Give me progressive candidates

To the editor:

In a Quinnipiac University poll released May 2, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was preferred by 50 percent, and Cynthia Nixon by 28 percent. Another 22 percent were undecided.

I’m not surprised by the lack of support for Nixon. But I’m glad that (if the poll is accurate) Cuomo is receiving less support than in the past.

Nixon, a friend of Mayor Bill de Blasio, recently claimed that transit repairs cost so much because workers’ salaries were too high. Transit workers finally got a decent contract after decades of real money pay cuts.

So Nixon did not object to all the Scrooge-like contracts that Cuomo gave to state workers, only the decent one he negotiated for transit workers. You can see why she and de Blasio, who’s given the city’s unionized workers nothing but real money pay cuts, like each other.

I’m guessing the 22 percent undecided is misleading. I was asked recently in a telephone poll who I would choose. I said neither of them. Was I counted as undecided? I will vote for the same man as I did in the last two gubernatorial elections, the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins.

The major parties continue to push candidates that cater to their corporate sponsors with no thought for everyone else. CounterPunch’s Rob Urie wrote in a March 12 article that in 2016, 73 percent of voters did not vote for Donald Trump, 71 percent did not vote for Hillary Clinton, and 40 percent did not vote at all. One percent of those who voted, including me, chose the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein.

Democrats want us to believe that 13 Russians on computers, and not awful candidate Clinton, were responsible for Trump’s victory.

On Feb. 18, MSNBC “journalist” Alex Witt interviewed Stein and attempted to blame Clinton’s loss on one Russian ad for her. She asked Stein if she knew that the Russians paid for that ad. Stein questioned the idea that of all the thousands of ads on the internet, she was supposed to know the origin of one, and that one ad was supposed to be responsible for Clinton’s loss.

When Stein pointed out that the corporate media gave Trump $6 billion in free advertising with their coverage, Witt’s witless response was, “But we’re not the Russians.” So it’s OK to rig an election as long as the U.S. news media is doing the rigging.

The Republican Party has been truly awful for quite some time, long predating Trump’s candidacy. So how come Democrats are not doing much better in elections? Just like the Republicans, they don’t represent the interests of all the people. Just the greediest rich. Only they do so with gentler rhetoric.

If the Democrats want my vote, don’t give me candidates who falsely claim to be progressive. Give me candidates who are progressive.

Richard Warren