NY State of Politics, July 6, 2018

Howie Hawkins believes there’s an opening for the Green Party in the race for governor, whether or not Cynthia Nixon remains in the race after the Sept. 13 Democratic primary against Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Hawkins, in a fundraising appeal on Friday, noted that Cuomo, Nixon and independent candidate Stephanie Miner, all backed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

At the same time, the Working Families Party with Nixon as its nominee in November would continue to be part of a broader project to push Democrats to the left, Hawkins argued.

“All three self-styled “progressive” Democrats – Cuomo, Miner, and Nixon – may be running on different ballot lines this year, but they all supported Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the (2016) New York presidential primary,” the email stated. “If Nixon loses the Democratic primary but stays on the Working Families Party line for November, she will still be a Democrat pursuing the Working Families Party strategy of influencing the Democratic Party. Of all six tickets on the November ballot, only the Green Party is building an independent party of the left to beat, not just influence, the corrupt two-party system of corporate rule.”

This a debatable point, given the limb the Working Families Party would walking out on by having Nixon as its nominee into November, however.

Hawkins ran for governor in 2010 and 2014 as the Green nominee, securing 5 percent of the vote four years ago and ballot status for the party this election cycle.

But Hawkins has been frustrated with some of the media coverage in the race, seeing reporters as star struck for Nixon’s candidacy and not covering his policy ideas.

And he argues there are differences.

“Unlike Nixon, I argue that socialist solutions are the only answers to capitalism’s blind, relentless growth that is consuming the environment and its compulsion to increase economic inequality by reducing the earned incomes of working people in order to increase the unearned incomes of big property owners,” Hawkins said. “I want to expand worker and consumer co-ops in the private sector and bring essential utilities and shared monopolies into the public sector, including a public energy system and public options in banking, broadband, and affordable housing.”