In 2024, I laid out an idea to turn Congress into The People’s House by 2028, with a goal of running 100 candidates across the country in 2024, 250+ in 2026 for the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, and a full 435+ in 2028. While it never coalesced into a real campaign, and had very little reach, there were actually at least 42 candidates that fit the bill.

This year I drafted a strategy doc and starting sharing it with people, hoping to launch a public push for a national Green Party campaign to recruit over 250 candidates for a dispersed yet national collective effort to use these federal elections to insert ourselves into the national political conversation and strategically build vital Green infrastructure and momentum.

I see it as an emergent strategy to empower the thousands and potentially millions of Green supporters to get activated around a common campaign with a wide variety of strategic priorities, approaches, and endeavors through a nationally networked yet decentralized campaign structure. This is participatory democracy at its finest, where we can collectively build a compelling container with national press intrigue that wields a multiplicity of strategies at a very important target – the United States Congress. Ralph Nader keeps signaling the unique importance of building an organized people’s voice in the House of Representatives, and his latest piece in the Capitol Hill Citizen is titled “Congress is there for the taking. Now’s the time to take it.” Yet the hope for this campaign is less about taking over Congress, and more about leveraging the attention around electoralism into a dynamic and engaging national effort to demonstrate Green leadership, build party and non-party infrastructure, and test out and compare different strategic focuses and tactics, including non-electoral ones like building local chapters of the party.

For many reasons, including a history of 40 years of trying to take on congressional contests without a strategic or adaptive approach, people are skeptical of “flooding the zone” with lots of candidates who might not put the Green Party in a very positive light. We’ve had plenty of candidates who were not the most polished, compelling, charismatic, informed, experienced, persuasive, or even plausible people for the job they were running for, so there’s a distaste for ordinary people putting themselves forward without a serious infrastructure or resources to even accidentally land themselves in Congress.

But together, we can turn that on its head by demonstrating that it is the people currently elected in Congress who have no business representing the interests and desires of We the People. Together, we can rally the kinds of experience, insights, and values that can truly turn the U.S. Congress into the People’s House. Through citizens assemblies, town halls, listening sessions and more, we can convene the people’s movements of the United States, including the very indigenous communities that survived the original sin of this colonial experiment. In fact, it is the deep wisdom of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy that inspired the original confederation of 13 colonies into a single republic. In 2026, we would be wise to take a deeper look at their Great Law of Peace.

With the genocide in Palestine raging on despite a supposed ceasefire, and the Green Party in the UK surging as the clearest alternative to right-wing fascism, the time for the Green Party in the US to assert itself as the clear leader for issues of war and peace, justice and democracy, and the social, ecological, and economic transformations we desperately need is NOW. If we don’t seize this moment then the revolution might pass us by. A revolution without guiding values as clear and transformational as the ten key values of the Green Party.

Now is our time. For every past Green that couldn’t stand the toxicity inherent within such a major undertaking while refusing corporate cash, and has burnt out on the trying realities of building a truly independent alternative, make 2026 the year you get back in the fold. For every non-Green that has bought into the propaganda that the Green Party just pops up every 4 years to run for President, let this be the campaign you support, in your own community, on your own terms.

If you support the idea of the Green Party running 250+ congressional candidates simply to put an alternative choice on a majority of congressional ballot lines, please sign and share the petition to your networks. Together, we can #GreenTheHouse, turn it into #ThePeoplesHouse, and #OvergrowTheGovernment.