In this, our season of discontent, it didn't seem surprising to learn that the Green Party intended to submit enough signatures to the Secretary of State to be included on the general election for the first time since 2002 in Texas.

On his subscription-only website Capitol Inside, Mike Hailey last week reported that the party had more than the necessary 90,000 signatures. He summoned up the gaunt specter of Ralph Nader, whose Green Party candidacy for president in 2000 some blamed for keeping the now-estranged husband of Tipper Gore out of the White House.

Before panic over the phoenix-like ascension of a left-wing Tea Party could spread like a BP oil slick, liberal Houston blogger Charles Kuffner assembled some past election totals and suggested the state's Democrats probably needn't worry too much.

Kuffner wrote:

Now, 2010 is a different environment than 2002, and I wouldn’t want to draw too broad an inference from these limited data points. My very tentative conclusions are that at the statewide and Congressional level, Green candidates are unlikely to have much effect. In nine of the sixteen races, the Green received less than one percent of the vote. If as many people believe, Libertarians tend to draw their votes away from Republican candidates, they will take more votes away than Greens will from Dems. Again, it could be different this year, but that’s how it looked in 2002. The effect may be greater in local races, such as for State Rep, and if I were to be concerned about an outcome being affected, that’s one place I’d worry about.