(Updated 7 November 2020) A Green Politician in Texas Since 1995, I have considered the Green Party my political home, as I participated in the Harris County Green Party Organizing Committee. Gravely disappointed in President Clinton's capitulation to Newt Gingrich's Republican wave in Congress, I cast a write-in vote for Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke for President and VP in 1996. My comrades and I didn't get very far in the actual organizing part, with members coming and going, but we did lay the groundwork for what became the HCGP by 1999. I attended my first HCGP meeting in January 2000, followed by the state convention in March of that year.
2000-2010 The whole period from March to November 2000 was magical, with a successful petition drive to appear on Texas ballots and three Green candidates for statewide office achieving the necessary 5% to maintain ballot access (thanks in part to the Democratic Party's lack of candidates for those offices).
In the years since, with plenty of highs and lows, the county and state Green Parties have not recaptured the same magic. There are multiple viewpoints on why they have not, but most of it boils down to a steep decline in the number of volunteers and donors after the 2002 election. The party did not recover its ballot line until 2010, and by then Nader was long gone from Green circles.
2012-16 In both 2012 and 2014, GPTX found about 50 candidates (myself include) to Occupy the Ballot, and both times at least one statewide candidate polled 5%. In 2016, the Democrats plugged all the holes, and the Greens' best showing was Martina Salinas's 3.26% in the race for Railroad Commissioner.
In 2014, the HCGP nominated me for County Judge. (No, you don't have to be a practicing attorney to be a county judge in Texas. It's just the misleading term for the county's chief executive—kind of like the Texas Railroad Commission, which has bupkis to do with railroads.)
The incumbent, Republican Ed Emmett, won as expected, and I wish him well.
There was no Democrat, thanks to a nominee who dropped out of the race in August.
The Libertarians did not field a candidate.
The final tally, according to the Harris County Clerk's office:
* The undervote refers to those who voted in other races but not this one. Most of the undervoters probably voted straight-ticket Democrat, not knowing or caring that several races had no Democratic candidate. If even half of those voters had actually looked at the down-ballot races, I might have captured a much more respectable share of the vote than 16.6%.
2018 and Beyond Since 2018, the Party has been in a rebuilding phase. It may be a painful metamorphosis, as members struggle over visions of the Party's future and strategies for long-term survival. Stay tuned, if you wish. We hope to reconstruct and re-energize the Harris County Green Party in this new decade.
The 2020 election played out in the shadow of the global COVID-19 pandemic and some new electoral rules in Texas. The previous year, the Republican-led Texas Legislature passed, and Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed, HB 2504. This law grants ballot access to any political party that has achieved 2% of the vote in any statewide race in any of the previous five general elections; however, it also imposes filing fees or petition requirements on all candidates. My run for US Senate would require $5,000 or 5,000 signatures from registered Texas voters who must pledge not to vote in the next primary elections.
Only two Green candidates paid to run; the rest of us filed under a temporary injunction that barred state and county authorities from enforcing the fee. When the federal court lifted the injunction, the rules were back in effect. In August, just before the deadline for counties to publish ballots, Democratic candidates went to state court to get unpaid Greens off the ballot. The 3rd Court of Appeals ruled in the Democrats' favor; the State Supreme Court overturned that decision, pointing out that HB 2504 did not specify a deadline for fees or signatures, so it could not reasonably be enforced.
Without knowing whether I would be on the ballot, it didn't make sense to solicit donations. So we non-payers raised and spent $0. We still got a fair number of votes from Texans who either support our policies, despise the corporatist Duopoly, or both. However, no statewide candidate received the necessary 2% to extend Green ballot access through 2030.
As of this writing, with the vote count ongoing, in the US Senate race I have received 81,709 votes, 0.73% of the total. There are about 165,000 undervotes this time, which cannot be blamed on straight-ticket voting. (Texas eliminated one-punch voting, beginning in 2020.) Running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, stalwart Texas Green katija gruene has 128,471, or 1.18%.
I see HB 2504 as an opportunity for the Green Party of Texas to get serious about raising funds for filing fees or signature gathering; although I'm not fond of fundraising, I look forward to participating in that effort for 2022.
1% of 3% Greens appreciate that democracy consists of much more than voting. There is organizing, agitating, pressuring elected officials, and spreading the word about your cause or party. Studies have shown that it takes just 3.5% of a population agitating for a cause to tip society in favor of that cause, as Extinction Rebellion frequently points out.
More than a quarter-million Texas voters have demonstrated their willingness to vote for Green candidates in down-ballot races, even with Republican and Democratic opponents. Martina Salinas received more than 287,000 votes in 2016, or 3.28%. Imagine if only 1% of that number became active Greens, participating in their local Green Party affiliates. Almost 3,000 people working to promote and expand the Green Revolution in Texas would be literally awesome.
Electoral Math: Conventional Wisdom is Wrong Here are two things every Texas voter needs to know, regardless of party affiliation. I don't often resort to ALL CAPS, but...
THERE IS NO DANGER OF SPOILING A DEMOCRAT'S CHANCES IN A STATEWIDE RACE IN TEXAS BY VOTING GREEN!
THIS ALSO APPLIES TO PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS: NO DEMOCRAT IS GOING TO WIN TEXAS'S 38 ELECTORAL VOTES!
Most registered voters in America are either unaware or vaguely aware that something called the Green Party exists. Most would not be able to name the Greens' 2012 and 2016 Presidential nominee: Dr. Jill Stein of Massachusetts. In 2012 I had the great fortune of hanging out with Dr. Stein for a few days in San Antonio, then seeing her nominated at the GPUS Convention in Baltimore. In 2016, I got to drive her around the campus of the University of Houston when the convention happened there.
Back In 2012, I was fairly confident that Dr. Stein would take about 2% of the vote in Texas, and I might get something close to that; several polls backed up my assumption. What does it say about Texas and 2012 that she received only about 0.30% statewide while I received 0.86% running for the Senate?
There are dozens of possible answers, some of them even plausible: Texas progressives may have actually believed that President Obama had a chance to win Texas, and decided that voting for him rather than a third-party candidate would actually make a difference. Then again, there may have been thousands of Green voters who decided that it was safe to vote for me, but who felt compelled to vote for the candidate most likely to defeat Mitt Romney. Most of the answers come down to this, though: how uninformed, under-informed, misinformed, or just plain deluded our electorate has been.
But It's Not The Voters' Fault The US Media Machine is built to keep voters in the dark. We get more information than we can process every day, but only a small fraction of that information is useful. Also, both major parties have become so appalling that most voters express their political preference by not voting at all: Witness the 33% turnout in Harris County and Texas in November 2014, which grew to more than 52% in 2018, but that's still a huge number of non-voters. Democrats finally won control of Harris County government and judicial seats in 2018; they can thank Donald Trump's election, and perhaps Beto O'Rourke's matinee idol looks, for waking people up to the importance of voting.
Statewide, however, the Democratic Party has become a chihuahua nipping at the heels of the Republican juggernaut. In statewide races, Republicans beat Democrats typically by 60-40 margins, or at least 55-45. O'Rourke outpolled Ted Cruz 58-41% in Harris County, but lost 51-48% overall. That's a huge improvement, but it remains to be seen whether Democrats can sustain it: the margins in other races were not so close.
The major task of a Green Party activist is finding people ready, willing, and able to vote their hopes rather than their fears. This is especially true In Texas, where we do not register by party, so you can't go to the Tax Assessor-Collector's office and buy a list of registered Greens. You'd be amazed how difficult it is to turn pissed-off adults into Green regulars, to get people to channel their anger into preserving the future.
Among Progressives, there is plenty of anger toward the Democratic Party and its shenanigans in the primaries, as the 2020 campaigns illustrated. However, that anger did not translate into a groundswell of support for the Green presidential ticket in this state or nationwide. The main objective was to evict Donald J. Trump from the White House. Opinion polls made it look as though Joe Biden had a chance to win Texas's 38 Electoral Votes; true to form, a lot more Progressives seem to have swallowed their anger and voted for Biden/Harris. Trump still won Texas by 5.77 percentage points, far more than the 1.4% for the Libertarian and Green tickets combined. There were even polls showing a Blue Wave pushing MJ Hegar toward catching up with John Cornyn; that Blue Wave fizzled, as Cornyn won by a million votes, or 9.82 percentage points.
As of this writing, Joseph R. Biden and Kamala D. Harris appear to have captured a slim victory. Trump may be on the way out, but the conditions that allowed him to take the presidency in 2016 are still in place. The neoliberal austerity agenda is still in place. The fascistic police state is still in place. Wall Street and the Pentagon are still very much in command. Climate disruption will continue to accelerate, but so will development of fossil fuels. The Democratic Party will not take a lesson from progressive victories in Congressional races; it will take donations from its corporate puppetmasters to squelch Green New Deal and single-payer health care legislation. All this is what our Progressive pals voted for when they were gaslighted in voting for Biden/Harris.
As Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker have said, the next phase of opposition to this regime begins now.