By Steve Early
As labor-backed independent electoral efforts proliferate, more activists in other state are looking to the example of the Vermont Progressive Party (VPP). More than any other third-party formation in the country, the VPP has campaigned successfully for state legislative seats and municipal office, “while building support for reform and nudging the Democrats left.”
Over the last three decades, Vermont Progressives have also been able to woo local labor organizations away from their previous knee-jerk support for local Democrats or moderate Republicans. These efforts have produced an influx of younger labor activists into the leadership of the VPP, who are now recruiting more union members to run against Vermont politicians who prove “indifferent, negligent, or hostile” to working class concerns.
While the VPP model of third-party organization may not be viewed as viable in much larger, more diverse states, the idea of recruiting union members to run for office themselves has been embraced and promoted by the national AFL-CIO. So the example of labor organizers and local union officers becoming candidates and, when successful, elected public officials is one worthy of emulation, either in its third party or more frequent mainstream political form.
What distinguishes the VPP from almost all state and local Democratic Party organizations, backed by labor elsewhere, is its year-round engagement with grassroots labor causes and campaigns, as well as legislative/ political issues like single-payer health insurance. These non-electoral activities, plus the emergence of homegrown VPP leaders and candidates who have been workplace organizers and local union officers, haves greatly strengthened VPP’s ties with the local labor movement.
Vermont Progressives now have a track record of electoral success spanning thirty-five years. In 1990, Vermonters sent the first “Prog” to Montpelier, where seventeen have since served a total of fifty-six legislative terms in the state capitol. Despite the VPP’s loss of Burlington City Hall in 2012—when a non-Progressive was elected mayor for only the second time since 1981— the party retains five city council seats (out of fourteen) in Vermont’s largest municipality, as of municipal elections in March, 2014. More than thirty Progressives have been Burlington city councilors over the past four decades.
Read the full article here.
Thanks to American Third Party Report for the link.