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When we spoke, Hawkins made it clear his campaign will be aimed squarely at supporters of Bernie Sanders and other progressives. If you support Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, he said, then the presumptive Democratic nominee shouldn’t get your vote.
“We’re the campaign that is for those things, while Joe Biden isn’t for any of those things,” Hawkins said. “Don’t waste your vote. Make your vote count.”
Those words will terrify (or infuriate) Democrats who worry that disaffected progressives, Sanders supporters especially, will hand the election to Trump by refusing to vote for a centrist. Some argue that the November election is too crucial to be messed up by third-party candidates who can only cause trouble.
As evidence, they point to the 2016 results in Michigan, one of several key swing states where the Green Party allegedly tilted the race to Trump. There, Stein received 51,000 votes while Trump defeated Clinton by a mere 10,000.
A clear-cut case that Stein is responsible for Clinton’s defeat? Hardly.
People forget that Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate and a former Republican governor of New Mexico, received 172,000 votes in Michigan and 4.5 million votes nationally. If we’re to believe that all the Johnson votes would have gone to Trump and all the Stein votes would have gone to Clinton, then Trump would have won Michigan easily — and won the national popular vote, too.
But that’s poppycock. Elections don’t actually work that way, in part because if Johnson and Stein hadn’t been on the ballot, many of their voters would have stayed home.
I mean, imagine if a store offered only two brands of cereal, a kind you don’t like and another you despise. Wouldn’t you leave without buying cereal?
Read More: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Churchill-Will-Democrats-hate-Howie-Hawkins-15278142.php
Albany Times Union
