David Cobb spent more than three decades chasing one idea: that a corporation should not hold the constitutional rights of a living, breathing person. Cobb, an attorney and the Green Party's 2004 presidential nominee, died September 7, 2026, in Eureka, California, at 63, according to Ballot Access News. He carried that fight from a Houston courtroom to a presidential ballot line to a rural stretch of California's north coast.

Cobb was born in rural Texas and worked as a laborer before making his way to college and law school, according to the Green Party's own account of his life. He was still a student at the University of Houston when he joined the campus anti-apartheid movement, and in the 1980s he campaigned for the Democratic presidential runs of Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown before growing disillusioned with the party. He went on to build a private legal practice in Houston, spending nearly a decade filing lawsuits against corporate polluters, work his later biographies would call that of a "people's lawyer." The habit of mind behind all of it, he said later, started in a classroom: "It wasn't until I got to university that I began to see that how I was told this country operated was a myth," he told Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center for Public Policy in a 2014 interview.

He helped found the Green Party of Texas in 1999 and ran its ballot access drive, gathering more than 76,000 signatures in 75 days. When Ralph Nader asked him to manage the Green campaign in Texas the following year, Cobb closed his law practice and took over as the national party's general counsel. In 2002 he ran for Texas Attorney General on the Green line, pledging to use the office to revoke the charters of corporations that repeatedly broke health, safety, and environmental laws. He lost, but the state party grew from four local chapters to 26 over the course of the campaign, and Cobb kept lecturing around the country on corporate power and democracy.

In 2004 the national party nominated him for president, with Pat LaMarche as his running mate, and the ticket pursued what the North Coast Journal called a "safe states" strategy, campaigning hardest where a Green vote would not tip the race to George W. Bush. Cobb was blunt about the calculation. "George W. Bush is qualitatively worse" than his Democratic rival, he told the paper that July, though "John Kerry is no progressive." After the vote, he joined Libertarian nominee Michael Badnarik in demanding a recount of Ohio's presidential returns, an effort the Green Party says helped launch the election integrity movement that followed. The party's own account of him also credits him with a simpler, steadier goal beneath the headlines: pursuing, in its words, "a peaceful revolution for a peaceful, just, sustainable and cooperative society."

Cobb had already settled in Eureka by the time he ran for president, working out of the Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County office and sitting on its steering committee as he refined the argument he had been making since Houston. In 2010 that argument became Move to Amend, which he co-founded to campaign for a constitutional amendment stripping corporations of constitutional personhood and eliminating the doctrine that political spending equals speech. He spent the next decade and a half as one of its national spokespeople and a board member, building chapters across the country from a base in Humboldt County, while also coordinating the US Solidarity Economy Network and serving as a fellow of the Liberty Tree Foundation for a Democratic Revolution.

He returned to national campaign work in 2016 as campaign manager for Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka's Green presidential ticket, then turned back to building locally. In 2017 he co-founded Cooperation Humboldt, incubating worker cooperatives, food sovereignty programs, and a worker owned compost business, with an ecovillage among its longer term plans. He later became outreach director for the California Public Banking Alliance's north coast region and advancement manager for the Wiyot Tribe's Dishgamu Community Land Trust, and in 2022 he began hosting the podcast "Redneck Gone Green." Through it all he kept a seat on the Green Party of California's Coordinating Committee, serving for years as the state party's spokesperson and, more recently, as its liaison to the ProRep Coalition for proportional representation, while also advising the California Progressive Alliance and the North Coast People's Alliance.

Announcing his death, the Green Party of California wrote that "David's vastly generous heart, analytical mind, and optimistic spirit have guided and inspired many of our Green family and friends." Its statement closed with a promise rather than a farewell: "We are all better to have known you and we commit to putting the lessons and wisdom you so generously and unconditionally shared with us towards the future we need and deserve."

What stays behind in Humboldt County is not a monument but an operating system: Move to Amend chapters still organizing against corporate personhood, Cooperation Humboldt's cooperatives and food programs still running out of Eureka, a public banking campaign he helped staff, and a land trust partnership with the Wiyot Tribe he had only recently taken on. The lawyer who once sued polluters in a Houston courtroom spent his final two decades trying to build, county by county, the democracy and economy he had spent his twenties arguing for.