Pa.’s Green Party courts Muslim voters as it seeks election gains

When someone mentions the Green Party, what comes to mind? 

The party’s historic connections to the environmental movement, perhaps? Or its presidential candidate, Jill Stein, and the recurring complaint that she’s a potential spoiler for Democratic nominees?

For actual Green Party members in Philadelphia, neither of those is a particularly salient aspect of their politics and activism right now. 

When asked, they reject the criticism of Stein as unjustified, and they note that “ecology” is one of their party’s main pillars. But they’re much more focused on boosting their vote totals in statewide races for attorney general and U.S. Senate, and on protesting U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Those two priorities are closely connected, because the Green Party of Pennsylvania — like its counterparts in Michigan and other states — has seen a surge of interest from Muslim voters who are angered by U.S. policy in the Middle East, and who could help the party achieve its goals in the November election.

“We’ve actually been working closely with a lot of local and regional mosques,” said Belinda Davis, a Rutgers University history professor who is the Green Party chair in Philadelphia. “At the mosques, there’s been a lot of interest in our circulating materials and talking about our candidates up and down the ballot.”

“These are people who were the noncommitted for Biden, who are extremely upset about the Biden-Harris genocide machine that the Greens are fighting fiercely against,” she said, “and which the Republicans have certainly not suggested that they’re going to provide any alternative to.”

Driven by a wish for peace

Pennsylvania’s Green Party is tiny, with just 13,042 registered voters as of mid-October, according to the Pa. Department of State. 

That represents an increase from the last few years. Pa. registrations had been hovering around 10,000, according to party members who tally state registration data. The number previously reached about 13,800 before the 2016 election, when Stein was last on the ballot, and before that hit a recent high of 17,800 in 2010.

Yet the current figure is still little more than one-tenth of 1% of the state’s roughly 9 million registered voters. Pennsylvania counts close to 4 million registered Democrats, 3.7 million Republicans, and 1.4 million independent and third-party voters.

Some 2,476 of the Green Party members are in Philly, out of more than 1 million registered voters in the city. The party says there are 10 Greens in elected positions across the state, mostly in election administration, as well as on town councils and school boards.

They include Alex Casper, an officer in the state and city Green parties who is an inspector of elections in the 47th Ward in lower North Philadelphia. 

Casper said their passion for the party is driven in part by their Catholic faith, by their opposition to violence and war, and by the need to “guarantee peace is on the ballot,” even in state and local elections.

“The Green Party of Pennsylvania is getting more support because of ongoing conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Ukraine and Russia,” as well as the southern border crisis and hostility to immigration, they said. “A lot of new Americans, who are registered to vote for the first time, are registering as Greens because they support our values of a pathway to citizenship.”

Muslim voters seek an alternative

An August survey by the nonpartisan Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) supports the claim that American Muslims are flocking to the Green Party. Of 1,115 surveyed nationally, about 29% said they would vote for Stein, 29% for Kamala Harris, and 11% for Donald Trump.

In Michigan, which has the largest Muslim population of any state, the shift toward the Green Party was particularly stark — 40% of those surveyed said they preferred Stein and just 12% Harris, with 18% for Trump and 21% undecided.

In Pennsylvania, where Stein won less than 1% of the vote during her last presidential run in 2016, 25% of Muslim voters favored Stein in the survey and 37% backed Harris. Trump had 8%, and 19% were undecided.

“What we are seeing is a heated debate within the community around, what’s the right way to vote?” said Ahmet Tekelioglu, executive director of CAIR’s Philadelphia chapter. “You can find all kinds of different opinions around it.”

In addition to the massive casualties in Gaza, many American Muslims are appalled by what they see as widespread antagonism in the U.S. toward Palestinians and other critics of Israel, Tikelioglu said. They consider the atmosphere of social and political hostility to be worse now than it was during the Trump administration, when many institutions and Democratic politicians voiced solidarity with Muslims and immigrants, he said. 

He cited recent examples of professors being fired, universities disciplining student protesters, and doctors being reprimanded, and said the Biden-Harris administration has done little outreach to Muslim voters.

The Green Party’s discourse “at this time has sort of filled a gap. It meets a demand from the community around a clear moral stance that the administration is not able to showcase,” he said.

Particularly in the Philly area, interest in the Green Party grew after the selection of its vice presidential candidate Rudolph “Butch” Ware, a professor of Islamic history who is Muslim and has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, Tekelioglu said. Another factor was the Democrats’ decision not to have a Palestinian speaker at their nominating convention in August.

Some American Muslims are thinking, “why keep voting the lesser of two evils? We can rather vote our conscience,” he said. “For some people, it’s just a protest vote. For some people, it is, sort of, trying to rethink a political future where there needs to be a move away from this two-party structure.”

“When I talk to people, some people are like, we realize that the Green Party is not going to be in the presidency,” he said. “But it still makes sense, because we want to register our disappointment.”

If Pennsylvania’s presidential vote ends up being extremely close, as many polls predict, a bump in support for the Green Party could tip the results. When Stein last ran for president in 2016, she received 0.8% or 48,912 votes. Joe Biden’s winning margin in 2020 was 80,555 votes.

Getting the vote out

Casper, Davis, and their fellow Greens are now trying to parlay the new bubble of enthusiasm for their party into real election gains. 

They’ve been handing out literature outside of mosques before Friday prayers and at other locations, posting signs on telephone polls — which are sometimes torn down, apparently by Democratic party activists — and preparing to talk to voters on Election Day.

“We’re flyering everywhere, and, of course, the additional plan for getting out information is at the various polling places,” Davis said.

In addition to Stein, the candidates appearing on all those flyers and stickers are Richard Weiss for attorney general and Leila Hazou for U.S. Senate.

Weiss, an attorney from Allegheny County, previously ran for Senate in 2022. He wants to ban fracking, opposes cash bail, would prosecute police misconduct, and supports marijuana legalization and “reasonable restrictions” on gun ownership. He has vowed to sue the federal government for “illegally” supplying weapons used in conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, and Syria.

Hazou previously worked on Wall Street and now owns a soap and candle shop in Pike County, in the Poconos. She supports progressive causes like LGBTQ rights, a right to healthcare, and higher taxes on wealthy people. 

But as the U.S.-born daughter of a Palestinian father, her main issue and the one that drove her to run is the war in Gaza and what she saw as both Republicans’ and Democrats’ abandonment of the Palestinians.

“The hope is that the more we normalize third parties, and the more people vote for third parties and make them legitimate, the more we can break through the duopoly,” Hazou told Al-Bustan News Service. “That’s the main thing for me: planting the seeds to change the system.”

It’s not easy being Green

How, practically speaking, does the Green Party break through on Election Day? It isn’t easy, and requires an understanding of arcane election laws and court decisions.

Because there are so few registered Greens in Pennsylvania, the organization doesn’t get the ballot status that Democrats and Republicans have. 

Under the rules governing so-called “political bodies” that aren’t officially parties, its candidates don’t appear on primary ballots. They also need to collect more petition signatures than Democrats and Republicans to get on general election ballots for the U.S. House, state legislature and local offices.

(A court ruling set fixed signature numbers for political-body candidates for attorney general, U.S. Senate and certain other offices, making it easier for Weiss and Hazou to get on the ballot.) 

However, certain restrictions are eased if a Green Party candidate wins 2% of the vote in a statewide race, both in the total vote and in each of 10 counties. That would give the Greens “minor party” status for the next election cycle, something they’ve reached a few times in the past. 

Under one of those obscure election rules, being a minor party would mean that if there’s a special election, a candidate who runs as a Green could automatically get on the ballot, without having to collect any petition signatures, Casper said. 

Looking for an opening

Special elections happen fairly frequently, for example when a state House representative dies, quits, or is removed from office. In theory, they give minor parties an opening to concentrate their electioneering efforts in a small field and, just possibly, win statewide office.

“We could run a very competitive election with our current efforts. We’d only have limited resources, but there’s less voter participation in special elections,” Casper said. “So focusing on special elections becomes more important for a movement like us. That way you can get peace candidates on the ballot.”

That’s the party’s overarching goal in next month’s election, Casper and Davis said: to leverage interest in the Green Party among Muslim voters, disaffected Democrats, and others, and get enough people to push buttons for Weiss and Hazou that at least one of them receive 2% of the vote.

Then, next year, when a state rep somewhere in Pennsylvania quits for a private sector job or gets pushed out over a scandal, the Greens can flyer up the district to the max and get a few hundred people to take a chance on their candidate. 

A win would give the Green Party a prominent platform in Harrisburg to promote the party’s progressive views and attract further support for Green candidates in the future, they say.

“We firmly believe in the idea of ‘glocal’ politics, or, global politics also carried out at the local level,” Davis said. “As well as very closely attending to specifically local issues, to be sure.”

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