Great news, Friend!

At least 17 Greens won on Election Day, including two newly-elected city council representatives!

Congratulations to the Maine Green Independent Party for those two, new city council reps! Voters in Portland, Maine’s largest city, were inspired by Anna Trevorrow’s amazing service on the school board to promote her to the city council. Scott Harriman stepped up to serve his community on the city council of Maine’s second-largest city, Lewiston.

Greens like Anna and Scott demonstrate the promise of how grassroots, strategic, people-powered politics can challenge the Democrat and Republicans' corporate-dominated cartel. But Election Day also brought examples of how the cartel pushes back.

With great sadness we must announce that the Green Party’s four-term Minneapolis City Council representative Cam Gordon did not win re-election on Tuesday. Cam faced a flood of money from outside of the district, with national power structures backing two of his opponents to the extent that they out-fundraised him by 3.5 times and 5 times, respectively.

Still, Cam went toe-to-toe against all of that money and came within a couple hundred votes of first place in the first round of Ranked Choice Voting tabulation. Cam’s campaign also suffered from a right-wing backlash against his championing the proposal to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety. That proposal also failed, which tells you how effectively authoritarians have mobilized since the people’s response to the murder of George Floyd.

We salute Cam for his public service as an elected Green in a major metropolis and Cam’s entire team for a race well-run. We ask all Greens to consider the implications of this setback:

1. This nation’s twisted political culture sees every elected Green as either an existential threat to the duopoly or a low-risk target to knock off.
2. Therefore, Greens across the country must support even our most stalwart, effective and established elected officials in fighting the massive, networked opposition they face.
3. The best way to help our elected officials pass a Green agenda while in office — and defend their seats during re-election — is building strength in our national party and state parties.

More than ever, resources are needed to defend hard-won seats in office and ballot lines when they come under attack. We need multitudes of experienced, skilled and trained-up volunteers ready to support Greens in their time of need.

Minneapolis, however, also yielded a very encouraging result: the election of Green Party candidate Samantha Pree-Stinson as the first Black Woman to the city’s Board of Estimation & Taxation. Samantha ran for a city council seat in 2017 and did not win, making her victory a powerful and inspiring comeback!

Many voters on Tuesday faced ballot questions with the potential to shape our democracy — for good or for bad. On the good side: voters passed Ranked Choice Voting in Broomfield, Colorado; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Westbrook, Maine!

Meanwhile, in the state of New York, voters were presented with a ballot question that claimed to oppose gerrymandering but in reality would allow further monopolization of redistricting by the Democrats in power. These are the same New York Democrats who passed horrible ballot access restrictions in 2019, designed to eliminate alternative parties like the Green Party.

The Dems’ gerrymandering ballot question failed, thankfully, but so did two other genuinely good ballot initiatives that would have allowed no-excuse absentee voting and same-day voting registration.

The “For The People”/”Freedom To Vote” legislation had similar outcomes at the national level: when Democrats try to smuggle in anti-democratic measures alongside badly-needed democratic reforms, the former stokes distrust of the latter at the expense of Grassroots Democracy.

Without a doubt, you have been exposed to a deluge of panic in response to the Democrats’ loss in the Virginia governor’s race. The only thing we’ll add here is this: people who want economic relief, a vote that matters, real social justice and real solutions to the climate and COVID-19 crises are already seeing how Democrat elites oppose all of that.

Those Democrat elites are paving the way for the next wave of Trumpism — or worse — unless we show folks a genuine way to fight corporate rule that puts peace, planet and people above profit.

Learn about more 2021 election results, news from state and local parties and events at gp.org

We are grateful to all Greens who ran in 2021, along with the supporters, friends and family of those candidates!

Let’s Keep Organizing,
Green Party of the United States

P.S. Giving Tuesday is coming up, which means our annual drive for Monthly Sustainers! We are grateful to each and every one of our Monthly Sustainers for supporting the Green Party all year long. If you're not yet a Sustainer, pick a monthly amount that works for you!