Going for governor.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Progressive Democrats and 3rd parties in 1998 gubernatorial races

Most are leftwing Democrats in the Midwest or New England. They have come out fighting to recapture their party's liberal tradition after years of Clintonization and drift. But some are third party candidates, who want to raise issues that both parties suppress.

None is more intriguing than former U.S. Representative Dan Hamburg, who represented Northern California as a Democrat in the early 1990s. He chose not to run for his old House seat in 1996 because he believed that the fundraising process was thoroughly corrupting. That same year, he switched to the Green Party and backed Ralph Nader's Presidential effort.

This year, Hamburg is seeking the Golden State's governorship as the Green Party nominee. And some political analysts hold out the hope that he could make a stronger showing than New Mexico's Roberto Mondragon, who stunned pundits by earning 10 percent of the vote as that state's Green Party nominee in 1994.

Hamburg would offer California voters a distinct alternative, especially if the Democratic nominee turns out to be Al Checchi, the former CEO of Northwest Airlines. Checchi has pledged to spend as much as 10 percent of his $600-million fortune to get elected. He is a fiscal conservative who wants to expand the death penalty and is hostile to some unions. The November gubernatorial contest may well come down to Checchi, theocratic Republican Attorney General Dan Lungren, and Hamburg.

In that scenario, an articulate Green candidate with solid name recognition, significant electoral experience, and a progressive platform could turn out to be a serious contender. "With the Republicans and the Democrats both preparing to run conservative candidates, it seems to me that there will be a huge number of voters looking for an alternative," says Hamburg. "If we put together a very energetic, very nontraditional campaign, anything's possible."

Already, the California Greens are planning a major voter registration drive. along with an effort to place an electoral reform initiative on the November ballot. They are developing the machinery to put in place the most sophisticated progressive, third-party gubernatorial campaign America has seen since the 1930s.

"We want to tie together the loose alliance of progressive groups around the state-peace and justice groups. environmental groups, community organizations. Native Americans, Hispanics." says Hamburg.

Other progressive candidates hope to build similar coalitions for their campaigns. The Republicans currently hold thirty-two governorships to the Democrats' seventeen -- and few of either party can be called liberal.

"Since the Reagan days, a lot of liberals and progressives have decided that they stand no chance in big-ticket races. But that's where they're wrong. It's in the big-ticket races where people are paying enough attention so that it becomes possible to break through," says New Mexico's former governor Toney Anaya, one of the most progressive governors of any state in the last twenty-five years. "Conservative Republicans have figured out that governorships are where it's at. So much power is being shifted back to the states. That means. that governors are in the driver's seat. Progressives lost sight of that. They didn't focus on governorships, and they've paid the price."

Behind the headlines about the 1994 shift in control of Congress was news of an equally jarring turn of events. Republicans -- many of them with backing from the Christian right -- won two-thirds of the thirty-six governorships that were up for election that year. They took over states their party had not run in decades...