Election 2014

Hawkins garners 5 percent of vote, most ever for Green Party candidate in statewide office

Howie Hawkins, a Syracuse native and Green Party nominee, garnered 5 percent of the vote in the race for New York governor Tuesday night, the best showing for the Green Party in a statewide office.

With 99 percent of polls reporting, Hawkins received a total of 173,510 votes — more support than he received in two previous campaigns for governor. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the incumbent, won the election with about 54 percent of the vote.

“We will use tonight’s big Green vote to move our progressive agenda,” Hawkins said in a press release. “The Green Party will focus in the coming weeks and months on strengthening its local branches to build up its grassroots base for upcoming issues and electoral campaigns.”

In 2010, Hawkins received about 60,000 votes in the governor’s race, which allowed the Green Party to be listed on the ballot for the next four years. The 60,000 votes were around 1 percent of the total vote as Cuomo won the election.

In his 2008 campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York’s 24th district, Hawkins received 3.3 percent of the vote, or 8,855 votes. Hawkins made a run at the U.S. Senate in 2006 and received 1.2 percent of the vote, or 55,469 votes, in the election.







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