‘Hate us, listen to us, learn from us’: Third parties play a vital role in US elections, Green and Libertarian leaders tell RT

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Like Benedict, Hawkins has seen his party’s core issues become mainstream ones. The Green Party supports the ‘Green New Deal’, an ambitious piece of climate legislation that currently has the support of more than 100 Democratic members of Congress, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey. 

Long before Ocasio-Cortez and Markey brought it into the mainstream, Hawkins was the first US politician to run on a Green New Deal platform when he made a bid for the governorship of New York in 2010.

Between them, Hawkins and Jorgensen scored slightly more than two percent of the vote on Tuesday, according to figures from AP. That’s still around two million voters who were not swayed to vote Democrat or Republican, on top of the roughly one third of all eligible voters who stayed at home. 

“Even in this election, the largest group of voters were those who didn’t vote,” Hawkins said. “Those are the people we can engage.”

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