Daniel M. Bring

Within the last year, election officials and judges in a few key swing states reduced the Green party’s erstwhile ballot access to write-in only. They likely intended to reduce the Greens’ vote share to the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democratic party.Voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin might have noticed the unusual absence of the Green party’s presidential ticket from their 2020 ballots. Democrat-controlled courts and Democratic election officials denied Green presidential candidate Howie Hawkins and his VP pick Angela Walker a place on those states’ ballots.

The Green party has nominated Howie Hawkins to the presidency of the United States. But Hawkins’s victory has seemed preordained since he began his campaign. And it has pushed America’s second largest third party further towards the political fringe.A former perennial candidate for New York governor, Hawkins is one of the founders of the Green party, which has only existed since 2001. Previously, the Green party was a decentralized network of state-based parties that would convene to nominate a presidential candidate, such as Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000.I reported in November that several candidates for the Green nomination protested how the party was tipping the scales in Hawkins’s favor.

Vermin Supreme has ‘been running for president for over 30 years’. His two most recent bids polled at third and fourth in the 2012 and 2016 New Hampshire Democratic primaries, respectively. But now, the boot-bonneted boomer is running to win.When I spoke to Supreme in January, he had just triumphed in New Hampshire’s Libertarian presidential primary. Now he’s runner-up in the LP’s primaries, with a chance to be on every American’s ballot come November.‘This is my first legitimate, actual, bona fide, real campaign,’ he said. ‘In the past, I ran as a Democrat and was not a Democrat, I ran as a Republican and was not a Republican. Right now, I am a Libertarian and seeking the Libertarian party nomination.

Anti-virus pioneer and globe-trotting eccentric John McAfee placed third in the 2016 Libertarian party presidential primaries. Now he’s running again, this time from a secure, undisclosed location likely on a boat outside the United States, which he fled last January allegedly to escape the IRS Although that sounds like an ideal setting for a Libertarian presidential campaign, McAfee doesn’t think too much of his chances of being their nominee. ‘It doesn’t really matter to me either way,’ he told me. ‘Number one, I’m John McAfee. I can’t be president. If anyone thinks I can, they need to move out of their mother’s basement and see the world. Neither can any Libertarian candidate. Ever.

Last Monday, Rep. Peter T. King announced his retirement at the end of this, his 14th term. The candidates now running to succeed him will have more than just a congressional seat to fill. You see, Pete King is a New York legend. With his rip-roaring rhetoric and unabashed Irish Catholicism, and without airbrushing or a filter, King has been an enduring holdout of old school New York politics. Moreover, his commitment to national security and justice for 9/11 victims made him a powerful, if controversial, advocate for his Long Island constituency. The 2018 midterms, not great for House Republicans, still saw King returned with a firm six percent majority. His past victory margins ranged up to 45 percent (in 2002).

Freshman Democrat Rep. Max Rose must steel himself for a tough re-election scrum in his Republican-leaning district. An unconventional, Trumpian contender, Joseph 'Joey Salads' Saladino, could make for quite an upset to both parties.New York’s 11th district covers Staten Island and a sliver of Brooklyn. Staten Island, New York City’s last GOP bastion, went for Trump over Hillary by 15 points in 2016. The district gave Rose’s Republican predecessor, Dan Donovan, a 26.1-point margin of victory in 2016 before Rose bested him by six points — just over 10,000 votes — in 2018.Seeing an opportunity to reclaim one of the three US congressional seats they lost in 2018, New York’s Republicans are mobilizing to oppose Rose.

The Green party’s 2016 presidential ticket, headed by Jill Stein, captured just about 1 percent of the national popular vote, a far cry from the 2.74 percent infamously won by Green nominee Ralph Nader in 2000. Now with its presidential primaries underway, party leaders are betting that voters will look to the left of the Democratic party. ‘The Green party’s just taking all the people who are too crazy for the Democratic Socialists of America,’ an insider in the Democratic party’s left wing told me. But the Greens have reasons to be optimistic about their future in American politics.

There’s a presidential primary race afoot in the Libertarian party, America’s third largest. In 2016, the Libertarians nominated former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, and as his running mate, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. Their ticket received 3.28 percent of the national popular vote, the largest third-party vote share since 1996 and the best ever Libertarian performance. For 2020, party leaders hope to break that record. Dan Fishman, executive director of the Libertarian National Committee, says the goal is to crest 5 percent of the popular vote, the share above which a minor party becomes eligible for federal campaign funding. ‘The numbers could be even higher,’ Fishman said.

Only just turned 18, David E. Oks extends over a lean 6'1 frame, bent slightly forward. His voice, called 'terrifyingly deep' by a fan, is unforgettable once you’ve heard it. Overall, he seems more like a Romanian apparatchik than the architect of the 2020 Democratic primaries’ biggest anti-war disruption. If you weren't aware, Oks, along with high school friend Henry Williams, was the teenage manager of former Alaska senator Mike Gravel’s insurgent bid for the Democratic nomination. In office from 1969 to 1981, Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record to make them publicly available and became a leading figure in the end of the draft and the Vietnam War.

'They say he’s not going to win re-election,’ blurted a tank top-wearing twenty-something as he scanned the crowd outside SNHU Arena in Manchester, New Hampshire. 'But look at this shit!' Pressed into the throng, I couldn't help but agree. At his first re-election rally in New England, President Trump’s supporters had filled the arena’s 12,000 seats. Denied entry, thousands more filled an adjacent plaza in which the campaign had erected a jumbotron. For them, proximity to the Trump rally was well worth the afternoon heat and the sticky urban humidity. Many wore Red Sox shirts or Patriots jerseys.