Howie Hawkins

Bundle and safe with Expedia.

You were made to follow your favorite band and from the front row, we were made to quietly save you more.

Expedia, made to travel.

Savings vary and subject to availability, flight inclusive packages are at all protected.

Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

This election, more than any election in modern memory, feels like a continuation of the last one.

For Donald Trump, he's proposed no new policies or argument for his second term, just make America great again.

Again.

For Democrats, they're desperately trying to make sure that what happened in 2016 doesn't happen again.

And for such a close Electoral College loss, you can point to any number of factors.

Jim Comey, Russia, not campaigning in the Midwest, or, as I'll discuss this week, third parties.

When many Americans think of the Green Party, the name Ralph Nader jumps to mind.

The nearly 3 million votes he won in 2000 were the high watermark for the environmental issues-inspired left-wing party.

They were also, many argue, the reason George W.

Bush narrowly won the presidency.

16 years later, the next time the Republicans flipped the White House, it was again a narrow win.

And again, one that the Green Party votes might have made the difference in.

Jill Stein didn't get as many votes as Ralph Nader, but in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, she won more than the margin between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

As a result, the Democratic Party is more than a little preoccupied with my guest this week, Howie Hawkins, the Green Party's 2020 nominee, and one of the party's co-founders.

Hawkins and his fellow Green Party members don't like the spoiler accusation.

After all, no party is owed a Parsons vote, and the alternative to voting for a third-party candidate is often not voting at all.

Nonetheless, Democrats have worked hard to keep them off ballots, and this past week succeeded in their efforts in two key states.

Because of paperwork issues, the Green Party won't be on presidential ballots in Wisconsin, and Hawkins' running mate won't be on ballots in Pennsylvania.

The Democrats aren't the only party interested in Hawkins' impact on the race.

Republicans would be delighted to see a spoiler, and Republican lawyers have even helped the Green Party fight Democrats in court.

So I wanted to sit down with Hawkins to ask how he feels about getting that help from Republicans, why he thinks Kanye West's candidacy is completely different from his, and what concrete changes he actually thinks will come of his candidacy.

Take a listen.

Howie Hawkins, thanks for being here on the ticket.

Oh, thanks for having me.

So let's just talk this through.

You were involved with the starting of the Green Party in America, and here you are as the presidential nominee.

How does that happen?

Bad luck.

I never wanted to run for president.

In fact, my message to that that first green organizing meeting back in August 1984 is we can't build the party out of a presidential campaign.

I've been through that with Peace and Freedom Party in 1968, the two People's Party campaigns in 72 and 76, and the Citizens Party campaign in 1980.

And, you know, people put a lot of effort into presidential campaigns, but there was nothing left afterwards.

So I said, We got to organize local groups, start getting involved in local politics.

And I still believe that.

And ironically, as as I later learned, to be able to run local candidates, you got to have ballot lines.

And in 40 of the 50 states, the presidential vote is a factor that determines whether you have a ballot line going forward, which makes it a lot easier to run local candidates.

For example, for Congress, it takes thousands of signatures in most states to get an independent congressional candidate on a ballot.

If you have a ballot line, In some states, you do it by designation.

Other states, there's a petition, but it's a small fraction of the number you need as an independent.

And then, you know, I've been involved in the Greens a long time and I was minding my own business and a bunch of people drafted me to run.

And it took them a few months to convince me, but I was finally persuaded.

So here I am.

You have along the way been a candidate on the Green Line for Senate in New York and for a House seat in New York.

What'd you learn from those that has informed you as you've undertaken this campaign?

Well, in the House races, I was able to raise issues.

And in fact, contrary to conventional wisdom, the only time the Democrat has beat the Republican in my congressional district is when we ran a green.

One time when I ran, and one time I was the campaign manager for another candidate.

And I think what that did was change the whole dynamic because we bring progressive issues.

The Democratic candidate, instead of tacking to their right, and losing the enthusiasm of their base, has to compete with the candidate to their left left as well.

The other thing I've learned is when the Greens statewide have asked me to run statewide, it's a whole different kind of campaign than running locally.

I mean, I've run for city council here in Syracuse.

First time I ran back in 93, we got 3% of the vote.

And I've built that up to 48%, came very close in 2011.

And the difference is you don't need a lot of money.

You knock on doors, people know you want to hear what they have to say.

It's better to just listen rather than give them an elevator pitch because, you know, they got issues and nobody's listening to them.

They really appreciate that.

This week, there was a court decision, which you were not a big fan of in Wisconsin, that affected your candidacy.

Walk me through how you see what happened there.

Well, it was a real injustice for the Greens and for the voters of Wisconsin.

My running mate, Angela Walker, moved within Florence, South Carolina, where she now lives, during the petitioning period.

We informed the Wisconsin Election Commission and they gave us instructions, although they changed over three days, but you know, finally said on the third day, this is what you need to do, which was change her petition on her name and address on petitions gathered after she moved, which is what we did.

And the other thing they wanted was an affidavit certifying her current address, which was on her declaration of candidacy.

which was filed with the petition.

And so Democrats challenged.

There was a signature challenge and they said the signatures collected at the old address didn't count.

And we had the documentation to prove that we had done what they said and certified what our current address is.

But the Democrat chair in the Wisconsin Election Commission hearing wouldn't let us present that evidence.

So that precipitated the whole thing.

We had to go to court to get our evidence heard.

And so the Democrats started it, but then the Republican majority court dragged it out up toward the absentee ballot deadline.

They had all the information they needed for a week, and they waited.

Now, there are three Democrats on there.

I wonder what really went on behind closed doors.

My hunch is they brought it up to the date and said, then we can't decide on the merits because we got to get these absentee ballots out or else Wisconsin is going to be embarrassed.

So the decision was, it's too late.

You're out of luck.

Although the dissenting opinions presented our evidence and you read those and it's clear by the facts and the law, we should have been on the ballot so we got screwed you know the way i look at it we were pawns between the political the partisan hacks in both parties i mean what kind of country is it where the governing parties run the elections well that's the way it works all over the country right in the united states yeah no that's what i mean and

russia they don't do that in canada they don't do that in the united kingdom they don't do that in new zealand Yeah, this is not the way it should be done.

And that is that runs through local government, state government, all over the place and all sorts of different ways.

The Commission on Presidential Elections.

It is a Republican and Democratic system, the Federal Elections Commission.

There's no question about it.

Wisconsin had an independent commission, and Republicans got that changed when they got power in Wisconsin.

So it can be done.

It used to be done in Wisconsin.

What the issue that was coming

to the forefront with Wisconsin was, is there was this question of delays in printing the ballots, whether they'd have to print a second round of ballots then, and then that would slow things down and maybe add to the confusion of what was going to happen when there were the mail-in ballots in Wisconsin.

And that was what was driving a lot of this.

What was notable to a number of people, and admittedly, I was one of them, is that you told the Washington Post in the middle of this when you were asked about whether Republicans were helping out on the legal side.

What you said was you get help where you can find it.

So were you being supported by Republicans in your efforts there?

Apparently, the lawyers are Republicans.

When I talked to the Washington Post, I didn't know that.

She asked me that twice.

I did not know that.

And then she asked me the hypothetical, well, if they were.

And I assume she knew something I didn't.

So I said, yeah.

I mean, we sought out progressive lawyers that were recommended to us.

They didn't get back to us.

So, you know, you go to court, you need a lawyer.

And these are the lawyers we could get.

Are Republicans helping out anywhere else beyond Wisconsin?

Not.

And our campaign has had no contact with Republican officials.

Republicans, like Democrats, play games behind the scenes.

We've seen that for years.

like here in New York, where the Green Party isn't organized in the county and sometimes even where they are, they will seed some people into the Green Party so they can collect petitions and put in a phony Green candidate who's really a Republican who thinks they're going to split the Democratic vote.

And in fact, we've caught some of them.

And

yeah, these games go on.

Do you think that those Republicans who were the Republican lawyers who were helping out in Wisconsin had an interest in ballot access or that their interest was anything beyond, in their minds, doing something that would help take away votes from Joe Biden, help him lose the election in Wisconsin and in a wider way around the country.

I haven't talked to them, seeing their briefs and their little comments when they send the briefs around.

They sounded to me like lawyers that wanted to win, you know, and their briefs were good.

Does it concern you, though, that part of what the motivation here is, and I know you don't see what you're doing as a spoiler, but others could look at you and say, oh, here's an opportunity to be a spoiler or help a spoiler.

Yeah, or hurt a quote-unquote spoiler.

I think both the Democrats and Republicans, I mean, they're really looking at one little weed in the whole forest, and they're not dealing with the whole forest, which is what has really impacted, say, the presidential elections.

It's been black voter suppression.

Going back to what Kathleen Harris did in Florida, even before you get to the vote count and the hanging Chads and all that.

You know, if the black vote hadn't been suppressed like it was in Florida, you know, Gore would have easily won.

And then 2016, those 75,000 votes never counted in Detroit.

It was the Greens in court trying to get them counted.

And we didn't have standing because we couldn't win the election, even if all those votes went to us.

But the Clinton lawyers were there, and the judge asked them if they wanted to get involved.

They said, oh, no, we're just observing.

So wouldn't they turn around and blame us?

I mean, right.

I mean,

to the people who say, like, well, if Ralph Nader's name hadn't been on the ballot in 2000, then probably Al Gore would have been the president.

What would you say?

Stop suppressing the black vote and join us in getting rid of the Electoral College and going to a ranked choice national popular vote for president.

There hasn't been a Republican first elected in the 21st century who wasn't installed by the Electoral College after they lost the popular vote.

George W.

Bush and Donald Trump.

They're losers, but the Electoral College put them in office, not the Green Party.

And if the Democrats were really serious, they'd go after the Electoral College.

And if they don't want the center-left vote split so these right-wing losers get in, they join us in going for for ranked choice voting.

Instead, they think we're easy pickings, the Green Party, we can knock them off and

basically eliminate us from the ballot.

I mean, we see that here in New York.

Under the cover of COVID, they passed a law that triples the number of votes we need to get, doubles the frequency we need to get them, and triples the number of signatures we need to get to get back on the ballot.

Now, New York is maybe the hardest state in the country to get on as an independent for a statewide office.

45,000 signatures in a six-week window.

Are you,

do you feel every party should bloom?

And one of the other

names that gets talked about a lot this year is Kanye West, right, who

is running also.

He doesn't seem to have a clear platform for why he's running or clear rationale for it, but he says he wants to be the president.

Should he be on the ballot, too?

I think Kanye West is a Republican dirty trick.

And if Roger Stone didn't think of it, he wished he had.

The birthday party.

I mean, come on.

There has to be some criteria for getting on the ballot.

You know, anybody with money can hire petitioners and get on the ballot.

There should be some threshold for recognizing parties, you know, of a level of organization.

So there's really a base there.

And they should be allowed to make their nominations by convention.

That's the way most countries do it.

They don't have the state keeping the lists of who's in what party or not even doing that and letting people come to the polls and pick up any party's ballot that day,

no matter what their politics.

We have memberless parties without Democratic accountability to a base.

So the whole system is run from the top by money and advertising.

And, you know, the candidates are like little startup businesses and they go around to the capitalists, the big donors, and say, invest in us.

They call that the money primary before you even get to that voting primary.

but you get why people would look at republican lawyers helping you guys in wisconsin and not see a big difference between that and what you just said about kanye west though not see a big difference yeah they would say well oh it's the same kind of thing it's a plant it's an operation it's that kind of thing uh now obviously the green party's been around for a long time right but you it doesn't make sense to you that some people might look at it and see a similar thing going on well i think some people are gullible i heard rachel maddow call us a republican op the other night, but that doesn't mean that's the reality.

I mean, we are a serious movement.

We've been around for 35 years.

We've run people like Ralph Nader, who's got more legislative accomplishments than probably everybody combined in Congress right now, going back to saving hundreds of thousands of lives in auto safety, the EPA, OSHA, et cetera.

So we're a serious party.

Kanye West, the birthday party, come on, this is a joke.

It's not serious politics.

So there is a difference.

And if people don't see that, they're not stopping to think.

All right, we're going to take a short break.

When we're back, I ask Hawkins about accusations from Democrats that his candidacy may return Donald Trump to the White House.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

Well, with the name Your Price Tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your your bills.

Try it at progressive.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Price and coverage match limited by state law.

Not available in all states.

I think that one of the reasons why people are seeing it so similarly is because there is this feeling among a lot of progressives, among a lot of Democrats, that Donald Trump has to lose, that there's no time for messing around.

And that's why you have even people like Bernie Sanders, who seems to be on a lot of issues in alignment with you in specifics and certainly broadly, but Sanders, who has been very supportive of the Biden candidacy and saying the most important thing here is that Donald Trump loses.

What do you make of that?

Well, the Green Party is a second front against Trump.

And the question for progressives like Bernie Sanders is, how are you going to vote against Trump?

You're going to vote for the guy who's against your signature issue, Medicare for All, Joe Biden?

Are you going to vote for the Greens who are for Medicare for All?

You know, this is the most policy devoid vacuous campaign I've ever seen.

You know, what policy debate is Biden and Trump having?

We've got really serious issues, a climate meltdown.

an inequality crisis where working class life expectancies have been declining and a new nuclear arms race that nobody's talking about.

And both parties are committed to the nuclear weapons modernization program, which destabilized the whole nuclear balance of terror.

None of these issues are being talked about.

These are issues we're trying to bring to the table.

So, you know, I tell progressives, don't get lost in the sauce.

If you're for Medicare for all in a Green New Deal, which has been the Green Party's signature issue for a decade, Vote for the Greens.

Everybody knows we're for those things.

You vote for Biden.

He's not for those things.

And your support for those those things gets lost in the sauce.

You're just another Biden voter.

So don't waste your vote.

Make your vote count.

Vote for the kind of things you want and make the politicians come to you.

If a couple of days after the election, because I think most people assume that the counting will take at least a couple more days than just the night of November 3rd, the election is clear, the results are clear at that point.

And there was a state that goes by

10,000 votes for Trump and he's re-elected.

And the margin of votes is smaller than the number of votes that you get on the ticket.

People might say Howie Hawkins is the reason why Donald Trump was re-elected.

Would you be comfortable being in that situation?

Well, I won't like it.

I think it's unlikely.

You know, the polls have been pretty steady.

Biden set up the win in an electoral college landslide, and the voting is starting.

But if it wasn't that situation, I wouldn't like it because I want Trump out there more than the damn Democrats do.

They could have impeached his sorry behind,

you know, early on in this thing for all kinds of lawlessness and self-serving and violations of things like the Emoluments Clause.

There's just a whole long, you know, rap sheet that could have mobilized public opinion around an impeachment based on how he is hurting workers and consumers.

You know, they had their chance.

I don't think they fight the rights so hard.

And the other assumption in that, you know, accusation that no doubt would be thrown at me is that our people would have voted for Biden if I wasn't on the ballot.

And we know from 2016 exit polls that 61% of Jill Stein's voters would have stayed home.

And you plug those numbers into the closest states, Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, wouldn't have made a difference.

We bring new people to the polls.

And what they've done in Wisconsin is, I think, suppress voter turnout.

Party suppression is part of voter suppression.

It's what the Democrats do.

For example, my running mate, Angela Walker, a native daughter of black Milwaukee, got 67,000 votes in 2014 running for sheriff as an independent socialist.

How do you think those people feel about her getting thrown off the ballot by the Democrats?

You know, a lot of those people may be just disgusted and they're not going to vote at all now.

I wonder if you can just walk me through a little bit more of your life of how you got to be involved in founding the party or helping found the party.

It's not like you grew up as a political operative and sitting obsessed with presidential trivia all day.

No, my parents weren't involved in politics.

They were Republicans, and what I learned was Republicans are civil rights, staying out of stupid foreign wars, and they weren't like Republicans today.

They're willing to pay their taxes, but they wanted to make sure the government spent it right.

Other than that, they just wanted the government to leave them alone.

When I was young, I mean, my cousins, one set of cousins, are the children of one of the first Japanese war brides from World War II.

And being Army brats, they were stationed in Virginia.

And another set of white cousins had moved there from Indiana where they lost the family farm.

And the white cousins being sent to the white school and the Asian cousins being sent to the colored schools.

And I'm, you know, this is I'm getting into elementary school and I'm thinking, man, that is wrong.

As a little kid, I just felt that was wrong.

And then I got into school and they told me to dive under my desk and put my hands over my head in case of nuclear war.

And we practiced that.

And I knew that wasn't going to save us.

you know, I knew enough about nuclear weapons that that was, you know, so I wondered what the adults were doing.

So I already had a lot of skepticism.

And then as I, you know, got into my teen years, thinking about, you know, well, where did I stand in the civil rights movements all around me?

Reagan's campaigning against a fair housing law that just passed.

The Republicans successfully got it repealed in a referendum.

This is in California where I was coming up.

And then I watched the Democrats seat the racist Dixiecrats instead of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic delegation.

So I'm asking, where's my party?

And the lesser evil won, Johnson, and escalated massively in Vietnam, and both parties supported that.

So by that time, I was pretty outraged.

And I was coming up in the San Francisco Bay Area where the movements were pretty strong.

So I got swept up into it at that time.

And all throughout, you've been a working stiff going through each day.

Yeah, I was unloading trucks at UPS at night and campaigning for governor.

and one time against Senator Clinton during the day, or at least the afternoon.

I did get some sleep.

But, you know, my running mate is working 12 or 13 hours now driving a dump truck in South Carolina because it's the peak season for, you know, road construction.

So, you know,

it should be a government of all the people.

And we think, you know, more working people should have an opportunity and be representatives for the people.

But you think these issues, the issues that you care about, the issues that you cared about your whole life,

would be better off if Joe Biden were president or better off if Donald Trump were president?

Well, better off is too positive a word.

They'd be maybe less bad.

Biden, you know, I look at his career.

He was the legislative architect of the mass incarceration state under Clinton as the head of the Judiciary Committee, shepherded through four conservative justices as head of the Judiciary Committee, had a big hand in drafting the Patriot Act that passed with hardly any debate.

after 911.

Then he moved over to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was the Democratic senator who mobilized Democrats behind Bush's war in Iraq.

You know, you go back and listen to Biden in the 90s talking about crime issues and it was pretty mean-spirited and pandering to basically that white suburban fear like Trump is today.

But he's definitely less bad than Trump.

I mean, Trump, you know, he lies every time his lips move.

He's not the smartest guy.

He's incompetent.

And he's a racist stirring up things that ought to be behind us.

So, you know, the thing I worry about after the election is Trump stirring up trouble from these ragtag white digital groups.

And I don't think they can overthrow the government, but they can certainly hurt a lot of people.

And that's a real concern of mine.

Do you ever have any moment where you think this might work out and I'll be the president of the United States?

No, I really haven't thought that.

We're building a movement.

We're trying to get ballot lines so we can elect thousands of Greens to go into the 2020s.

And my biggest aspiration was to get some of these issues that I mentioned before, the climate issue, the inequality issue, the nuclear arms issue, really debated.

And, you know, as tough as ballot access has been, the tougher problem is getting these issues debated in this election because, you know, these are the issues that will determine our future.

And we're in deep trouble.

All right.

That sounds like a good place to leave it.

Howie Hawkins, thanks for being here on the ticket.

Well, thanks for having me.

I enjoyed the conversation.

That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you have thoughts on the show or ideas for guests, email me at isaac at theatlantic.com.

Thanks for listening.

Stay safe.