Jan 10, 2011

Green Party Strategy in 2011

From Michael Kwiatkowski at FireDogLake:

I’m going to be attending a meeting of the Northeast Ohio Green Party on the 18th of January. We’ll be discussing strategies for future elections in Ohio, particularly Northeast Ohio. This is especially important in light of the GOP’s efforts to remove two of Ohio’s Democrats from Congress by way of redistricting, likely Dennis Kucinich, Marcia Fudge, Betty Sutton, or Marcy Kaptur. Any two of these four Democrats could be on the Congressional chopping block. This means even less representation of the public than we have currently, and we haven’t much to begin with.

But it also presents Greens with an opportunity to expand our own efforts in Northeast Ohio. With legislative districts being redrawn to favor Republicans and hurt Democrats, areas that were previously closed to third parties because of strong Democrat presence may open up. This means we can run truly leftist candidates in areas where Democrats simply don’t bother or have been pushed out because of the redistricting. Also helping is the official ballot recognition of third parties in Ohio, which allowed Greens and other outside political parties to obtain ballot access for the first time last year.

The time to build up progressive political parties is now . . .

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is great that Ohio now has 6 ballot-qualified parties, but that situation is somewhat fragile. Greens in Ohio must be proactive with the Ohio legislature, which will probably pass a new ballot access law this year. Libertarians in Ohio have been working as hard as they can with the legislature, to make sure that the new ballot access law is tolerant, but they could use some help.

DLW said...

What Greens shd focus on is pushing for 3-seated state assembly elections...

It wd help them to win seats and incentivize them to help persuade more nonvoters to vote for them in local winnable elections and to vote strategically with them in not-so-local or winnable elections. But if turnout increased, it would throw a wrench in any gerrymandering of US congressional districts by upsetting historical voter patterns.

dlw