Green Party of the United States

The Green Party of the United States (commonly referred to simply as the "Green Party" or "Greens") is a left-wing, environmentalist US political party. The use of the term "green" in the party’s name symbolizes its commitment to environmental preservation and protection. Other issues important to the Green Party include social justice, peace and antiwar advocacy, and grassroots democracy. Tracing its origins to the summer of 1984, the Green Party has run a candidate for president of the United States in each presidential election since 1996—perhaps most notably in 2000, when consumer advocate Ralph Nader ran as the Green candidate and garnered nearly three million votes nationwide. In 2012 and 2016, the Green Party nominated former medical doctor Jill Stein as its candidate for the US presidency. Howie Hawkins, an activist and one of the cofounders of the Green Party, was the party's presidential candidate in 2020, and Stein resumed the candidacy in 2024. Candidates and supporters of the Green Party generally consider the Democratic Party (the more left-leaning of the nation’s two major political parties) to be less progressive than they desire and too beholden to the financial influence of lobbyists and corporate donors to promote a strong progressive political platform.

Background

At the time of the Green Party’s emergence in the mid-1980s, the United States was in the midst of the "Reagan Revolution"—a resurgence of conservative political ideology and principles that followed Republican Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980. The Republicans also gained a majority of seats in the US Senate in 1980, and Reagan easily won reelection in 1984 over his Democratic opponent, former vice president Walter Mondale. In 1988, Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, handily defeated the Democratic candidate, former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. The sting of three consecutive losses in the presidential election by considerable margins prompted Democratic Party leaders to reconsider their political message in order to present the party as more appealing to the conservative mood of voters. The ensuing retreat from the more left-wing social and economic policies that had defined the Democratic Party since the 1930s led some in the media to begin describing these more moderate party leaders as "New Democrats" by the late 1980s.

Committed progressives in the United States became frustrated with the Democratic Party’s shift toward the center, and some decided to take action. Today’s Green Party had its origins in a small meeting in 1984 in St. Paul, Minnesota, among just a few dozen progressive activists. The first loose organization established was called the Green Committees of Correspondence, intended to do local grassroots organizing with minimal national coordination. In 1991, a national organization, the Greens/Green Party USA (G/GPUSA) was founded. This organization chose to focus on grassroots organizing and movement building more than electing candidates to office; this choice of strategy was a point of contention from the start within the Green movement, with some wanting to avoid electoral politics and others wanting to form a disciplined political party. In 1996, people espousing the latter point of view established the Association of State Green Parties, which in 2001 evolved into the Green Party of the United States (GPUS).

The Green Party of the United States espouses the Ten Key Values established at the first meeting of Greens in 1984. They are: grassroots democracy, social justice and equal opportunity, ecological wisdom, nonviolence, decentralization of wealth and political power, community-based economics, feminism and gender equality, respect for diversity, personal and global responsibility, and future focus and sustainability.

In 1996, the Greens nominated their first presidential ticket, which consisted of Ralph Nader and his running mate, Native American activist and environmentalist Winona LaDuke. (They were not nominated nationally, but by numerous state Green parties, gaining a place on the ballot in twenty-two states.) Nader and LaDuke garnered less than 1 percent of the popular vote, although their candidacy legitimized the Green movement in national American politics. The party has run candidates in every presidential election since 1996; by mid-2024, more than 150 Green candidates held elected positions in local governments nationwide, and registered Greens had won some 1,500 races since the party's inception in 1985.

Overview

Perhaps the biggest influence that the Green Party has had on American politics occurred during the 2000 presidential election. Texas governor George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, narrowly defeated Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, in Florida by a mere 537 votes. In one of the closest presidential elections in US history, the vote in Florida ultimately proved to be the deciding factor in the 2000 election, as Bush’s slim victory in the Sunshine State enabled him to carry all 25 of Florida’s electoral votes, accumulate a total of 271 electoral votes, and thus defeat Gore to become president. Ralph Nader, the Green Party’s candidate once again in 2000, received almost 100,000 votes in Florida, leading many Democrats to see Nader’s candidacy as siphoning off votes that would have otherwise likely gone to Gore. Nader, the Green Party, and Nader’s supporters passionately challenged such assertions by pointing out that approximately half of all registered Democrats in Florida did not vote in the 2000 election, and even among those who did, more than 200,000 registered Florida Democrats voted for Bush—and this, they claim, is what ultimately cost Gore the victory.

The Green Party has not garnered the same degree of media attention since the 2000 election, however. In the 2016 presidential primary elections, the party’s espousal of a strong left-liberal political vision was overshadowed by the insurgent candidacy of US senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. A self-described democratic socialist who had served nearly three decades in the US Congress as an Independent, Sanders entered the 2016 race as a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Sanders’s campaign articulated many of the positions that the Green Party had long expressed support for, such as a stricter regulation of Wall Street commerce, the creation of a national health care system, an end to corporate influence in elections and congressional votes, and tuition-free college education for American citizens. Sanders earned the loyal support of many progressive voters, particularly those under the age of thirty, while 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein tried to assert her own political positions. Though Stein and her running mate, human rights activist Ajamu Baraka, gained just over 1 percent of the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election, critics again returned to the argument that the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would have won the election over Republican Donald Trump had it not been for the Green Party receiving a share of the popular vote in critical states.

The Green Party chose labor activist Howie Hawkins to run for president in the 2020 election. A democratic socialist, Greens hoped he would be able to gain some of Sanders's supporters. Ultimately, however, Hawkins received only .3 percent of the popular vote. The party returned to Stein as their selection as the 2024 presidential nominee, running against Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump. Fearful that the Green Party would once again pull votes from the Democratic candidate, Democrats attempted to remove Stein from ballots in key battleground states leading up to the election, while Republicans offered support in securing ballot access.

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