Like many Democrats, I’m impressed by the $5 million Jill Stein and the Greens are raising for recounts in the Mid-West. I don’t know who this money is coming from, but this is unlikely to overturn the results of those states.
So, progressives, leftists and Democrats should turn their efforts to the future. We would see more good happen if this amount of money were raised to turn the legislatures of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana Democratic. Even New York needs to turn its Senate back to a Democratic majority. What if the Greens made a deal to campaign for Democrats in these legislatures in exchange for greater environmental protections in state law and regulation? We could make real progress toward social justice and environmental justice. As long as the Republicans control Michigan’s legislature and governor’s office, the people of Flint will never get a proper, safe water system like all the wealthy suburbs of Michigan have.
Last point:Trump won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes... and Jill Stein had about 30,000 voters there. Sure, Wisconsin alone was not enough for Hillary to lose the Electoral College, but these numbers indicate that if Green voters ally themselves with Democrats in swing states early in the cycle, they can help keep climate change deniers out of power.
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19 Comments on "Forget the Wisconsin Pres. Race–Look at Legislative Races."
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You lost me at Let’s Make A Deal
Your post is well written and I appreciate the thought that you put into it. I jumped ship when you suggested that Greens bargain with Democrats to get environmental protections. No, no, no! That is what Democrats are supposed to be leading on. Greens are progressive Democrats, “socialist democrats” who have left the party of insider politics, pandering and caving. Greens are highly principled and not willing to compromise the future of the planet and the human race.
It is disingenuous (no, make that nauseating) to voters to see big D pols targeting blacks, latinos, women and now Greens to do what the party should have been doing and leading on all along.
That is the root of the problem. That is why there are so many disillusioned voters who were formerly Democrats, or people who could/should be attracted to the Democrat party. The party is not authentic in it’s walk….talks the talk but flirts with Wall Street and caved too often over the past two decades for anyone to believe that democratic candidates and the party have principles that don’t waiver and flip-flop.
By not helping stop Trump.
Look at the other side’s “principled” people, among them Evangelicals. They know Donald Trump is the least Christian presidential candidate in word and deed. But they voted for him, and they will get at SCOTUS justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade (and in reality, increase the number of abortions–I could go on for a long time about how this is to the women of the USA but I’ll stop) because that is their goal and they made the strategic move to achieve it.
Donald Trump’s appointees will not advance any environmental protections for the next 4 years, and the Earth needs that protection.
The Greens can help protect it, by supporting Democrats in the races on the margins–and that’s even more effective than just one person driving around in a Prius.
Nobody — no political party, no non-profit, no religion or church, and no person — has a monopoly on the best way to achieve a better world. Hell, it’s just as logical (read: unreasonable) to state that if only all the Dems had supported Greens that Jill Stein would have defeated Trump.
heartland is right. The best way to get the Greens to team up with the Dems is for the Dems to actually work and actually achieve some of the Green ideals. As a Democrat environmentalist, I worry how much weaker the Dems would be on environmental issues without the Greens. In my opinion, the Green Party does a heck of a lot more than drive around a single Prius, and I think your flippant dismissal of their efforts is pretty crummy.
I don’t see anything wrong with that and just makes the case for doing it stronger anyway – a win-win in my book.
What does the Green Party do as far as policy or influence? It’s late now (for me) and my mind draws a blank as I try to think of their efforts.
on the harmful effects of vaccination and wifi. The people who condemned Galileo were more pro-science than the Greens.
I am interested in learning about the Green Party’s influence on policy at local, state, federal levels of gov’t.
Educate me.
she and the Greens were used by Putin and the Russians to manipulate the outcome of the election in the Fascist Trump’s favor. Exhibit One : she sat at the same table with then General ( now National Security Director nominee ) Flynn at the Russian propaganda TV event. Both of them sat on either side of Putin !
The Fascist Putin has played both the American left and right to advance Russian interests OVER America’s national interests !
We played right into his Svengali hands. FOOLS !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Do you have a video or something? I think she could have been a spoiler, but for now she is doing the right thing IMO.
Is a Russian spy.
n/m
if it were posted in all caps, with extra exclamation points for emphasis.
An autonomous organization. You don’t like it, you join it, you create a faction, you try to take it over. It’s easy to get involved with the party. It’s a bit more difficult to move up to the state level. Christopher is on the DSC. JTM has road blocks to moving up, but he’s involved in the party. The Democratic Party is a large, national and state, representatively democratic organization. It’s not Walmart. There isn’t a customer service desk. You can’t just change the products because a few people don’t like them.
As in any large organization, there are vested interests. There is also a lot of sausage-making. The fatal flaw of the Greens is that they think they can be a viable party without diluting their ideals. It doesn’t work that way. The greater your membership, the more varied the opinions, the more the requirements of representation dilute the desires of individuals and small groups. Trying to unite is part of the sausage-making.
The United States is no different. Every organization has its problems. The larger the organization, the harder they are to fix. I could, for example, bitch about the deterioration of the American Red Cross, but I don’t belong to it. You want to change things, you want to win, get in the ring.
I’ve got like no short of making the state committee because of where I live. So, I gave up on that a while back.
n/t
One of the frustrations of Massachusetts political life is that Massachusetts Democratic Party is essentially irrelevant to all the things we talk about here. It has few, if any, carrots to offer candidates and groups who support our values, platforms, and pronouncements and no sticks with which to punish those who flagrantly violate them.
My understanding is that anybody who wants to can pull papers and run as a Democrat for any office of their choice, and they can run with any platform or program they choose. So long as they register as a Democrat, the Massachusetts Democratic Party will support them.
I invite Christopher, a resident expert, to correct anything I’ve mis-stated here.
I think our party is who we are, in the large. I think the reason that our Massachusetts state government is so often at variance with our ideals is that a great many Massachusetts residents choose, for whatever reason, to not participate in politics at all. They don’t vote, they don’t run, they don’t know or care who their local officials are or the offices that they hold.
My view is that if you want to participate in politics, then choose an office and make a run for it. There is nothing that the state committee can do to stop you, and little that they can do to help if you were a member.
If that’s what you want to do, then go for it.
It’s called the First Amendment.
The DSC doesn’t have to do much for you. The DNC, as we’ve seen, can work against you to some degree. The RNC had similar issues with a man named Trump.
I guess I’m still confused.
Is the “state committee” in question an organ of the DNC, or of the Massachusetts Democratic Party? I assumed the latter.
I was referring to a run at the local, not national, level.
Most DNC members are elected by the respective state committees so I guess in theory accountable to them as well. Another large bloc of DNC members are the state party chairs, who are of course elected by the state committees as well. The statutory state committee is elected by the Dem voters by senate district either directly on the presidential primary ballot or by a conference of delegates selected by the town and ward committee members in said district. Town and ward committees are themselves selected by the Dem voters on the presidential primary ballot. I for one don’t like that this means unenrolled voters who pull Dem ballots can have input on the composition of partisan committees. Additional state committee members are elected by the statutory state committee at the quadrennial reorganizational meeting to address demographic diversity. I for one do wish we would take platform adherence into account more when determining which races we target, but we’re stuck with our nominees as chosen by primary voters per state law.