Green Candidate Refuses to Bow Out to Hurt Grimm

Written by Jon Lentz on . Posted in Blog, Campaigns/Elections, Daily, Environment, Features, Heard Around Town, Latest, News.




Hank Bardel

In this week’s Siena College poll for New York’s 11th Congressional District, Republican Rep. Michael Grimm is supported by 48 percent of likely Staten Island (and some Brooklyn) voters, the Democratic challenger, Mark Murphy, is supported by 38 percent, 8 percent don’t know who they’ll vote for or are not voting, and 6 percent are backing a little-known Green Party candidate named Hank Bardel. Though dropping out of the race could potentially put Murphy in range of upsetting Grimm, Bardel said he has no plans to do so even though he has virtually no shot at winning the election himself. “We in the Green Party are out to inform and give information to our constituents, which I don’t think the Republicans and Democrats do,” said Bardel, a retired Parks Department supervisor. “They keep the people in the dark. We’re out to educate.” Bardel maintained that the two major parties aren’t too different on the issues, either. “I think they’re basically going to be the same,” he said. “We’re going to have wars. We’re going to have a bad economy. We’re not going to have single-payer health care. They’re basically going to be the same story.”




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  • Tom Shcherbenko

    Wrong, and slightly deceitful. Grimm is anti-environment protection, voted to gut the Clean Air Act, signed the no-taxes to stop Global Warming pledge, said that EPA regulations were bad, and Mark Murphy has challenged him on all of these. If you want to protect the environment, you must prevent Grimm from being re-elected.

  • Roy Moskowitz

    Any so called liberal or progressive that enables a Republican to win an election by throwing away their vote on a third party candidate is making a big mistake that hurts everyone.

    Was there really no difference between Gore and Bush? If Nader didn’t siphon away votes, the Supreme Court wouldn’t have had the opportunity to steal the election and we wouldn’t have had the Bush Tax Cuts, September 11 (Gore wouldn’t have ignored intelligence reports about plans for terrorists to use airplanes as weapons)Iraq and Afghanistan.

    There is just as a wide of a gap between Murphy and Grimm. How can anyone who considers themselves progressive vote for the Green party candidate instead of Murphy and potentially help re-elect Ryan budget supporting Grimm.