Although Ralph Nader came up short in his bid to get 5 percent of the vote in the presidential election, 18 other Green Party candidates around the U.S. won their races last week. Greens now hold a total of 72 elected offices in the country, mostly on city councils, school boards, and commissions in California, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. The Greens hope Nader’s high-profile bid for the presidency will help the party put more members into local and state offices. “We’re encouraging people to run in a lot of elections in the upcoming years, and we’re going to keep pushing on the issues we’ve been working on,” said Winona LaDuke, Nader’s running mate. Meanwhile, to the north, Canada’s Green Party is arguing that it is being unfairly excluded from televised political debates, just as Nader and his supporters argued in the U.S. in recent months.
