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Jeff Sessions left a Cracker Barrel in Mobile, Alabama, yesterday, before his second round of the Senate Tuesday against Tommy Tuberville, who has been endorsed by President Trump.
What role will Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins play in November?
Bernie Sanders may not have won the Democratic presidential nomination, but there will still be at least one Democratic Socialist on the ballot in November. His name is Howie Hawkins, the former activist and frequent (though never successful) candidate for political office in his native New York.
Hawkins, who is this year’s Green Party chairman’s candidate, actually campaigned for Sanders in 1972, when Sanders ran for Vermont governor on the Liberty Union Party ballot. Sanders won 1.1 percent of the vote in that election, the exact turnout that Jill Stein won in 2016 as a candidate for the presidency of the Green Party.
Some Democratic observers that year complained that Stein’s presence in the race contributed to the loss of Hillary Clinton in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Other factors, such as Gary Johnson’s most popular libertarian candidacy and the seven percentage point decline in black voter turnout since 2012, may have played an even bigger role.
Then there was Clinton’s unpopularity among Sanders’ supporters. Only 74 percent of voters who supported her in the 2016 primaries later voted for her in the general election, according to the Congressional Election Cooperative Study. In comparison, a recent New York Times / Siena College poll of six battlefield states found that Joe Biden, this year’s alleged Democratic nominee, was garnering much greater support among Sanders’ 2020 primary voters.
In an interview with our reporter. Reid J. Epstein This week, Hawkins dismissed the argument that Stein had played spoiler, and instead attributed it to her for bringing the green New Deal into public conversation. And she directed a sharp attack on Biden.
Where the hell is Joe Biden? Hawkins said. “He lives a short distance from the White House press corps. He can get your attention. It should hold press conferences and take advantage of what we need now: a testing, tracing, and isolation program to suppress the virus, like most other organized countries around the world. “
This year’s Green Party is authorized to be on the ballot in 22 states. That’s half the number that Stein’s name appeared in 2016, but the Hawkins campaign says it is requesting access to the ballot for more than a dozen people.
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