MILWAUKEE (Reuters) - The Green Party holds its presidential convention in Milwaukee this week to decide whether to field a candidate or go without one and endorse the independent bid of Ralph Nader, who headed its White House ticket in 2000.

Nader is not seeking the Green nomination this time, and it is unlikely he will attend the June 23-28 meeting, but he is seeking the party's endorsement.

To win that, he will have to get past Green Party activist David Cobb, a California lawyer actively seeking the party's nomination. He leads its national delegate count by a clear margin and has spent the last eight years visiting 40 states, working at the grass-roots level to build ties between its environmental and labor wings.

"David Cobb has a long history with the party," says Ben Manski, a third-year University of Wisconsin law student and co-chairman of the Green Party of the United States. "He's a democracy activist centering around election reform and fighting corporate power. His appeal is that he is charismatic, articulate, working-class, and he's a Green."

As the Green candidate in 2000, Nader drew 2.7 percent of the popular vote, but Democrats saw him as a spoiler who sapped strength from former vice president Al Gore in battleground states, including Florida, where Nader drew 97,488 votes.

Gore won the popular vote nationally but lost the weighted electoral college vote -- and the election -- to President Bush, losing Florida by 537 contested votes.

Cobb has said his he wants to see Bush defeated and for that reason would not concentrate on the states where the President is in a tight race with John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

"What they call spoiling, we call participation," Cobb said in an interview. "If anyone thinks we are spoilers, it is because of a system that forces voters to vote against what they hate instead of voting for what they want."

Cobb's platform reflects the Green Party as a whole. His main issues center around protecting the environment and "ending war as foreign policy," including the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Columbia.

Cobb would like to see what he calls the U.S. military-industrial complex dismantled, an end to the war on drugs and an effort to build more schools instead of prisons. He also advocates universal health care for all Americans.

In 20 years, the U.S. Green Party has grown to an estimated half a million members. There are currently 205 elected Green officials across the country, compared with 87 four years ago, Manski said.