The Green Party Almost Always Loses

You can’t build ecosocialist power when you never win

The Green Party of the United States (GPUS or Greens) is a big tent of social democrats & democratic socialists who prioritize environmental issues.

As a democratic socialist, I wish they held more power. Unfortunately, they do not and will not. The Green Party loses 99.8% of non-local elections and loses 77.2% of meaningful local elections:

The Green Party holds very few elected seats, wins no real power, and poses no threat to centrist Democrats or to capitalism. That’s because the Green Party pursues a failed strategy.

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The Green Party is the most successful leftist party in the US

The Greens compete for elections exclusively on the Green ballot line. This is the “clean break” strategy: Greens hope to win general elections and electoral power outside of the Democratic Party.[1]

On this measure, the Greens are the most successful leftist political party in the US for the past 40 years. Currently, the Greens hold about 150 elected seats, more than any other leftist clean break party:

• 0 Senate seats

• 0 House seats

• 0 statewide seats

• 0 state upper chamber seats

• 0 state lower chamber seats

• 4 mayor seats

• 39 city council seats

• about 105 other seats

Using the elected official counts from my earlier blogpost, we can calculate that Greens control about 0.025% of mayors & other local executives, 0.022% of city councils & other local legislatures, and 0.033% of other local elected offices:

That might be hard to see. Here’s a 100-times zoomed-in version:

As the graphs above suggest, “most successful leftist party” is an extremely easy competition. Currently, socialist parties in the United States hold:

• CPUSA: 1 city council seat (Denise Winebrenner-Edwards)

• SPUSA: 3 school board seats, 1 taxation district seat

• SAlt: 0 seats

• PSL: 0 seats

• FSP: 0 seats

• WWP: 0 seats

• SWP: 0 seats

• WCP: 0 seats

• SEP: 0 seats

• SAct: 0 seats

• SCWP: 0 seats

Put another way: If you, dear reader, started a political party and won 5 school board seats, you would lead the 2nd most successful leftist party in the US. Leftist electoral power outside the Democratic Party is pathetically weak.

In absolute terms, the Greens are also powerless. Just ~45 of the ~150 seats above have any real power. All of those seats are local. None have the capacity to make major changes. These seats CAN be stepping-stones to higher office, but have yet to do so for a single Green candidate. The Greens last won a state legislative race in 2006, 18 years ago. To add insult to injury, that winner is now a MAGA Republican.

One could protest that this criticism is unfair, because the Greens simply aim to be a “protest vote” against the Democrats. In fact, Green presidential candidate Jill Stein explicitly cited the number of Green electeds as one of two “yardsticks” of Green power:

You’re not in the universe of independent political alternatives, so you are not the yardstick against which to measure Green growth. For that, you really have to compare us to other non-corporate parties, which are not bought and paid for. And if you look at those parties, the Greens are actually a huge pillar of strength.

Stein correctly argues that the Greens hold more elected seats than all other leftist clean break parties. Stein falsely calls this “a huge pillar of strength”, because the bench of Green electeds is small, not growing, and not powerful.

In short: The Greens are more successful than all other leftist parties. However, the Greens are not a successful leftist party.

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When Greens run for office, they almost always lose

Stein provides a second yardstick of Green power: Green candidates win election and re-election “at pretty high rates”:

In fact, we have elected some 1500 [candidates], and we currently have 150 active officeholders, who’ve been elected and are actually re-elected at pretty high rates.

Unfortunately, Stein is wrong on both points.

The section above shows that very few Greens hold meaningful office. The reason for that is simple:

Hundreds of Greens run for office each year, and the vast majority of them lose.

Between 1985 and October 2024, Green candidates for elected office won just 19.8% (or lost 80.2%) of their elections:

There is no obvious trend in the Green win rate over time, upward or downward:

Since 2000, despite a dramatic increase in the popularity of leftist ideals and memberships of leftist groups, the Green Party has failed to substantially increase its win rate or win count.

In fact, the 19.8% rate above actually overstates Green electoral success. Greens only see meaningful electoral success at the local level:

• Federal: 0% won

• Statewide: 0% won

• State legislatures: 0.3% won, 4 wins[2]

• Local: 32.0% won, 1251 wins

Local elections account for a staggering 99.7% of Green election victories in the past 40 years. Greens have had an extremely hard time climbing the electoral ladder from near-powerless local positions.

As the graph below shows, Greens lose virtually all elections beyond the local level:

Again, there is no obvious trend in the Green win rate over time, upward or downward:

In fact, this breakdown also overstates Green electoral success. We can further divide elected seats into those with meaningful power (local executives, legislatures, judges, etc.) and those with almost negligible power (election judges, taxation districts, school boards, etc.). If we do so, then the win rates are:

• Federal, meaningful: 0% won

• Federal, negligible: 0% won

• Statewide, meaningful: 0% won

• Statewide, negligible: 0% won

• State legislature, meaningful: 0.3% won, 4 wins

• State legislature, negligible: n/a

• Local, meaningful: 22.8% won, 545 wins

• Local, negligible: 46.5% won, 706 wins

Most of the Green election victories since 1985 are negligible local positions. The Green win rate for meaningful local positions is 2/3 that of the Green win rate for all local positions. And as the graph below shows, this win rate has not changed over time:

This is not particularly surprising. Stein argued that it is more important to be independent of the Democrats than to win power:

I wanna clarify several points of misinformation in your video. First, running as a third party, it really doesn’t matter whether your party is 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th. The question is whether you are an independent alternative, independent of this big money machine, that’s bought and paid for by the corporations and billionaires[.]

In my personal experience, a supermajority of Green voters hold similar views. Most Green voters will reject the leftmost viable candidate and vote their conscience, even if they lose badly and gain nothing.

I understand the appeal for this view, which does not require any compromise around one’s views. However, this is not a strategy for a power-building party. It is a strategy for a protest vote party.

In short: The Green Party holds no federal-level or state-level seats, and just 0.03% of local seats. When Green candidates run, they win 0% of their elections for federal and statewide seats, 0.3% for state legislature seats, 22.8% for meaningful local seats, and 46.5% for negligible local seats.

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When Greens run for re-election, they win at normal rates

Stein was wrong to tout Green electeds as a “pillar of strength” and wrong to claim that Greens win elections “at pretty high rates”. Is she right that Greens have a higher re-election rate?

No. When Greens win election and run again for the same office, they win about 57% of the time:

That’s not a stellar re-election rate. Most Greens run in very small cities. Smaller cities usually have less-competitive elections, which favor favor incumbents.

For comparison:

• de Benedictis-Kessner 2018: Among all incumbent mayors of cities above 10,000 residents, the re-election rate was about 45%.

• Trounstine 2011: Among incumbent city councillors in Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, and San Jose, the rate was about 55%.

In short: The Greens have a typical re-election rate.

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What durable power has the Green Party built?

The results above strongly suggest that the Green Party has not successfully “built power”. I don’t blame them: It is extremely hard to beat the two-party system, as shown in “Third Parties Almost Always Lose”.

In fact, the Green Party had some of the best conditions to try to break this pattern. In 2000, the Greens had the strongest leftist Presidential run in 50 years. The Nader campaign claimed 75,000 donors and 150,000 volunteers, and won 2.9 million votes, or 3% of the popular vote:

With these tailwinds, what did the Green Party win? Not much.

About 30% more Green candidates ran after Nader, but they had the same rate of success as before Nader: No federal wins, no state wins, no increased rate of local wins.

Since then, the number of Green candidates has slowly declined. 2016 saw a small bump in candidates, when Stein won 1% and Sanders revived the socialist movement. However, that bump had disappeared by 2019, and the Green Party is now running the fewest candidates in 20 years:

The reason for this is simple: The Green Party is pursuing a failed strategy, the “clean break” strategy. Leftists and socialists have run independent campaigns from the Democrats for decades and decades and decades. It never built mass support for our views or attracted mass support for our organizations.

In contrast, Sanders’ 2016 run in the Democratic primary did more to inspire popular and organizational support for socialism than any other event in the last 40 years. DSA runs on the Democratic ballot line and works to beat centrists in Democratic primaries. In a typical year, DSA wins about 40 state legislature elections, which is 40 times better than the best Green election year.

I call this the "Dem Ballot Line Premium". Take state legislative elections: These have real power, and leftists can win them consistently when they contest them through the Dem ballot line. It is roughly 20 times harder for an Independent ballot line (and about 180 times harder for a Green ballot line) to win election than for a leftist to win the primary AND general election for a state legislative election:

Socialists should embrace the Dem Ballot Line Premium. It has costs:

• We lose some independence from the Democratic party. (But not always: See Rashida Tlaib's excellent criticism of Israel's brutal war on Gaza.)

• Our politicians may be pulled rightward by the Democratic Party. (Of course, Green candidates also get shifted right: See MAGA Republican John Eder or Cynthia McKinney's arguments that Jews control America.)

It also has rewards:

• We can actually pass policies, like the Build Public Renewables Act.

• Close primaries (like Sanders 2016) and primary wins (like AOC 2018) can inspire millions to become socialists and tens of thousands to join our organizations.

"Breaking the duopoly" has value. "Criticizing the Democrats from the left" has value. But these values are finite.

Socialists who reject the Dem Ballot Line Premium should ask themselves: Do they have enough value that you should make it between 20 and 180 times harder to win electoral power?

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Conclusions and shilling

In short: The Green Party loses 100% of federal elections, 99.7% of state elections, and 80% of local elections. The Green Party holds just 45 seats with law-setting power. Neither trend is upwards. The clean break strategy has paid tiny dividends for immense effort. Socialists should embrace the Dem Ballot Line Premium.

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The data for this article comes from my sheet, GPUS Elections 1984-2024, which is a combined and slightly cleaned version of the GPUS Elections Database.

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Notes

[1] In contrast, those who support “inside” strategies (often progressives) and “inside-outside” (often socialists) strategies hope to win primaries within the Democratic Party and to pressure Democrats to shift left.

[2] 2 of these 4 state legislature wins were Democrats who ran as Green for ballot access purposes: Fred Smith and Richard Carroll. Both switched to Democrat soon after their election.