Why Green have Both Won and Lost
Despite growing alarm over climate change, the Green Party isn't gaining any traction in the 2008 US presidential elections. What's more, for a party whose founding platform was one of environmental protection, tackling human induced global warming doesn't even seem to be on their radar this election season.
Instead, an immediate pullout from Iraq, reforming immigration laws, axing the No Child Left Behind law, and legalising marijuana were the issues of the day at the party's first 2008 presidential primary debate held earlier this month in San Francisco.
The Green's failure to embrace environmental issues isn't because Americans are no longer worried about a warming world. Rather, the issue of climate change has already been subsumed by the Democratic Party; all of the leading Democratic candidates, and at least one Republican hopeful, are embracing mandatory cap and trade schemes for greenhouse gas reductions.
For the Greens, or any third party, to stand a chance in US presidential elections, they have to push ideas that the two leading parties are ignoring.
The best, recent example of this was in 1992 when Reform Party candidate Ross Perot won 19% of the vote by calling for a reduction in the federal budget deficit at a time when neither the Democrats nor Republicans wanted to touch the issue.
But even if the Green Party does find a killer issue – and the ones listed above seem dubious to me – the odds are still staked against them. Plurality voting, the voting system used to elect presidents in the US, makes serious third-party contenders virtually impossible.
The last time a third-party candidate became president of the United States was in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln of the then-minority Republican Party beat the Whigs and Democrats on an anti-slavery platform.
So what's the point of a third party in US presidential politics? If the goal is not to actually win the election but to push the leading parties into adopting your issues as their own, I'd say the Greens have already won.
Phil McKenna, New Scientist contributor
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2 comments:
Very interesting. I see a sort of double standard here: If the Repbulican party were to abandon its main platform and embrace an issue that no one was covering (for instance getting rid of the national debt) people would question the overall stability of the party and not vote for them. [same thing for the Democratic Party] But the mostly ignored Green Party and other third parties can get away with that sort of thing...interesting. I can't wait for the next issue as powerful as slavery which brought us the Republicans...
I like this article a lot it explains how the green party is adopting in the past years to stay alive un like the bull moose party. But it is also great because it shows that even though they can not get a canidate to win the electon they are still changeing the american polices to what the what to happen. It's one of those factions that is gaining a little head way in america.
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