With the sun shining on the Brighton seafront, the Green Party – meeting for its conference here – is in a bullish mood.
This is their heartland, won by Caroline Lucas from Labour in 2010 and which they have held onto ever since, increasing her majority to 20,000.
But she remains their sole MP – along with two members of the House of Lords – and she’s standing down at the next election.
Lucas is standing down at the next election
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The Green Party’s co-leaders Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer are not well-known figures, but they have big ambitions – claiming they can quadruple their number to four MPs next year.
Both of them hope to pick up seats, against Labour in Bristol Central where Denyer is standing, and against the Conservatives in Waveney in Suffolk and South Herefordshire.
But these seats, or the ones that preceded the boundary changes, all have big majorities for Labour and the Conservatives – making even that modest aim a long shot.
The first-past-the-post system makes any breakthrough for a smaller party difficult. So, will another prediction of a Green surge turn out to be a damp squib?
Both Green Party leaders hope to pick up votes in Bristol Central and Suffolk and South Herefordshire
Winning local elections is where the battle starts
The party believe this could be their moment for several reasons. The first is big gains at local elections – a lot of groundwork over the past decade came to fruition in May when the party picked up a surprise 241 councillors.
In 2001, the party had 45 councillors, they now have more than 900. But winning MPs is obviously much harder.
The Greens won 1.1 million votes at the 2015 elections but still just one MP. UKIP won 3.8 million and only got one MP, too.
But winning local councils is where the battle starts – as the Lib Dems showed in the 1980s and 1990s before winning dozens of seats in Westminster.
The second reason for Green optimism is that climate policies are surging up the political agenda.
Market research company Ipsos