It will be interesting to see if he very partisan tendencies of the current national political scene generate increasing interest in third party candidates.

As usual when Pat LaMarche speaks she confuses me. Outside of Portland what races have they won?

The numbers she cites hardly add up to a majority. Just ask the Republicans in the state Legislature.

Maybe she has been drinking again and her math is a little hazy.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/specialrpts/alcohol/d4pat.htm

My mistake. After a little digging on the website she sites, it looks like the greens have won some races in Maine outside of Portland. In fact they have won a whopping 3 seats total in the last 5 years. Out of the Thousands of political contests held they won three. Those races include everything from School Board and Planning board, to Governor and President.

Using the metric of "races we have run in" is BS, if you they were a real party they would field a candidate in every race. The fact they can't stop smoking weed and dancing around their drum circle long enough to qualify or recruit sane candidates, and put together a coherent platform is the reason they don't hold more elected offices; certainly not because of grand conspiracy.

The fact is; a third of Maine voters identify them selves as independent and those votes are up for grabs every election. The party that wins is the one that this group of voters identifies with. And as far as I can tell that is not, nor has it ever been the green party.

Edouble:

I think you miss her point - it's not how many elections they have won of the total that happen, but how well they have done in which they have had candidates entered.

Nathan D.:

If the major parties were to allow the use of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), they would instantly know how little support their candidates, and hence their actual policies, have amongst voters. I don't think the IRV would allow the Greens or other 3rd party candidates to win many seats, but it would allow for protest votes that have real meaning.

Which is why the two major parties fight the idea so much.

Her point only makes sense if every district in Maine has the same political dynamic as Portland. That is certainly not the case.

People still largely self identify with one of the main stream parties. In Maine when you register to vote you get to check the box for party affiliation and there is a choice on the voter registration card, right between Democrat and Republican for Green Independent , there is also a box for a write in party (I imagine we will see a few TeaBag registrations this year) and a box if you do not wish to enroll(PDF of Voter Reg Card). According to the latest data on the Secretary of State's website a little more than a third pick unenrolled (375,235), followed by Democrat (309,525), then Republican (279,641), and then in a distant last place you have Green-Independent (29,347). Now these numbers are from 2006 so they are a little old (based on the Mr. Dunlap's crappy job performance of late the fact these numbers are 4 years old should surprise no one), based on this past election's Democratic landslide the number of Democrats has certainly gone up quite a bit. But even using 2006 numbers if the greens somehow grew their party by 10 times its current size they would rate behind Democrats and only slightly ahead of Republicans.

Maine is a moderate state and we have moderate Democratic and Republican elected officials. The Greens will never have any serious state wide movement anytime soon, because they do not represent the views of Maine voters, or if they do they are to incompetent to spread the message.