Congratulations are due to Georgia's Green Party, which has become the second state GP organization to get itself disaffiliated from the Green Party of the United States within the past year or so. Georgia is the largest state so far to have its chapter ejected from GPUS. The vote tally was 119 Yeas, 17 Nays, and 6 abstentions.
The other state that lost affiliate status this year is Alaska,"de-accredited" in January 2021 rather than "disaffiliated." Alaska's official Green presence, according to some National Committee members to whom I've spoken, was just "one guy, and he's a Berniecrat." After last year's Presidential Nominating Convention, there was talk of tossing Rhode Island due to its State Executive Committee's decision not to place the duly nominated presidential ticket of Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker on the state's ballot. The official affiliation for Rhode Island was instead switched to a group called the Ocean State Green Party. There is no National Committee vote on Rhode Island to which I can link you. TERF War, Anyone? As you might see from a keyword search for Georgia Green Party, the site georgiagreenparty.org has been taken down. There is currently a brief Wikipedia entry summarizing the disaffiliation. The National Committee's motivating factor for kicking out Georgia was the adoption of "trans women are not really women" language in its platform, in violation of at least one of the Ten Key Values. The platform language arises from the Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist angle, not the "God made only male and female" perspective. Not all Georgia Greens share that view, as you might imagine, but enough of the state's Green leadership does that it warranted disaffiliation. The Lavender Greens Caucus led the campaign to remove Georgia's affiliate status. This was not a summary judgment: It followed months of negotiations, including with a "Dialog, Not Removal" faction (DNR) that wanted to reach a compromise, with Georgia's GP censured at most rather than removed. The problem was that the Georgia group dug in its heels on the matter. Apart from disassociating the party from a group of TERFs, it's tempting to just say "no great loss." Due to Georgia's absurdly prohibitive ballot access laws, the Greens there have never (or maybe once?) secured a statewide ballot line. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka were successfully included as a write-in ticket there in 2016. The hope is that a different group will do the work required to get the state organized again. Blatantly Burying the (Potential) Lede Teaser: In a future post (sorry I've continued to post so infrequently of late), we may learn how this disaffiliation trend will affect Greendom in the Houston area. However, at this time there isn't enough useful information to make a complete story of it. I will say that there is a group within GPTX that wants to disaffiliate a county chapter due to its leadership sharing the position of the Georgia Greens' leaders. More if anything actually happens.
This entry is adapted (unrolled, if you will, and edited slightly) from a thread that I tweeted out yesterday. The tweets might not appear in their correct order, because sometimes my Twitter-fu is not so sharp.
Hypothesis: If the Democrat Party didn't show up for an election, the majority of Texas Democrats would vote either Republican or not at all rather than vote Green. It is based on observations, not on anything quantifiable.
This (Delilah's tweet, embedded above) got me in a hypothetical frame of mind: Suppose the Democratic Party of Texas, having nominated a string of "dude, really?" candidates for governor since the 1990s, sees the futility & decides not to waste time & money.
So, in this hypothetical situation, with the Dems sitting it out, the race comes down to Gregg Abbott (or possibly Allen West), a Green, a Libertarian, and a scattering of independents or write-ins. How would the vote go among self-identified Democrats? The Green nominee could be Delilah, or it could be a Green with a proven track record in politics and statewide name recognition. Let's go with the latter for now. My bet is that more Texas Democrats would vote for the Republican nominee—the devil they know—than for the Green. Some Dems would vote Libertarian, some would write in their dream candidate, and quite a few (probably the majority) wouldn't vote in that race at all. This is my conclusion based on (1) living here a long time & (2) my own race for Harris County Judge in 2014. In 2014, more Harris County residents undervoted the County Judge race than voted for me. This was due mostly to one-punch, straight-ticket voting, which is now a thing of the past. (I hope it stays in the past.) Granted, Ed Emmett was a moderate conservative and quite popular among Houston-area Democrats, while Abbott is not. However, for all the talk about how Greens and Democrats are (supposedly) ideologically similar, Dems will dig in their heels & not vote Green even when their favorite Dem office-holders behave and legislate like the Republicans they claim to despise. The Green Party represents a bigger threat to them than the GOP. To me, this is both deeply troubling and...amazingly exciting. Ooooh, the power! An Additional Thought That Wasn't Part of the Twitter Thread It's important to note that voting patterns at the state level differ from the federal level: That whole phenomenon, just as there are differences between voting for Congressional seats and voting for president. It's not uncommon for voters to pick, say, a Democrat to represent them in the US House (especially an incumbent Democrat) but pick the Republican presidential candidate, or vice versa. My own pattern is that I'm willing to vote for Democrats for State Legislature and county government, but not for POTUS, Congress, or state executive offices. For the latter group, if there's a Green, I'll vote Green; otherwise, Libertarian (if the Libertarian is not demonstrably an asshole) or abstain. I may not always agree with Borris Miles or Shawn Thierry, but I'll vote for them—not that they need my help, being in absurdly State Senate and State House districts, respectively. Friends, on Independence Day and on every day, remember that freedom isn't free.
That shit all costs money. Freedom—the ability to realize one's full potential as a citizen—is often won by dissenters whom the state has deprived of their freedom, their basic rights, their means to live, their pathways to prosperity. Conditions grow so intolerable that they & their allies risk beatings & shootings from the people hired to protect the wealthy & powerful. If you love your freedom, thank a protester. |
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