Nick Reisman is reporting for State of Politics longtime activist Howie Hawkins is running for president on the Green Party ticket. He ran for governor of New York three times, as well as for Syracuse mayor and city auditor. He also ran for the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Hawkins is going national at a time when voters are being presented with two stark choices by the mainstream parties. He believes the pandemic has demonstrated that both the Democratic and Republican parties have failed. "The two governing parties are governing over a failed state," Hawkins said in an interview June 24. "Look at the coronavirus. We have four percent of the world's population and 20 percent of the deaths." Hawkins has four "life or death issues" he is running on: The pandemic, a Green New Deal to combat climate change, fighting economic inequality through a job guarantee and fighting nuclear proliferation. Hawkins says Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has a sizeable following in the party, and he has pushed the party's positions on mainstream issues like universal access to Medicare, but he believes that impact falls short. Asked about criminal justice reform in the wake of George Floyd's killing, Hawkins said, "it's good to redistribute" some police funding to aid the homeless or drug addiction. However, he does not support abolishing police departments entirely. "You're going to need somebody...to go out and apprehend people who are dangerous," he said. Hawkins believes he shifted Democrats on key issues like a ban on hydrofracking and increasing the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour when he ran for governor in 2014, and Governor Andrew Cuomo eventually embraced both issues. He thinks he can have the same impact on a national level in 2020. Read the full story at nystateofpolitics [dot] com.