Howie Hawkins

Hawkins has played leading roles in anti-war, anti-nuclear, and pro-worker movements since the 1960s. Hawkins is a retired teamster and construction worker; from 2001 until his retirement in 2017, Hawkins worked the night shift unloading trucks for UPS.

Hawkins has run for numerous political offices on 25 occasions, all of which resulted in losses. He was the Green Party of New York's candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2006. In 2010, Hawkins ran as the Green Party's candidate for Governor of New York, which restored ballot status for the party when it received more than the necessary 50,000 votes. In 2014, Hawkins ran again for the same office and received 5% percent of the vote. Hawkins ran for Mayor of Syracuse in 2017 and received roughly 4% of vote. He then ran a third time for Governor of New York in 2018, but received less than 2% percent of the vote.

Hawkins received 407,068 votes, or 0.2% of the electorate in the 2020 presidential election, receiving nearly a percentage less of the popular vote compared to 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

Hawkins ran for Governor of New York in 2022, but since the Green Party only received 32,832 votes in New York in the 2020 election, less than the 130,000 needed, the party lost ballot access and Hawkins ran as an Independent write-in candidate. He failed to win, attaining 9,290, or 0.2%.

Early life and career

Hawkins was born in San Francisco, California, in 1952, and raised in nearby San Mateo, California. He grew up in a diverse neighborhood in the city near the Bayshore Freeway, which had seen a large influx of migrants from the southern United States, both black and white: Hawkins has credited his southern-inflected accent as being a result of this. His father was an attorney who was a football and wrestling student-athlete at the University of Chicago and served in the counter-intelligence unit for the U.S. Army's Manhattan Project during World War II. He became politically active at the age of 12, when he saw how the multiracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was denied recognition at the 1964 Democratic Convention.

After high school, Hawkins attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He was never granted a degree because he did not complete the foreign language requirement. While at Dartmouth, he founded the Dartmouth Radical Union which opposed Dartmouth's investment in corporations that supported, among other causes, apartheid in South Africa and the Vietnam War. Despite his anti-war activism, he joined the Marine Corps after being drafted in 1972. He was never ordered back to active duty after completing boot camp.

That same year Hawkins campaigned for Bernie Sanders, then the Liberty Union Party candidate for senate and governor of Vermont. In 1973, Hawkins joined Socialist Party USA, a membership which has continued to the present day. In 1976, Hawkins was one of the co-founders of the Clamshell Alliance which was an anti-nuclear power organization aimed at stopping its use in New England.

Green Party

In the 1980s Hawkins joined the green movement. In 1988, he and Murray Bookchin founded the Left Green Network "as a radical alternative to U.S. Green liberals", based around the principles of social ecology and libertarian municipalism. In the early 1990s a press conference was held in Washington, D.C., that featured Charles Betz, Joni Whitmore, Hilda Mason, and Howie Hawkins to announce the formation of the Greens/Green Party USA. Later in December 1999, Mike Feinstein and Hawkins wrote the Plan for a Single National Green Party which was the plan to organize the ASGP and GPUSA into a single Green Party. A perennial candidate, Hawkins ran in multiple New York Senate and House races. In 2010 he surpassed the 50,000 vote requirement to stay on the ballot in the gubernatorial election and four years later he received enough to move the Green Party line to Row D as he had taken one-third more than the Working Families Party and twice as much as the Independence Party. However, in 2018 he lost 80,000 votes, but retained ballot access and was only lowered one row down to Row E.

In 2012 Hawkins was approached over the possibility of running for the Green Party nomination, but declined due to his employment commitments at UPS forcing him to campaign for offices in New York at most and would interfere with a national campaign. Following Hawkins' retirement he was approached again to run by a draft movement with a public letter addressed to him that was signed by former Green vice presidential nominees Cheri Honkala and Ajamu Baraka, former Green mayoral candidate and Ralph Nader's 2008 running mate Matt Gonzalez, and other prominent Green Party members.

Hawkins was accidentally listed on ballots in Minnesota as the Green Party candidate for vice president, along with Jill Stein for president in the 2016 general election. Although Ajamu Baraka was Stein's running mate on the party's national ticket, Hawkins was inadvertently placed on the Minnesota ballot due to the party using him as a stand-in before the vice-presidential candidate was chosen. With Hawkins listed, the Green Party ticket for President of the United States in Minnesota received nearly 37,000 votes statewide, an increase of 0.82% from the party's previous result in 2012.

Political positions

In 1993, Hawkins favored anarcho-communism as well as libertarian municipalism, as the "best way of integrating worker's control and community control in a process of social change that ultimately yields in a marketless, moneyless, stateless cooperative commonwealth". Hawkins was also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Hawkins disagrees with the "party-within-the-party" approach to the Democratic Party exercised by organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America or by individuals such as Bernie Sanders. Instead, he believes that socialists should immediately create an independent left-wing party. He has nevertheless expressed sympathy towards socialist politicians within the Democratic Party such as Zohran Mamdani, arguing that while their demands may be insufficiently anti-capitalist they should still be supported against more right-wing politicians, and that they represent a campaigning model that can be learned from.

Hawkins became the first politician to include the Green New Deal in their election platform when he ran for Governor of New York in 2010. Hawkins supports the Green Party's version of the Green New Deal that would serve as a transitional plan to a one hundred percent clean, renewable energy by 2030 utilizing a carbon tax, jobs guarantee, free college, single-payer healthcare and a focus on using public programs. He self-describes as an eco-socialist and libertarian socialist.