[GirlySports]

We have the Green candidate, Howie Hawkins. I found this interview pretty interesting as a choice for progressives. And he has a black female running mate!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuMbNSFVZUE

Excerpt about wasting your vote, that would interest you, and the things that have been discussed in this thread.

Spoiler!

Q: So your platform in general I mean is is very impressively radical, it has a lot of stuff which I think you know everybody thinks we should have. But I'm curious in terms of your sense of the, our political consensus machine tends to produce a kind of negotiate from the middle or to start halfway to your opponents position and then negotiate halfway from there. It's led to us a lot of cynicism right around just electoralism in general on the Left. What do you say to people who think electoralism is just a dead end, we shouldn't even bother.


A: Well to have a mass base party of the left, it's got to be driven forward by social movements. But on the other hand, if the social movements don't support a vote for that party, they're gonna be taken for granted. Because in the end, street demonstrations are a more militant form of lobbying Democrats. And if you're not threatening their votes, they gonna take you for granted. We saw that during the Iraq War, we were called the world's second superpower by the New York Times, massive demonstrations. But then the leadership of the peace movement said, in 2004, our slogans gonna be against the Bush Agenda, which meant vote for Kerry, who at the Democratic convention said I'm reporting for duty I'm a veteran I could fight the war better than Bush. He wasn't anti-war, he just said I'm a better warrior. And that really undermined the peace movement. So we got to vote for what we want and make the politicians come to us.


And if you vote for Biden and you're a progressive, say you're supported Bernie Sanders, you wanted Medicare for All, a full-strength Green New deal, College for All, tax the rich, all those things, and you vote for Biden, you get lost in the sauce. You don't know you're a progressive, you voted for Biden, you just silenced yourself. You vote for the Greens, we're for those things and more. Everybody knows what we stand for it, and that's your voice, and you can make it heard and the more votes we get the more leverage we'll have going forward. When I got 5% of vote running against Andrew Cuomo for Governor in 2014, he had wanted to run up the vote to get ready to run for President. He wanted to get more votes than his father Mario Cuomo ever got. He want to get more votes than he got when he was first elected in 2010, and he got less. He couldn't take us for granted, he's looking at our five percent. He had asked, "What were they saying?" Before that he was a fiscal hawk, now he rebranded himself as the pragmatic progresses that gets things done, and he started adopting some of our planks.


A ban on fracking, a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave. Even made gestures toward tuition free college in public institutions. He didn't do that, but to compete he had to act like he was. So that's where our leverage is. If you vote what you don't want, I mean what's the point? You just silenced yourself and you have no leverage. You vote for what you want, we may not win the White House, hey if we get 5%, whoever's in there is gonna like, particularly if it's a Democrat, they're going to say, that could have been the margin of difference, what are they talking about that I got a deal with? And that's you know our leverage in the process going forward.

Q: So I mean, Democrats particularly have have always used this argument, I mean, at least at least going back to Ralph Nader's campaign in 2000 of well the other guy's worse and you're just you're just throwing away your vote and the threat of Trump is being used heavily on this right? We know Biden's not a good candidate, we don't want to vote for that guy. But it's always, "But if you don't vote for him, you're just voting for Trump." You don't you don't buy, I assume.

A: Yeah look, they call us the spoilers. But I say the Democrats are the spoilers. Because since that Ralph Nader election, we've been giving him the proven nonpartisan solution to the spoiler problem. Replace the Electoral College with the rank-choice national popular vote for President, problem solved. If I ever get on the debate stage with Biden, I'm going to say, "Joe will you support us, will you embrace this reform, a rank-choice national popular vote for President, and then we don't have to spoil the problem what do you say Joe?" I'm afraid Joe is gonna look at me like, "What's that?" I'm not even sure he knows. But that's why we got to be in the race to raise issues like that.