INTERESTING LOOK AT THE MAINE GREEN PARTY

Jeff Clark, Down East - Portland (Maine) has been a Democratic stronghold for decades, the party's grip on power so absolute that Republicans often don't even bother to run candidates in local elections - which officially are nonpartisan but in practice are as political as any senate race. But these days the Greens are widely acknowledged as the city's new second party, displacing the GOP in both votes and political offices and shaking the complacency out of the Democratic power structure. In terms of election results, the Forest City's Greens are the most successful branch of their party in the country. Retaining and building on that success, though, will be a major challenge if the Greens want to be more than just another footnote in Maine political history.

Portland's Greens have found success appealing to a group of voters that until recently were routinely ignored in political races - young adults. Historically Maine Greens have their roots in the environmental movement of the early 1980s, with a strong dose of progressive politics adapted from the European Greens, the party's original home. The party's core values of social justice, ecological wisdom, grassroots democracy, nonviolence, and decentralization resonate particularly well among Portland's large under-thirty-five population.

Greens have been an officially recognized political party in Maine since gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Carter won 6.4 percent of the vote in 1994, with a two-year hiatus after presidential candidate Ralph Nader failed to break the required 5-percent benchmark in 1996. Pat LaMarche won back official status in 1998 when she won 6.8 percent of the vote running for governor as a Green Independent (a name chosen on the spur of the moment due to legal ambiguities surrounding the party's official status and later formally adopted). Today Maine has the highest percentage of registered Greens in the country, about 3.2 percent of Maine's 994,155 registered voters.

Even in the gubernatorial races in Maine, though, the party's political organization can best be described as casual. Many old guard Greens still view the rough and tumble of electoral politics with distrust, making the success in Portland an even larger anomaly. "Greens are fiercely independent and antiestablishment,"� points out Eder, "and running a political campaign is a very establishment act. Some Greens find that distasteful."�