PRESIDENT & VICE PRESIDENT OF THE US
NOTE: You may vote for one. Candidates are presented below in the order they appear on your ballot.
Reason for My Endorsement: The winner of this year’s Presidential campaign will be either Harris or Trump, and the race will remain a nail biter to the bitter end. Every. Single. Vote. Matters. The differences between the two candidates is stark on every issue from reproductive rights, to addressing Americans housing shortage to support for Ukraine. But the end game is this: It’s time (and a chance) for a new generation of smart and younger progressives to take the helm. Trump is neither. Plus he’s hateful, authoritarian, a sexual abuser, and nuts.
FURTHER NOTES — On Aug. 12, a federal judge reversed the North Carolina Board of Elections’ decision to deny ballot access to presidential candidate Cornel West and his Justice for All party. And, in a separate ruling, a federal judge said third party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can remain on voters’ ballots in the fall after the state Democratic Party sued to keep him and his We the People party out of the race. On August 29, the State Board of Elections voted along party lines to keep Kennedy on the November ballot. A judge later overturned that decision, so Kennedy is no longer on the ballot.
You may vote for one. Candidates are presented in ballot order.
Kamala D. Harris / Tim Walz (D)
https://www.facebook.com/KamalaHarris/
It seems positively historic to witness this moment in a presidential year — the confidence, charisma, and net effect of practical experience at multiple levels of government, by a woman raised to work hard, to operate with compassion and “to push past the comfortable toward what is necessary and right.” She also happens to be running for the nation’s highest office at a moment when democracy itself is at stake.
High School yearbooks show Harris was active in the California Student Association and the debate team and chaired the economics society. Then at Howard University in DeeCee she ran for her first office: freshman class representative. She had a summer gig at McDonald’s, as well as internships with a US senator and at the Federal Trade Commission. She did research at the National Archives. And while working as a tour guide at the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Harris got her first official code name: “TG-10” for “tour guide No 10.”
In law school back home in California, Harris led the Black Law Students Association and was among an early, small group of Black students who spoke of wanting to become prosecutors. In 1988, Harris took an internship in the Alameda county district attorney’s office. She passed the California bar on her second try in 1990 and joined the Alameda prosecutor’s staff, specializing in the prosecution of sex crimes. After nearly a decade in Alameda, Harris was recruited to run the career criminal unit in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, focused on violent and repeat criminals. In 2002, Harris ran for and won the District Attorney’s job for San Francisco with 56% of the vote.
Two years into her first term, Harris launched what was then a rare program, Back on Track, “wherein first-time defendants aged 18-30 could plead guilty to non-violent crimes – and in exchange for getting a job or going to school, performing community service and making use of social workers, see their records expunged. The program enjoyed unprecedented success. Only 10% of participants wound up back in the criminal justice system.
In 2010, Harris was elected Attorney General of California. Followed in 2016 by her Senate seat. And in 2020 Joe Biden, who had beaten her in the primary, plucked her as his Vice President. That is not a career. That is mere prelude to a career yet to happen! — all of it, the net effect of practical experience at multiple levels of government.
Chase Oliver / Mike ter Maat (Libertarian)
https://www.facebook.com/ChaseForLiberty/
Oliver was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in Georgia. He began his career working in the restaurant industry for 13 years, then worked as an account executive in the import shipping business. As of May 2024, Oliver was the chief executive officer of the Libertarian Party of Metro Atlanta.
Oliver’s involvement in politics began as an activist opposing the Iraq war. He joined the Libertarian Party in 2010. At the 2024 Libertarian National Convention Oliver said, “We’re going to wake up millions of people, bring them into the tent, and say that if you’re living your life in peace without violence, force, fraud, coercion, or theft, your life is your life, your body is your body, your business is your business, and your property is your property. It’s not mine, and it sure as hell isn’t the federal government’s.”
I’m always favorably impressed by the spirit behind such declarations, but the Libertarian Party loses me fast when they get into specific policies. Like abolishing the Department of Education, opposition to gun control measures, and reducing taxes on the one percent.
Oliver gained some notoriety in 2020 in his first run for office as a Libertarian in the special election for Georgia’s 5th Congressional District, the seat left vacant when Rep. John Lewis died. In 2022, he ran again in the U.S. Senate election in Georgia. Oliver received 2.1% of the vote, meaning no candidate received more than 50% of the vote and Raphael Warnock (D) and Herschel Walker (R) advanced to a runoff which Warnock won. Oliver became what The Rolling Stone called “the most influential Libertarian.”
Jill Stein / Rudolph Ware (Green)
https://www.jillstein2024.com/
https://www.facebook.com/drjillstein?checkpoint_src=any
Stein is a physician (Harvard Medical School) who was photographed buddying up with Putin and is considered a Russian asset by some critics. Speaking to The Intercept in 2017, she said the notion that it was an “intimate roundtable” was “mythology,” and that Putin and his associates “weren’t at the table for very long.“
Regardless, Steve Bannon says Stein is key to Trump’s path to victory: “The path to victory here is clearly maximizing the reach of these left-wing alternatives…. No Republican knows that oil production under Biden is higher than ever. But Jill Stein’s people do .… Stein is furious about the oil drilling .… The more exposure these [third-party candidates] get, the better it is for us.”
Stein ran for president under the Green Party label in both 2012 and 2016 and ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and 2010. New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said of Stein’s 2024 campaign, “All you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that. You’re not serious. To me, it does not read as authentic. It reads as predatory.”
I’m not so sure I’d go that far, but it does appear Stein is a perennial “spoiler”: Political science researchers concluded that Hillary Clinton could have won the presidency in 2016 but for the Jill Stein votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
When Stein hasn’t been busy lobbing patently deranged criticisms at centrist Democrats, she’s worked to smear progressives. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, is a D.C. insider “corrupted” by corporate money, according to Stein—a bizarre charge, given that she herself has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and McKinsey.”
Randall Terry / Stephen E. Broden (Constitution)
Terry, a pro-life activist who founded the pro-life organization Operation Rescue, an organization established to organize blockades outside abortion clinics, is hoping to persuade Americans to refrain from voting for Democrats in the 2024 election by proving to them that the party is a “fortress of evil that must be destroyed.”
That appears to be his total platform: “We MUST stand for unborn babies, and for children who are being seduced into transgender cruelty and sexual perversion.” He’s begging pretty hard for money too.
Donald J. Trump / JD Vance (Republican)
https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump
What can I possibly say about Trump that you don’t already know. He’s 78 years old, he’s a politician and media personality (The Apprentice), and was elected as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.
He has a Bachelor of Science degree in economics, his father made him president of the family real estate business in 1971, and he renovates or builds skyscrapers, hotels, casinos, and golf courses. He and his businesses have been plaintiffs or defendants in over 4,000 legal actions, including six business bankruptcies. And according to the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the Jauary 6th coup attempt, the attack was the culmination of a seven-part plan by Trump to overturn the election he had just lost.
But you knew all that.
Trump is exactly who he always was, a deeply flawed, unempathetic, attention-starved, would-be dictator. We’ve known him so well, and seen his “core” being, or character, in action. So I feel no need to catalog anew his many faults.
Suffice it for now to describe only the way his campaign in 2024 has devolved in its entirety into “identity” attacks on his enemies — full of racist assumptions, bigoted stereotyping, and vicious insults. In relentless attacks, often infused with language that is either overtly racist or is coded in ways that appeal to racists, Trump calls his opponents “animals” — “stupid” — “losers,” especially the one Black woman who he says pretends to be Black.
For Trump in fact, Black district attorneys are “rabid,” like cur dogs. He called the district attorney who indicted him in Manhattan a “degenerate psychopath” who “hates the USA.”
I’ve had way more than enough of the guy.
As we approached September, long-time Trump financial backers were grumbling pretty publicly that “It’s like he’s choosing to lose.” Others who like to play psychiatrist think he’s compulsive and insecure enough to not be able to stop with the insults. We the voters have to stop him, and every other candidate like him.
Cornel West / Melina Abdullah (Justice for All)
https://www.cornelwest2024.com/
https://www.facebook.com/drcornelwest/
West is perhaps the rarest of presidential candidates, a “public intellectual” and a socialist who has also been a professor at Harvard University, Yale University, Union Theological Seminary, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, Pepperdine University, and the University of Paris. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton.
Cornel West is my age. He’s from Oklahoma and “the grandson of a Baptist minister, and his primary philosophy focuses on the roles of race, gender, and class struggle in American society.” He has repeatedly marched in civil rights marches and admired Malcolm X, and he helped found the helped found the Center for African American studies at Princeton. He has written or contributed to more than 20 published books and is a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
West offers a full, comprehensive platform that I can get fully behind. Every issue regarding women, education, the environment, the economy, etc. insists on justice for all of us.
West is not immune to controversy however: “West has drawn criticism for his spending habits, having been in debt often and owes the IRS $483,000 as of 2023. Some of the spending has gone towards extramarital affairs, with some girlfriends and ex-wives claiming he impregnates and abandons women.”
West’s campaign has received extensive support from Republicans and Trump allies to get and stay on the ballot in swing states hoping he takes votes from Harris. In fact, even though West has largely abandoned his campaign, it is still aided by Republican-aligned groups, donors, and lawyers to get or keep him on the ballot in 8 states, including North Carolina.