I know. All those OTHER parties managed to break into the two party club. If all those others can do it, why can't the Greens? I guess they suck that much. Not enough of that work ethic that brought success to everyone who really wanted it.

Just kidding. Nobody has ever done it, have they? Weird. Maybe Democrats and Republicans really are the only ones who know from work.

Anyways. That's fine. You guys got this election all figured out. We suck. You hate us. The last thing you need is our votes. You guys know where the votes are. You're going to win over all those sweet, sweet independents and a big juicy chunk of relatively less batshit crazy Republicans. I bet you can taste victory now. What could go wrong?

@209 @210 @212
I've had Greens come to my door. The Democrats or Republicans don't, and the rest of the people at my address are registered Democrats. There is plenty of phonebanking going on in states where the Greens need signatures to get on the ballot.

Do you have any idea how much suppression of outside challengers goes on in the system? Do you think these emails with DWS and crew are an anomaly that even then is restricted to only within their own party? The Commission on Presidential Debates is owned by the Democrats and Republicans, that is why the League of Women Voters fully rescinded their sponsorship of the debates since 1988.

Those televised debates are the most important medium for any political figure to get noticed. The Greens have had social media accounts for a long time, but they hardly do everything you need it to when it comes to political campaigns, especially since the system is also rigged against the Greens on the internet as well. It took Jill and the Greens so long to be verified on Twitter, meanwhile a bunch of nobodies were getting verified left and right. Why was Jill Stein not on the Google search results for so long when you typed in "Presidential candidates"? There is something seriously wrong here.

Did most people find out about Hillary, Trump, or any of the gubernatorial or local major party candidates' campaigns in recent history through the internet? No, it was all through television.

Why did Cuomo have to be pushed to be in only one debate with Howie Hawkins and the other candidates in 2014? Why did the Commission on Presidential Debates change the polling approval percentage from 5%-15% in order to be included? Why did the Commission illegally use police to follow a blacklist during a debate, and keep Ralph Nader out of a remote screening of the debate that he had a ticket for? Why did the Commission have Jill Stein arrested outside of Hofstra, taken to a dark location, handcuffed to a chair surrounded by local police and Secret Service agents for hours until all the PRESS left the area? Why does the Commission claim they are non-partisan when they are bi-partisan? Why do "other" democratic nations, for example, Finland, have eight candidates in the televised debates? Because television is that important, and the Democrats and Republicans rely on fear to keep all the "suckers" in, and they cannot look that bad to outside challengers on television. Televised debates can change everything in terms of support and approval, look at that notable Kennedy and Nixon debate.

That is because they all know the importance of television, and they have all been bought out, and run by the same people.

As for avoiding to run for president, IF ANY THIRD-PARTY WANTS TO BE ABLE TO WIN LOCALLY, THEY MUST RUN CANDIDATES FOR PRESIDENT, BALLOT ACCESS AND OTHER BENEFITS ON A MORE LOCAL LEVEL ARE LARGELY AFFECTED BY THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS.

@213 That is the most sarcastically worded serious comment I ever saw in my life. What work? The Democrats and Republicans talk slightly different on some occasions, do the same terrible job as the other party, get everything, and then some. That is unfair to every voter.

This notion that the Democrats are entitled to anyone's votes is false. There should be instant-runoff voting, which could be implemented on a state or even local level and they could be different than other municipalities, just like the butterfly ballots in Palm Beach County that, amongst other things, led to the election of Bush in Florida. The ballots have not been printed yet, so tell your officials to make it a thing. It's funny, because Jill campaigned for this in Massachusetts, did the Democrats in power want it if they actually bought the whole "spoiler" concept? No, they didn't.

But regardless of what there should be, even under the system we have now, there is no such thing as a spoiler, and do not point at the hero Ralph Nader. Bush was elected in Florida mostly because of the 308K+ registered Democrats who voted for Bush, and the fact that there was no recount, not to mention the Democratic Party's apathy to the whole incident.

I do not understand what people see so different in the two parties. Like I said before, they feared McCain, they feared Romney. What ended up happening since 2008? The most immigrant deportations under any president, expanded wars, bigger bailouts for Wall Street, a joke of a healthcare system when we were promised universal healthcare, and our president had two chambers of Congress with a Democratic majority, continues loss of civil liberties, and they thought all of these results would not have happened once Bush left office. Go figure.

Jason West, former two-time Green Mayor of New Paltz, New York, performed same-sex marriages for 25 couples, and he was charged for that, but eventually had the charges dismissed. New Paltz had a Green city council majority caused by that same election in 2003.

The next year, the Green Party's petition for the presidential election was successfully challenged, and the Greens did not appear on the ballot in New York State. That sounds like an odd series of events to me.

Jill Stein helped pass the Clean Elections Law in Massachusetts. The Democratic majority legislature repealed the law. That was when she left the Democrats for good, and joined the Green Party. She later filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the state's failure to pass the law. She got on a televised debate with Romney in 2002, the press mobbed her for the first and last time with news that the instant online viewer poll declared Stein the winner of the debate. They also stopped doing the instant online viewer poll for some reason. Since then, she was elected twice in Lexington, Massachusetts to a Town Meeting Seat, and since then, she ran for president once, during that campaign, she protested and got arrested multiple times, once for helping an evictions blockade in Philadelphia, for helping the tar sands blockade in Texas, and for protesting a violation of democracy. She has more than done the work, and that is why she deserves every at least decent person's support.

http://lwv.org/press-releases/league-ref…
You all need to wake up.

@215:

See, there's that narcissism working against you again. Democrats don't HATE you, we just get really, really exasperated by your constant unwillingness to work or play well with others. And then, to make matters worse, you constantly berate those who, for whatever reason, won't hoe your narrow, exclusive ideological row. Dripping sarcasm and vitriolic condescension are pretty much guaranteed to make people NOT want to consider your position, regardless of how sensible, necessary or constructive it might be otherwise.

Just take the damned chip off your shoulders already, and try for once to not treat everyone who deviates even slightly from your agenda as idiots, morons, and corrupt shills for the status quo.

@215 Christ you're a drama queen. And the entitlement! Jesus.

How much volunteering for the Green or the Democrats have you done? How much money have you donated? Clearly not fucking much. You don't like where the democrats are going then get in there and change them like the rest of have been doing for forty years. Oh? We haven't, you say? really? Um. What was the democratic platform on gay rights thirty years ago? Yeah. That's how long it took us. And that's how shit works. It takes time. Burning it all down doesn't work. It's never worked.

So. Quit your whining and quit foisting your responsibility on everybody else. Politics is hard. It takes work. It's for grown-ups. Like the rest of adulthood it means maybe doing things you don't like.

You may be fine with losing ground and ceding SCOTUS to the extreme right. You may be fine with rolling back the hard won rights of gays and women and minorities. You may be fine undoing sixty years of progressive battles through difficult compromises. But the rest of the adults here are not. We know we have lots of work to do.

We know it's going to take years. But you let another GOP reactionary extreme right take control and change is going to take decades to just to get back to where your entitled ass is right now.

Savage makes a logical argument and he's obviously knowledgeable, but its clear to me that he only has an outsider's understanding of 3rd party politics.

He makes a sound argument in suggesting that 3rd parties should try to build from the ground up by winning lower offices first, but that strategy by itself is simply not enough. His stance against running presidential candidates seems well thought-out, but what he doesn't understand is that 3rd parties NEED to make a presidential run to promote their message and grow.

Candidates for president, whether major or minor, are standard bearers for their party. They are the ones who attract the most attention and support for their party. Furthermore, the amount of support they gain during an election directly translates into how much media attention and funding they get later. If you look at the membership and donations made to any political party, you will notice that their peak growth occurs around the presidential election season. Not running a presidential candidate means missing a HUGE opportunity for them to grow. Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are running for president, but they have much more to gain than just an office. They're not as dumb as Dan Savage would have you think.

In the end, voting third party isn't about winning today; its about helping a new party grow and build momentum so that one day they CAN win.

@219:

The problem, however, is that running as a third-party candidate for national office is ineffectual if it is not also bolstered by significant electioneering at the local and state levels; a tactic most of the minor parties have demonstrated a woeful inability to actualize. GP'ers keep pointing to the 116 races where Greens are on the ballot in this current cycle or the roughly 100 low-level seats they currently hold, as if that was indicative of their resolve to build structure, but it only serves to emphasize how little they've progressed in that area in more than 3 decades, given there are literally hundreds of thousands of seats up for grabs in any given year. THAT is the "HUGE opportunity for them to grow" they consistently miss out on, and they don't seem to be showing any inclination, so far as I can tell at least, to do much of anything about it.

Perception bias, though. There aren't many Greens in this area because traditionally the progressives have been wedging into the Dems party around here. WA Greens is basically nonexistent. But that's just us. It's not the rest of the country.

I can’t speak as much to smaller parties or the Green Party (That either doesn’t have a lot of down ballot candidates or doesn’t promote them all that well) but the Libertarians definitely have ~150 office holders at the state legislative levels and (mostly) local level. Then in this current election they have 20 candidates for 19 US Senate seats, 120 Candidates for 113 congressional seats, 7 Gubernatorial candidates, 6 Lt. Gov. Candidates, a host of other state wide candidates (Various SoS’s, AG’s, Auditors, Treasures, etc…), 268 candidates for various state legislature seats as well as hundreds of people running for county and municipal positions all over the country.
All the press they get is for Johnson/Weld but they are definitely not just a 1 trick pony looking just at the big score.
They do try to build from the bottom up but getting a big splash at the top (even without a win or particularly close to it) gives all those other candidates a lot more credibility.
Anyone interested in some of this grassroots political change should check out your local ballots well before the election and see who is running for all these offices and check out some of the independent and 3rd party people to see if you would be interested in voting for them.

@217 You have nothing to say about anything I brought up in my last post?

The fact that television matters and the parties in power know it? The fact that the Democrats and Republicans own the Commission on Presidential Debates? The fact that the Democrats and Republicans have blacklists for people they don't like, for the debates and conventions, even remote screenings of for instance, a debate, so they illegally use the police to harass those people on the list?

Abby Martin of teleSUR was just assaulted and arrested yesterday at the DNC even though she listened to police orders. That is because the Democrats knew what she talks about on her web series, "The Empire Files", and they did not want her to by chance, get on national television.

How about the polling approval percentage that a Green candidate would need to get on those televised debates on five different national polls? How about the fact that the national polls do not always include third-party candidates? The powers that be do not want another voice, they work with the mainstream media to block out those voices, and especially after these leaked emails from the DNC, that is painfully obvious. I do not understand how blind some people are.

It is almost a miracle that the Green Party of the United States lasted this long, because so many other third-parties did not last this long. They do NOT accept corporate donations, or any large donation, and that is big, because what do you need to get big time coverage? A lot of money. When the national candidates do not get heard enough, that trickles down to the state and county parties, especially when the Democrats or Republicans demonize them in order to persuade people not to support alternative voices, especially voices that oppose this corporate establishment that we have had for years. When people do not hear alternative voices, you cannot expect anything to change significantly, and that is what the two parties want. That is abhorrent, and no one should support that.

I know one question that is holding people back from not supporting Hillary, is if Trump gets elected, who will he nominate to be a Supreme Court Justice? I would not worry about the Supreme Court if Trump gets in or not, because if we vote progressives into Congress this fall, then they will not accept a far-right nominee if Trump decides to nominate one like that. I would suspect that Hillary would nominate a Justice that would allow the TPP to pass, and Trump is not in favor of the TPP himself.

When you have Hillary supporting NAFTA, getting rid of many high-paying manufacturing jobs that naturally blacks and minorities would have mostly filled up, when you have Hillary labeling many blacks "superpredators", when you have Hillary supporting a mass incarceration bill, when you have Hillary supporting a welfare reform bill that threw the needy off welfare, including many minorities, and 70% kicked off were children, and most of the minorities and blacks still love her, there is a problem.

When you have Hillary voting for a border fence in 2006 to keep out the illegal immigrants, when you have Hillary supporting a Honduran coup that led to the death of a prominent activist, and refugees coming into the United States, when you have Hillary toppling the Libyan regime, causing more refugees coming to the United States, and turns around and supports deportations for undocumented immigrants, there is a problem.
When Hillary does all of these things, then picks a person who pushed informed consent laws in Virginia, discouraging pregnant patients from getting an abortion, supported offshore drilling, supported anti-union efforts, and supported the TPP, and after everything listed here, Democrats are still trying to convince voters, particularly progressive voters that this is the best they could offer to them as opposed to Trump, who has voiced his disapproval of the TPP, but talks about doing all of these other things that Hillary Clinton already did, and Hillary is supposed to be "better" than Donald Trump, there is a problem.

How disgusting it is to see these hypocrites piss on the world and get rewarded for it.

OK -- just a bit of advice. You will not get a third party candidate elected by using the "F" word every other sentence in an immature tirade. Not even for dogcatcher. If you want to play with the big boys and girls or have a candidate represent your views, you'll have to grow up and fit in a bit. Society does have standards. We all have had to learn these lessons. Grow a vocabulary....then try again.

@224 Did you just tone troll for anger at The Stranger?!!?

Idiot.

I don't know about other states, but Dan Savage is completely wrong when it comes to Minnesota. Every ballot I've seen here has Green Party and other minor party candidates up and down the ballot, from Watershed District to Governor. It's the voters who need to take the blame, by refusing to vote anything but D or R, even for local races.

This is a short video about how I transitioned from an Obama field organizer to Jill Stein supporter: https://youtu.be/k_iBXcJ51zs