticket candidates, who face required signature counts for state ballot access in the tens of thousands and have lower public profiles with which to attract sufficient names. Cuéllar is right to point out Stein’s potential to influence public opinion, but this alone has not translated to particularly robust gains on the grassroots level.

In many aspects, the party is neglecting the arena in which it could be most effective. Local elections can be ideal venues for minority inclusion; groups not substantially represented at the national level can still seize representation within local government, where they may be more concentrated. University of California, San Diego political science professor Zoltan L. Hajnal argues that America’s lack of voter turnout matters most at the local level because groups with little numerical sway in national elections can make up substantial proportions of the population within a smaller frame of geographical reference. The local level offers crucial opportunities for the Green Party to gain electoral ground and could often present far more realistic offices to target than the presidency.

In the words of scholar Jonathan Rauch, politics does not magically organize itself; it requires coalitions of elected officials, interest groups, and voters that become particularly massive at the national level. The Green Party is not only neglecting a potential arena of progress by ignoring local politics; their lack of focus in this area may actually be hampering their presidential efforts. Without power in institutions such as state houses and school boards, the Green Party lacks the type of political and organizational foundation necessary for a successful presidential run and a successful presidential administration.

The Green Party’s lack of local and state presence is particularly interesting in comparison to the wave of Tea Party activity that emerged in 2010, in no small part at these levels of influence. Even today, Tea Party candidates unable to find success in major races have deliberately turned their attention to local elections. Though the ideological bases of each party are in opposition, both constitute minority movements, and the Tea Party seems to have found a method of entry into electoral relevance far more effective than the Green Party’s attempts. While certainly factors beyond strategy impact the disparate outcomes of the two, the contrast is illustrative of the significance of local elections to political efforts outside the establishment system.

If the Green Party wishes to offer a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties and become more than a source of consternation for figures like Obama, a singular focus on the presidency will not aid them. Local elections, while far from immune to the sway of the GOP-Democrat binary, at least present fewer of the demographic challenges that locate themselves in the presidential race. At present, Stein offers a mostly symbolic resistance. To begin building a movement with greater heft than a series of brief quadrennial bursts of activity, the Green Party must move beyond Stein and invest in local and state races, including those that fall on years between presidential contests.

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