US Greens a single-issue party

Considered that Nader saved thousands of lives by campaigning for safety belts... how many politicians can make that claim about themselves?
 
Would such a Green Party have more influence than the OTL one?
No. Pretty much the whole reason the Green Party ever gained any traction at all is because they moved away from just an environmental stance. The problem with running as a single issue party on a scale wider than a local or maybe special district election is any other party can come in with a candidate that agrees with you but also agrees with voters on other issues and take your voters. Look at the 2006 Maine 118th house district race. John Eder had served as the only Green member of a state legislature since 2002, but was unseated by Democrat Jon Hinck, who was an environmental activist and Greenpeace director. It's easy for other parties to co-opt your platform when you're only running on a single issue, and if that happens, then voters start to ask themselves why they should bother voting for you when your platform is no different from this other party but the other party offers more they agree with.
 
I'm just adding to the chorus at this point, but this would make the Green Party even more irrelevant than it is today. As @wilcoxchar says, it's too easy for the issue of environmentalism to get co-opted by the other parties; in fact, this is already something green parties struggle with, and it would be compounded here. The other major problem is that, by running candidates with inconsistent (even diametrically opposed) stances, it would be extremely difficult to actually build up any sort of organization or machinery, since nobody could be sure that their time, effort, money and votes are going to candidates they actually support overall.

The only possible way I could see this working out if the Green Party were a very, very loose organization and mostly concerned with running candidates for municipal office; we're talking mayor as the biggest office, but mostly stuff like park boards or school districts or whatever, where "I'm going to be more environmentally-conscious" is enough of a platform and stances on other issues like same-sex marriage and abortion are irrelevant. Or, as suggested upthread, perhaps the Green Party exists more as a lobbyist and pressure group that simply endorses other candidates, rather than actually existing as an actual electoral force.
 
the basic question with a single issue party is 'how important is that single issue?'. Environmentalism has been an important issue for a long time now, but just one of many issues. That could change in the near future though... as climate change wreaks havoc on coastlines and agricultural areas, as more and more species go extinct, as temperatures climb, as energy becomes a problem... environmentalism might become the #1 issue. So far as alternate history goes, a single issue environmentalist party in the US is rather doomed to irrelevance across most of our history...
 
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Nader Leno Sept. 12, 2000
AP


Okay, not terrible, but . . .

Yeah, it's pretty bad when Mr. Rogers has a better grasp of hip, late-night comedy than you do.

"Things don't always go right in the neighborhood."

(Sorry, I know that's a pretty random juxtaposition, from two different eras, but it's always interesting to see who can groove with a particular milieu, and who can't. It's not always the results you'd expect. With Nader, he probably effed up by trying to pull off actual premeditated gags, rather than just letting the humour flow from the conversation.)
 
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