[EM] Green Party Candidate Strategy

[Bart Ingles]

Makes sense.  One seldom-mentioned benefit of the winner-take-all
electoral college system is that it allows third-party voters in most
states to vote for their favorites.  Only if your state is "in play" do
you need to worry about choosing a lesser-evil candidate.

Whether this "feature" harms or helps Bush is less clear.  The same
strategy is available to right-leaning parties.

In non-presidential elections, I've been thinking that the best
3rd-party strategy for use in plurality systems is to run candidates in
roughly half of all races.  The party should select the half of all
races where the least-desirable alternatives exist, and if possible
endorse one of the major candidates in the remaining races.  This
carrot-and-stick approach may reverse the natural tendency for Green
[/Libertarian] candidates to drive the outcome in a non-Green
[/non-Libertarian] direction.  Sort of like the way that active
suspension can make a car lean *into* a turn, even though the natural
tendency is for the opposite.

Bart


Forest Simmons wrote:
> 
> Green Party Event:  Pacific Green Candidate Party: David Cobb,
> front-running candidate for the Green Party's presidential nomination,
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Cobb's goals for the presidential campaign are to increase membership in
> the Green Party, raise critical issues and get G.W. Bush out of office.
> His campaign plans to accomplish these goals through a "safe states
> strategy" - by not campaigning in swing states after his nomination and
> focusing primarily on states which lean either heavily Democratic or
> Republican.