At the Maryland Green Party Assembly on June 25th,  Brian Bittner and I gave a presentation about electoral reform and party building. Our first  goal was to engage a conversation within the party about policy tools that  enable more healthy parties to participate in our elections and ultimately in our government. Our second goal was to think about how we as a party can build the political power to achieve these outcomes.

These were the three main recommendations we made

We laid out a vision for a  strong Green Party that is collectively building power with its members and an ecosystem of civic organizations, movements and campaigns. We used the concept of Associational party building advocated by Tabatha Abu El-Haj & Didi Kuo.
Source: https://columbialawreview.org/content/associational-party-building-a-path-to-rebuilding-democracy/

As I wrote about at the end of last month, the end of the annual assembly, marked a shift in my focus away from internal state party work, toward my campaign (and ballot access).
 
I have gotten really focused on my campaign this month:
 

I’m going on vacation soon (including my first ever visit to Fenway Park).In August the campaign will kick off our Green outreach.  The goal over the  next year is to contact every registered Green and anyone who has been a member in the last 5 years.  In that process we hope to do a lot of things, but one of them is to help with the Maryland Green Party 2024 ballot access drive. Look for more info about that here very soon. 

I want to turn back to electoral reform.  As we head into  the thicker parts of the 2024 Presidential election cycle it is clear yet again  that a system that allows only two parties to be healthy (but allows smaller parties to exist) is destined  to drift into polarization, disengagement, and authoritarianism. This “Two Party Doom Loop” as Lee Drutman calls it, not only can’t solve the multiple crisis we face  but in many cases that two party system  obscures and suppresses the community based solutions that already exist and could help us face these challenges. This is true on a national scale and it is true in Maryland.

The presentation  Brian and I made to the MGP Assembly argued that the only way out of this Doom Loop is a multiparty democracy in which multiple  parties can be healthy, and voters and coalitions can be more fluid. Additionally, we argue that Greens can not wait till electoral reform comes, we must build a strong party so that we can get good electoral reform (and everything else).

Since then a few new studies and scholarship around this question of electoral reform and party building  have come out. 

This work provides new and strong evidence for the points Brian and I were making, and I look forward to diving deeper into them. 

Making the case for a multiparty system in which the Green Party is strong and healthy is an important priority of this campaign and something  I am excited to focus on in the coming months. If you would like to read and discuss some of this material with us send an email to andy@gogreen2026.com or find me on Twitter at @GoGreen2026.com.