Christopher Hooks is a politics writer for the Texas Observer based in Austin.

HOUSTON — In Philadelphia, at the Democratic National Convention, the woman had been a delegate for Bernie Sanders. But now he was gone and she was here, on stage at the talent show at the Green Party convention in the student center at the University of Houston, very far from the center of the political universe. She hadn’t known much about the Green Party before she came, she said, but one song had come to mind. So she pulled up the lyrics on her phone, and launched into a slow, a capella rendition of the Muppet anthem: “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

It's easy to make fun of the Green Party — maybe too easy. They don’t try to make it hard. At the convention, Green Party delegates shared spaces with baffled U of H undergrads and queued with them for the McDonald’s in the food court. Much of what took place at this week’s convention alternated from a cringe-inducing earnestness about the political process — the convention’s slogan was “Houston, we have a solution,” offering a green future to a city with 575 miles of freeways that celebrates oil tanks with murals that depict moments from the Texas War of Independence — to the sort of self-unaware kitsch that might play in a Tim & Eric sketch.


The talent show, a keynote event and fundraiser the night before the nomination of presidential nominee Jill Stein and vice presidential nominee Ajamu Baraka, is a great example. Here is a party that aims to be taken seriously, whose new narrative centers on the theory that 2016 is a year of Green Party emergence. And here are their senior members, listening to open-mic poetry with lines like "Isis is a goddess, not a terrorist" and “We are gonna Banksy the big banks, see?” and ukulele songs about the unimportance of money and the comparative importance of dancing. The night ended with an off-key group karaoke version of “We are the World,” but with new lyrics: “We’re not going to go with Trump or Hill-ar-y,” those on stage sang, as the audience waved their hands wildly back and forth.

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The nation is paying more attention to the Green Party this year in large part because of the worry — or hope — that disappointed Sanders supporters will flock to Stein and sap the Democratic Party of strength, possibly tipping the election in Trump’s favor. Recent polls have Stein at 4 or 5 percent nationally in a four-way race, and one poll had the party capturing some 16 percent of voters under 30.

Stein would be the first to tell you that Greens are taking a huge chunk of Sanders voters. In her acceptance speech Saturday, she sought to play up the partnership, telling the crowd that it was an “honor to be running in alliance with the Bernie Sanders movement that I now hear as ‘berning green!’”

At the DNC, she said, “The City of Brotherly Love was overrun by love and revolution, as the Bernie or Bust movement declared independence from the Democratic Party, and merged with our campaign in rally after rally, growing stronger by the hour,” though protests had actually seemed to taper off as the Democratic convention went on. It also seems strange for Stein to embrace the term “Bernie or Bust.” Is voting for Stein what it means to “go bust?”

There were indeed lot of folks with Sanders swag at U of H last week, and Green Party officials reported a significant swell in volunteers and voter interest since the Democratic primary had started to wind down. But the Bernie folks broke into different camps. Some said Sanders was the only Democratic Party candidate they’d ever supported — that they had simply returned to their natural home.

Others, like Francisco Cid, an 18-year-old from San Antonio who's attending the University of Texas at Austin in the fall, says he came out of a kind of general support for third party politics, but wasn’t completely sold on the Greens. He'd probably vote Stein this year if he was a citizen, because the outcome in deep-red Texas is likely predetermined. But if he was living in Ohio or Florida, he said, he’d vote Clinton.

Others pledged they were now with the Green Party for good. YahNe Ndgo, a prominent Bernie-or-Buster who was given a prominent speaking slot on the convention's main day, read aloud from an article arguing that Bernie Sanders was effectively a plant, a “sheepdog” being used by the Democratic Party to sap energy and resources from the left until the summer before the election.

Later in the day, Ndgo took part in a joint strategy session with some fellow Sanders supporters and some Green Party vets. Bernie vets talked excitedly about what they had learned as part of a big-money Democratic organizing effort — the technology they had used for mobilizing volunteers and allowing coordination in ways they had not previously experienced. The Greens, they thought, could and should do something similar.

Ndgo took charge of the meeting. Two of her technically-adept friends would be creating a clearinghouse of information to connect Bernie-or-Busters with Green Party organizations and attempt to bring more than a “small fraction” of ex-Sanders supporters on board. And Ndgo’s friends had a PAC, Citizens Against Plutocracy, which aimed to fundraise and heavily campaign for Stein and against Clinton with Sanders-aligned constituencies.

It's possible to imagine that the energy and organizing experience brought to the Green Party by the Bernie Sanders people will help the party — but it’s just as easy to imagine that the energy of the Busters cools and dissipates in a party with few resources and not much of an organizing background. As Ndgo laid out plans, some of the Greens in the room, older folk who’d been with the party for a while, seemed uncomfortable. The new Buster clearinghouse Ndgo described seemed “bottlenecky,” one Green delegate from Massachusettes said. Ndgo turned the conversation to a brainstorming session. What other organizing ideas did people have?

A man in a full formal green Army uniform jumped up. “I started a GoFundMe account. I haven’t gotten any donations yet,” he says. “I have lots of big ideas.” He had a friend who made banners, and he planned to go to Dallas-area highway overpasses and put up signs. The first: “‘Clinton is a terrorist.’ The next overpass, you’ll see ‘Trump is a pedophile.’ The third will say: ‘Jill Stein is a doctor.” The room cheered.

Ndgo’s eyebrows jumped up and down. “Banner drops,” she said. “That’s an idea.”

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There was a dichotomy at the Green convention. There are a lot of people that could be — affectionately or unaffectionately — referred to as kooks. The kook-ism is what most people know the party for. Stein hasn’t gone out of her way to help that reputation, with statements about vaccines and the dangers of wireless internet. Julian Assange spoke to the convention on a livestream, from the Ecuadorean embassy where he’s avoiding rape charges, to express his opinion that the choice between Trump and Clinton was like a choice between “cholera and gonorrhea.” The party’s vice presidential nominee, Ajamu Baraka, has a long history of fringe statements and beliefs, like his opinion that the Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine looked like a “false flag” operation.

At a press conference at the convention, Stein said, strangely, that if Russia had hacked the DNC as some now allege, it was not an especially noteworthy event, because, “This is nothing new. This is something that goes on all the time.” On social media, observers re-circulated stories about Stein’s associations with the state-owned TV network Russia Today, associations shared with Trump’s advisers.

But there were also a lot of people at the convention with credible and considered political beliefs, who held nuanced positions about Clinton and Trump, and had thought at length about their involvement with a third party. They don’t tend to get heard much. Henry Lawrence, from Florida, came to the Green Party through Ralph Nader’s 1996 presidential run. The party represents his political beliefs, he says, but it’s also something of a home, or a community or social club, for an assortment of radical movements that no longer have much of a home elsewhere: “the anti-war movement, the social justice movement, the environmental movement, labor activists.”

He knows the Green Party won’t have electoral success in any meaningful way for a long time if ever, and he doesn’t really care: They help propagate radical ideas. There are hardly any Greens in office anywhere in Florida, he says, although there is Oliver "Ollie" Kofoid, who currently represents District 1 on the Florida Keys Mosquito Control Board.

Would he vote for Clinton if it looked possible there might be a repeat of the 2000 election in Florida? The Nader Question is bunk, he says, and the rhetorical question is moot: Clinton is gonna hammer Trump in the general, and his vote won’t make an iota of difference no matter where it goes. “They’re afraid of him. But I’m not afraid of him,” he said. “He’s falling apart.” And Al Gore, by the way, lost because he was a pathetic candidate.

There was a remarkable diversity of life experience on display in Houston. There’s Michael Feinstein, who served as mayor of prosperous Santa Monica for eight years, walking around the convention space with a silvery man bun, Ray-Ban specs, tie-die pants and a long, flowing wrap, along with gruff Howie Hawkins, from Syracuse, whose shirt reps his Teamsters Local. Hawkins scored 5 percent of the vote in the governor's race against Andrew Cuomo in 2014, winning the Green Party a more prominent ballot position in New York state.

Feinstein says there are a few possible practical ways forward for Greens. They do well in certain local elections. Their reelection rate in city council races is high. But they need an electoral system that runs onproportional representation to have any hope of doing well in legislatures or Congress. In California, he says, it could be possible to partner with the state’s beat-down Republican Party on that project, passing it through a popular referendum.

Hawkins, who has been active in alternative politics for many years, says the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class and the Green Party, as imperfect as it is, is the only possible vehicle for labor. “The Democratic Party ideology is the ideology of the professional class,” he says. “Meritocratic competition. Do well in school, get well-rewarded.”

They don’t stand all that strongly for people who work a job to earn a wage. “The biggest threat to the Democrats isn’t losing votes to the Greens,” Hawkins says. “Working class whites say, well, the Democrats don’t have all that much for us. And Trump sounds like he’s mad at the system. So they throw a protest vote to him.” And the Dems should also be worried about “the African-American, Latino, Asian working class. Barack Obama got them out twice, but he didn’t do a lot for them, and he’s not on the ticket this time.”

Bob Master of the New York Working Families Party, the Green Party’s nemesis in New York, has been making the case that all on the left should unite to stomp Trump decisively and deal his ideology a mortal blow. I put that to Hawkins. “Did Barry Goldwater get beaten by a large margin?” he asks. “Did Ronald Reagan get elected anyway?” Trumpism, in other words, is probably here to stay, and only the left can make a real counter-pitch to the white working class the ideology feeds on.

The convention’s last full day ended with a “Party for the Revolution” in the student center Ballroom. Cash bars, snacks, no tablecloths, and a scattering of people on a dance floor. Green Party congressional candidates tried to be heard over a huge din. Calls for donations didn’t always receive an answer.

Many people at the convention are operating under the belief that if the Green Party does better this year, the Democratic Party will be forced to tack left to compete for those votes. It’s not clear that that assumption is correct: The Green Party’s presidential bids peaked in 2000, only to see, in 2004, its momentum wiped out and a Democratic Party that had moved right to fight Bush.

Still, delegates in Houston seemed, on the whole, delighted. After a long time in the wilderness, they finally had just a little bit of a headwind again. For the moment, perhaps, it is getting just a little bit easier to be green.