David Cobb

David Keith Cobb spent a generation arguing that American democracy had been rented out from under the people who worked it. He died on 7 September 2026, Labor Day, during a walk on the beach at Eureka, California. He was 63. The Green Party of California, where he was spokesperson, announced the sudden loss the next day. On the same date the Green Party of the United States published a remembrance by Jim Reed, who called Cobb his best friend and wrote that Cobb's heart finally gave way on that walk, his favorite holiday, the one that marks what the labor movement won for working people.

He was born on 24 December 1962 in San Leon, Texas, a Gulf Coast place he later described, in a July 2004 CNN interview with Judy Woodruff, as grinding poverty. A Democracy at Work host biography says he grew up poor in the rural South, worked construction, and was a deckhand before junior college. An archived early Wikipedia account, matching that outline, adds work as a shrimp-boat crewman, a construction worker, and a waiter. The Houston Press, profiling him in October 2000, said his mother taught him the importance of sharing and that he idolized Atticus Finch. It also said he made law review at the University of Houston, quit law school over moral uncertainty, was drawn back, and concentrated on social-justice work. The State Bar of Texas lists David Keith Cobb, bar card 00787257, University of Houston, Texas license date 5 November 1993. Later bar records listed him as not eligible to practice in Texas because of an administrative suspension. That status is a licensing fact, not a finding recounted in the obituaries used here.

In the 1980s he organized as a student against apartheid, a record the Democracy at Work biography says includes an arrest record from that work. He threw himself into Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign and Jerry Brown's 1992 campaign, then burned out, the Houston Press wrote, and spent a stretch listening to records and asking how to attack injustice at the root. He came to a sentence he still used years later: the corporation as institution was the hijacker of the body politic. Listening to Houston's KPFT, he heard Ralph Nader accept the 1996 Green nomination. By 2000 he and Nathalie Paravicini, whom the Houston Press then called his wife, were organizing the Green Party of Texas from a Garden Oaks house. He was state party secretary. She coordinated Nader's Texas campaign. They quit paid jobs, his as an insurance trial lawyer, and gathered more than 51,000 ballot-access signatures in a state that required more than 37,000 from a narrow class of voters in 75 days. An archived encyclopedia account says Nader asked Cobb to organize Texas in 2000 and that Cobb closed his law practice to do it, while also serving as general counsel to the Green Party of the United States.

In 2002 he ran for attorney general of Texas on the Green ticket, pledging to use the office against corporations that repeatedly broke health, safety, and environmental law. Official returns cited on Wikipedia show Republican Greg Abbott 2,542,184 (56.72 percent), Democrat Kirk Watson 1,841,359 (41.08 percent), Libertarian Jon Roland 56,880 (1.26 percent), and David Keith Cobb 41,560 (0.92 percent), on a turnout of 4,481,983. The same year he facilitated the founding convention of the Green Party of Louisiana in New Orleans on 31 August and 1 September 2002.

When Nader said in late December 2003 that he would not seek the Green nomination, Cobb became a front-runner. On 13 January 2004 he won the first Green primary in the country, in the District of Columbia. Nader later ran as an independent with Peter Camejo. At the Forward 2004 convention in Milwaukee, on 26 June, delegates nominated Cobb on the second ballot and named Pat LaMarche of Maine for vice president. Wikipedia records the fight: Nader had won most of the actual primary votes, and Cobb's primary support was about 12.2 percent. Cobb's answer, given to CounterPunch that October, was that he had joined the party, campaigned on its platform, worked shoulder to shoulder with Greens for years, and actually sought the nomination through the process the party set, while Nader had said he was not seeking it and would not accept it. The campaign used a safe-states or strategic-states approach and the phrase "vote your conscience." Cobb was arrested on 8 October 2004 in St. Louis after breaking a police line to protest the Commission on Presidential Debates for locking third-party candidates out of the televised debates. Libertarian nominee Michael Badnarik was arrested with him.

In November 2004 Cobb finished sixth nationwide with 119,859 votes, 0.10 percent, and no electoral votes, a drop of more than 90 percent from Nader's 2000 Green-era total. On 11 November 2004 he and Badnarik announced they would demand an Ohio recount, saying in a joint statement that voting is the heart of the democratic process and that people who stand in line for hours need to know every vote will be counted fairly. They also asked Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who chaired the Ohio Bush campaign, to recuse himself. Cobb and Badnarik later sought a New Mexico recount as well. Cobb and party materials later described those demands as a start of the election-integrity fight against unauditable electronic voting.

After the race he stayed inside the institutions he had helped build and then tried to change the Constitution those institutions ran on. He sat on the Green Institute board, the Sierra Club's national Corporate Accountability Committee, and the steering committee of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, and he worked with the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy. In 2010 he co-founded Move to Amend, the campaign for an amendment to abolish court-made doctrines of corporate constitutional rights and money as speech. The We the People Amendment, which California Green materials credit him with announcing once it had congressional sponsors, says constitutional rights belong to human beings only and that campaign spending is not First Amendment speech. In 2016 he managed Jill Stein's presidential campaign, the Stein/Baraka ticket. At an October 2016 rally for Stein at the Berkeley City Club he is the man in the Wikimedia Commons portrait speaking from the floor, a Stein/Baraka button on his jacket.

By then Humboldt County was home. He co-founded Cooperation Humboldt in 2018. Democracy at Work's host biography says he helped create the Wiyot Tribe's Dishgamu Community Land Trust, worked as a tribal government employee on private and public Land Back projects, and helped start multi-million-dollar housing projects for the Tribe. He served as co-coordinator of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network and as administrator of the People's Network for Land and Liberation, whose mission he described in a Regeneration Journal interview as decommodifying land and restoring a right relationship with the earth. The network's nodes, as he listed them, included Cooperation Jackson, Community Movement Builders, Cooperation Vermont, Incite Focus, Native Roots Network, and Wellspring Cooperative. He liked a line from that work: if it is not soulful, it is not strategic.

In his last years he taught that argument every Monday. Redneck Gone Green, which he hosted with Shane Knight on the Democracy at Work YouTube channel, went live at 3 p.m. Pacific and 6 p.m. Eastern. He signed Substack notes "David Cobb (he/him)" and pointed readers to the show. A 10 August 2026 Substack post set a conversation with Erel Onojobi. Listen Notes listed the podcast as updated through 18 August 2026. He was still the California Greens' spokesperson when the party said goodbye on 8 September.

The life was not a large vote total. It was a working-class lawyer who closed a practice, fought for a third-party line in Texas, took a nomination his own party's primary voters mostly did not give him, was arrested on a debate line in St. Louis, forced recount questions in Ohio, then spent two decades trying to write corporations out of the Bill of Rights and land back into community hands. Reed's ode, the closest thing to a public farewell, said the heart had carried a heavy load. The ocean, Reed wrote, sounded like a return.

This profile is David Keith Cobb, the 2004 Green Party presidential nominee. It is not the CBS Sports writer David Cobb, not David R. Cobb of Madisonville, Kentucky, not music producer Dave Cobb, and not the Minnesota running back.