Progressives have to look hard to see anything good about the election results in Texas. The 2014 election was a crushing defeat for progressives, and a huge win for the right-wing extremist teabaggers. That can't be denied. But there are a few bright spots, and one of them for me is that the Green Party scored enough votes to qualify them for the Texas ballot in 2016.
To qualify for the ballot in the next election, a party must have at least one candidate in a statewide race that garners at least 5% of the vote. The Green Party had three candidates (in statewide judicial races) that did that -- and Judith Sanders-Castro (running for Place 4 on the Court of Criminal Appeals) set a new record for statewide Green Party candidates by getting 10.45% of the vote (the first statewide Green candidate to get a double-digit percentage).
Some of the Greens running for a seat in the U.S. Congress did even better (taking advantage of races without a Democratic candidate). Her is a list of how the statewide and congressional Green Party candidates did in last Tuesday's election.
Statewide
US Senate - Emily "Spicy Brown" Sanchez - 1.17%
Governor - Brandon Parmer - .39%
Lieutenant Governor - Chandrakantha Courtney - .59%
Attorney General - Jamar Osborne - .63%
Comptroller of Public Accounts - Deb Shafto - .97%
Commissioner of Agriculture - Kenneth Kendrick - 1.68%
Railroad Commissioner - Martina Salinas - 2.04%
Commissioner of General Land Office - Valerie Alessi - 1.28%
Supreme Court Justice Place 7 - Charles E. Waterbury - .74%
Supreme Court Justice Place 8 - Jim Chisolm - 9.24%
Court of Criminal Appeals Place 4 - Judith Sanders-Castro - 10.45%
Court of Criminal Appeals Place 9 - George Joseph Altgelt - 8.56%
Districts
US Representative District 2 - Mark Roberts - .87%
US Representative District 3 - Paul Blair - 18%
US Representative District 13 - Don Cook - .70%
US Representative District 18 - Remington Alessi - 1.22%
US Representative District 21 - Antonio Diaz - 14.71%
US Representative District 28 - Michael D. Cary - 4.56%
US Representative District 35 - kat swift - 1.34%
US Representative District 36 - Hal J. Ridley, Jr - .51%
State Senate District 10 - John Tunmire - .60%
State Senate District 17 - David Courtney - .72%
State Representative District 42 - Nicholas Serna III - 11.55%
State Representative District 64 - Braeden Wright - 2.83%
State Representative District 80 - Marco Buentello - 10.4%
State Representative District 123 - Paul Ingmundson - 13.72%
State Representative District 130 - Art Browning - 9.23%
State Representative District 146 - Morgan Bradford - 8.12%
That's great - those petition drives are expensive and not much fun.
ReplyDeleteAnd Art did pretty well! I would have liked Deb Shafto and Don Cook to do better - they've put in a lot of years trying to organize a decent Green party movement in Harris County.
The numbers show two important differences for Green candidates:
ReplyDelete1. If there is no Democrat running (because the Texas Democrats are perennially short of funds & have to pick their battles), the Green will do well because the more progressive Democrats will vote Green. If there is no Republican (as in Morgan Bradford's race), the progressives and the Republicans will vote Green.
2. Green candidates who campaign actively, like Kendrick and Salinas, will usually get bigger percentages than those who don't. No big surprise there. Sanchez got a lot of mileage out of her nickname, but in the final months she traveled, made some speeches, and showed some social networking smarts.
In 2016, Texas Greens need to choose candidates willing & able to act like candidates. If it means having fewer candidates, with some people to serve as campaign staffers, let's do that.
But mostly, we need to spend the next year shaking some trees and turning Green voters into Green Party apparatchiks. 87,000 people statewide voted for Martina Salinas in a 4-way race. We can realistically turn 1% of that number into active Greens.