Seeking alternative, area political activists form Nye County Green Party

Nye County Greens was born on Saturday.

After a round of discussions about the future of the Green Party, a group of local supporters formed its Nye County satellite.

Nye County Greens member Thomas Rasmussen said that he joined the Green Party a year ago and always wanted to make changes.

“I want to actually try to make the changes that are needed in order to go ahead and bring about changes in America. Something has got to knock out the stranglehold that Republicans and Democrats have on politics,” he said.

Rasmussen said many people don’t know about alternatives to the two major parties that have dominated the political landscape in the U.S. for decades.

“If people knew what those alternatives are, and they knew what they were about, they’d be interested in the Green Party, I think they would be,” Rasmussen said.

While the party is decentralized, it has seven co-chairs on the national level who determine its policy together.

The four pillars of the Green Party are ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy and non-violence, according to its website.

“The Green Party to me seems like Ghandi, because that’s what Ghandi’s family was. It was political but not political, but it was about the promise of truth and what was right and non-violence,” said Chandini Breathwaite, another member of the newly-formed group.

Bill Huggins, member-at-large of the Nevada Green Party, who organized the Saturday meeting said that the Green Party puts emphasis on local politics.

“The Green Party is an activist party, we are not out breaking any laws, but we are not afraid to get out on the street and make a stand,” Huggins said.

Rasmussen said he wants to draw more people into the Green Party in Nye County.

“I don’t think there’s a majority of people out here in Nye County (who) are Green Party supporters, but I think that there’s the potential for a lot of people to be interested in what the Green Party actually stands for,” Rasmussen said.

At the meeting, members of the newly-formed party discussed ideas of get-togethers and future activities. Rasmussen said it will be important to keep people engaged after the presidential election.

“Doing those kinds of things would be good for the soul, and good for our political souls. And I could imagine that that shift would take place here, in Pahrump after the November election,” Rasmussen said.

Huggins said the Green Party tries to make people to get out in their communities and engage others.

“Basically, it’s like planting green seeds,” he said. “You put them out there, put them in the ground, you water them and then it’s on these places, and people who live here to build from there. That’s how you build a party.”

Current challenges

The Nevada Green Party has received some national attention in the last few weeks because of its push to get Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein on the ballot in the state, Huggins said.

“This kind of attention hasn’t been paid to the Green Party since the year of 2000,” he said.

The party however, faces some challenges. After U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont decided to run for president as a Democrat in April 2015, some Green Party members threw their support behind him, driving down the party’s numbers.

“The numbers got skewed because a lot of people went and registered Democrats, so they could vote for Senator Sanders in the primaries and work for him. That cost us,” Huggins said.

Many of those volunteers have come back but by the time Sanders conceded to Secretary Hillary Clinton, the Nevada Green Party was right up against the deadline to put Stein on the ballot.

So far, Stein hasn’t been able to get on the ballot in the Silver State. On Friday, the Secretary of State denied an appeal for ballot access saying that the Nevada Green Party failed to meet the one percent threshold of registered voters, a state law requirement.

“We think this is a terrible decision for democracy in general but especially for the people in Nevada to exercise their freedom of choice electorally, and we are considering other options now,” Huggins said.

While the first push garnered 9,000 signatures, several thousand signatures were thrown out for various reasons. The Nevada Green Party got over 1,000 signatures in the last couple of weeks before the second attempt.

“If we had enough people registered green in the state, we wouldn’t have to worry about a ballot access petition because we would need that requirement just with registered voters as green,” Huggins said.

Nevada doesn’t have write-in ballot rules, and Huggins said that political barriers can be challenging for third-party candidates, depending on the state’s laws.

Some Nevada counties, such as Clark, don’t recognize the Green Party as valid, so those greens who are registered have to be counted in another category.

While Nye County doesn’t have a stand-alone column of voters who are registered to the Green Party, there are 98 voters that are registered as “other,” and Green Party voters are buried in that number.

Keeping a ballot line is important for a lot of reasons, Huggins said.

“This election and the Nevada Green Party, we are not just about Doctor Stein,” he said. “We are trying to build this, so we can build the party from the local to the county, to the statewide level, run candidates at all levels of government and work our way up into the national feed. Doctor Stein being a candidate would create that ballot line for us.”

Future plans

The Green Party is trying to capitalize on an influx of Sanders supporters who were diffused by the Democratic National Committee after the Vermont senator’s loss, Huggins said.

“Taking that energy, that passion that Senator Sanders’ supporters have and keeping that, keeping everyone motivated, looking toward the future, that’s really what this is about,” he said.

Raising money isn’t always easy for the Green Party as it doesn’t accept corporate contributions and functions on public funding and individual donations.

While the Nevada branch of the Green Party is rebuilding from the ground up, the drive to get Stein on the ballot is helping it to get attention.

Huggins said he switched in 2011 because of his views on certain issues such as climate change and corporate money in politics.

Corporate money makes it hard to govern, Huggins said.

“The corporate influence in our government is pervasive at all levels,” he said.

Rasmussen said he supports Stein because she is not beholden to corporate cash.

“I think Jill Stein is a good candidate and that’s why I want to vote for her because she stands for things that I think are really good,” he said.

Stein attended the Asian American Journalists Association Presidential Election Forum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on Saturday, where she spoke about her vision for the country.

So far, the Green Party nominee is listed on the ballot in 27 states. Huggins said the party will continue the effort to put Stein on the ballot before November.

“This isn’t just about this (election) here,” Huggins said. “This is about building an alternative party for the future. So if Doctor Stein doesn’t get on a ballot, whatever our next step is, we are going to focus on 2018, we are going to continue building this (party) statewide and be ready for the next opportunity we get.”

On a local level, Huggins said the movement could open doors to Green Party candidates who want to run for office but can’t do so because they can’t get into the Democratic or the Republican machines.

“Obviously, the main thing is to build an infrastructure, get the ballot line, and run candidates,” he said. “That’s the primary thing to get the green voice out there in the politics.”

The party’s largest national showing was in 2000 when activist Ralph Nader received 2.7 percent of the popular vote.

Contact reporter Daria Sokolova at dsokolova@pvtimes.com. On Twitter: @dariasokolova77