Spoiling for success: in New Mexico, the Green Party costs the Democrats a Congressional seat.

Colorado Governor Roy Romer, the grizzled political veteran Bill Clinton put in charge of the Democratic National Committee, throws off soundbites about the Lincoln Bedroom, the Chinese connection, and Paula Jones with easy confidence.

But ask him about the Green Party tactic of running against Democrats in competitive electoral contests and you'd better be ready for a grumbling diatribe about political responsibility, "spoiling elections," and practical politics.

"People are talking about how they cost us that seat in New Mexico," Romer growls. "I'll tell you something: They got a lot of Democrats angry. They certainly got people's attention."

Romer is talking about the May 13 special election that filled the U.S. House seat vacated by former U.S. Representative Bill Richardson, the Democrat from New Mexico, whom Clinton appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Richardson's northern New Mexico seat was one of the safest pieces of Democratic political turf in the nation.

But on election day, the Santa Fe-based seat fell to the Reverend Bill Redmond, a Republican whose ties to the religious right had consigned him to also-ran status in his previous forays into politics. Redmond won the race over moderate Democrat Eric Serna by a 43-to-40 margin. The remaining 17 percent of the vote went to Carol Miller, a former officer of the U.S. Public Health Service who ran on the Green line.

The willingness of the Greens to cost the Democrats a high-stakes special election has sparked a heated national debate about third-party strategies for advancing progressive politics.

The debate points up a profound difference on the left end of the American political spectrum. Some claim that it is irresponsible to undermine campaigns by credible, if imperfect, Democrats when the result will be the election of conservative Republicans.

This is the position of the New Party, a left-of-center grouping whose members sometimes run as Democrats. It takes a dim view of spoiling, arguing that, for the time being at least, progressives need to work "both inside and outside the Democratic Party."

But 1996 Green Party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader rejects the no-spoiling line. "It's impossible to spoil something that is already rotten to the core," he says.

Cooperation with the Democrats, in the form of a "stay-clear" rule in competitive races, has not advanced the progressive cause, argue a growing number of Greens. The answer, they say, is to offer a clear and consistent alternative to both major parties.

"Building a progressive third-party movement right now is a lot more important than sending one more Democrat to Congress," says Cris Moore. a Santa Fe city -- council member active in the loose-knit national federation of state-based Green Parties.

"Even people who want to move the Democratic Party to the left ought to recognize that it's just not going to happen inside their party," adds Moore. "It's like Frederick Douglass said: 'Power concedes nothing without a demand.' No one is going to change the system until Democrats lose some elections because they've moved too far to the right. That's the lesson from here: Until they lost a race that they actually cared about, they didn't pay attention."

Democrats have been grumbling ever since about how the Greens spoiled the election for them. At times, their statements have been dismissive of the tiny third party. But they have also been according the Greens the sort of grudging respect that third parties of the left have rarely known since the disappearance of the Wisconsin Progressive and Minnesota Farm-Labor parties in the 1930s.

Democratic leaders, who used to view progressive third-party activism as a fringe behavior, suddenly have "talking points" regarding the Greens.

The Democratic leadership has denied that the Greens and other third parties are a factor. It's been part of their broader denial of environmentalists and social-justice groups and the whole coalition of progressive forces in this country," says Dan Hamburg, who represented Northern California in Congress as a Democrat from 1993 to 1995 but who now has joined the Greens. "I recognized a couple years ago that the Greens were building something that mattered in states like New Mexico and California. Now a lot of powerful Democrats have been forced to recognize the same thing."

Within days after the May special election, New Mexico state Democratic Party chairman Ray Sena called for a series of meetings with party officials and prospective candidates to discuss the impact of the Greens.

They're a factor. They're no longer a 2 percent party." Richardson said of the Greens. The former Congressman urged that "early entreaties be made to the Green Party."

Richardson actually raised the specter of running a Green-Democrat "fusion" candidate to regain the seat in 1998. Fusion refers to an electoral strategy -- now practiced only in New York state -- where a candidate can earn the endorsements of two parties in the same election and can then collect votes on the ballot lines of both parties.

If the Democratic and Green votes had been fused in northern New Mexico, their combined total would have been 57 percent to the Republicans' 43 percent.

That some New Mexico Democrats are daring to utter the word "fusion" is remarkable, considering that as recently as January the Democratic Party blocked an effort by the Greens, the Libertarians, and Ross Perot's Reformers to make fusion legal in New Mexico.

It is even more remarkable in light of an April ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that rejected a New Party initiative to remove legal barriers to fusion nationwide. That court ruling seemed to deal a harsh blow to third-party organizing. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the court, declared. "The State's interest permits them to enact reasonable election regulations that may, in practice. favor the traditional two-party system."

Formed in the early 1990s, the New Party has from the start fashioned itself as a "responsible" third-party initiative, and it has consistently avoided mounting challenges to Democrats in high-level competitive races.

New Party leaders, such as University of Wisconsin professor Joel Rogers, argue that left-leaning third parties have historically been undermined by the suggestion that supporting them only ends up electing Republicans. Rogers and others had hoped that a removal of barriers to fusion would allow the New Party to begin flexing its muscles in partisan races in states where it has established bases of strength, such as Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Montana.

But the ruling means that the New Party could be sidelined from partisan competition for some time to come, as its executive director, Daniel Cantor, explained in a memo to the membership.

"Where the decision will make a difference is in the higher-level partisan races," he wrote. "In those, we have to figure out how one can project progressive values and issues, over time, without the benefit of a party ballot line. In the meantime we'll keep our eyes on the 80 percent of all elections that are nonpartisan."

With the union-backed Labor Party eschewing electoral politics for the time being, only the Greens are positioning themselves to play the high-stakes game of challenging the major parties at the top of the ballot.

It is a tactic that, Hamburg and others argue, the Greens should use cautiously, so as not to squander their credibility. But they are using it, particularly in New Mexico.

In 1994, when the Greens ran former Democratic Lieutenant Governor Roberto Mondragon for governor, he won 10 percent of the vote -- a figure that paralleled the margin between winning Republican Gary Johnson and losing Democrat Bruce King.

Polling figures show that a substantial portion of Mondragon's vote came from Republicans and disaffected voters who might otherwise have sat the election out, so the "spoiler" tag is a stretch. But he faced it all the same.

When the Richardson seat came open in northern New Mexico, home to the strongest local Green Party operation in the nation, there were pressures on the party to sit the race out.

But after the Democrats nominated Serna in a closed convention, leading activists to complain that they had been locked out of the process, the Greens made their move.

Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper columnist Richard McCord described Serna as "an old-fashioned machine politician" who had "repeatedly demonstrated that his idea of public service is to use his office to do favors for friends and family, and for the organizations he is supposed to regulate." But what rankled the Greens most was the prevalent belief that Serna would serve in Congress as just another "Bill Clinton Democrat."

"There was a real feeling that Serna was going to be another typical Democrat in Washington, and these days typical Democrats vote pretty much like typical Republicans," says Carol Miller. "That's what people inside the Democratic Party and outside of it are tired of."

Running on a platform that emphasized opposition to NAFTA and GATT and support for universal health care, progressive taxation, protection of federal lands from development, and abortion rights, Miller argued that Green policies were much closer to the mainstream than the religious-right politics of Republican Redmond or the mushy centrism of Serna.

A lot of New Mexicans agreed.

Miller won the endorsements of the Albuquerque Journal and the Albuquerque Tribune, the state's two largest newspapers, as well as the widely circulated Santa Fe Reporter and Taos News publications. Nader campaigned for her. And former Sierra Club executive director David Brower urged voters to disregard endorsements of Serna by national environmental groups and go with Miller. "You've got to say what you believe, and support the Green Party," he argued. "That's the only way to get democracy going again."

In what will probably turn out to be the hardest fought special election of 1997, a lot of voters heard that message. Miller got 17,000 votes. In Green strongholds such as Santa Fe County, she won 35 percent of the vote -- a virtual tie with Serna. Miller carried twenty-two precincts outright -- including the Taos and Tesuque Indian Pueblos -- and ran second in an additional fifty-five.

She expects to run again as a Green in 1998. Some Democrats are interested in heading that option off with fusion legislation, but Miller and a growing number of Greens have grown dubious about fusion.

"There's a danger that fusion actually does more to institutionalize the two major parties. It could turn the Greens into junior Democrats, and I think we have a lot more potential than that," says Miller, who sees proportional representation on a European model as the most rational electoral reform.

Several weeks after the election, Miller says, a man stopped her on the street in Santa Fe to tell her the Green campaign had convinced him that, for the first time in years, voting was worthwhile.

"That's what it's all about. People aren't going to get excited about politics until they believe that their votes really matter." explains Miller. "And that's not going to happen if you tell them that they're spoiling something if they don't vote for a Republican or a Democrat. The Greens aren't spoiling anything. We're renewing democracy."