Osborne Gallego Hart, May 9, 1952 (Buncombe County, N.C.) -
VP candidate for Socialist Workers Party (aka Independent aka Unaffiliated) (2016)
Running mate with nominee: Alyson Kennedy (b. 1950)
Popular vote: 12,465 (0.01%)
Electoral vote: 0/538
The campaign:
A Kennedy/Hart ticket sounds like a dream ticket for liberal Democrats in the 1980s, but in 2016 it meant Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart of the Socialist Workers Party.
In his most excellent Ballot Access News website for Feb. 13, 2016 Richard Winger reported and observed,"On February 12, the Socialist Workers Party announced that its 2016 national ticket will be Alyson Kennedy for president, and Osborne Hart for vice-president. This is only the second time that the SWP has nominated a woman for President; the first time was in 1972, when Linda Jenness ran. The Socialist Workers Party has now nominated a presidential candidate for 18 elections in a row. Besides the Democratic and Republican Parties, the only other U.S. political parties that ever did that were the Prohibition and Socialist Labor Parties."
In the course of those 18 elections the SWP had shifted their emphasis from Trotskyism to Castroism and in the process had experienced a number of splits and splinters. By the 2016 election the Party appeared to have stabilized, although others in the Left thought of it as an almost cult-like political entity with rigorous demands on their followers.
The SWP provided a campaign biography of Hart--
Osborne Hart, whose father was a career soldier, spent his youth traveling around the world with his family.
Since getting involved with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Hart has been a lifelong fighter for Black rights. He’s joined struggles against police brutality and school segregation and the movement to bring down apartheid in South Africa and free Nelson Mandela.
He was politically active in the 1970s in the fight to end Washington’s war against the peoples of Vietnam and Indochina.
Hart joined the Socialist Workers Party in the mid-1970s and for decades has been part of helping to build and strengthen the labor movement. He’s lived in Atlanta, San Francisco, New York, Detroit and now Philadelphia and has worked in industry, including as a meat packer, steelworker, loading trucks in a TJX warehouse and on the railroads. He currently works at Walmart.
He joined actions in defense of United Steelworkers-organized oil refinery workers forced on strike in 2015, demanding workers control over safety to counter bosses’ speed-up drives, job cuts and attacks on unions.
Hart, 63, ran for mayor of Philadelphia in 2015, gaining a wide hearing among working people. He participated in protests against cuts in Medicare, demanding free, government-funded medical care for all; against police brutality and in solidarity with workers fighting concession demands by steel giant ArcelorMittal. He explained the need for independent working-class political action, urging workers to fight for a labor party based on the unions, to challenge the Democrats, Republicans or other capitalist parties.
Over the past five years, Hart has joined in building protests in Philadelphia against the relentless drive by state and city governments to slash funds for public education, with massive layoffs and spiraling class sizes. These moves have been accompanied by assaults on teachers’ and other school workers’ wages, pensions, health care and their unions.
Hart is active in the fight against government attacks and discriminatory laws against undocumented workers, protests against deportations and efforts to organize the unorganized.
He’s spoken out and built meetings in defense of the Cuban Revolution, demanding Washington end its 55-year-long economic embargo of the island and return the territory containing the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo to Cuba. He was part of the international movement that won freedom for the Cuban Five, revolutionaries imprisoned in the U.S. for working to defend their country’s socialist revolution.
He calls for the immediate release of Oscar López, a fighter for Puerto Rican independence framed up and jailed in the U.S. — much of it in solitary confinement — for more than 34 years.
Hart was one of the few third party VP candidates to take his campaign near my neck of the literal woods when he visited Olympia, Wash. Apparently the electioneering efforts up here paid off as The Evergreen State gave the SWP their highest popular vote percentage.
The Kennedy/Hart ticket made the ballot in 7 states: Washington (0.13%), Tennessee (0.11%), Minnesota and New Jersey (0.06% each), Utah (0.05%), Colorado and Louisiana (0.02% each). It was their strongest popular vote result since 1992. One wonders how much of that was due to the temporary migration of Sanders followers who felt disenfranchised.
Election history:
1976 - US House of Representatives (Ga.) (Independent) - defeated
2001 - Mayor of Detroit (Nonpartisan) - primary - defeated
2004 - US House of Representatives (Mich.) (Independent) - defeated
2006 - Governor of Pennsylvania (Socialist Workers Party) - defeated
2007 - Philadelphia City Council (Socialist Workers Party) - defeated
2008 - US House of Representatives (Penn.) (Socialist Workers Party) - defeated
2012 - US Senate (Penn.) (Socialist Workers Party) - defeated
2015 - Mayor of Philadelphia (Socialist Workers Party) - defeated
2017 - Mayor of New York City (Socialist Workers Party) - defeated
2018 - US Senate (Penn.) (Socialist Workers Party) - defeated
Other occupations: meat packer, truck loader, Walmart worker, railroad employee
Notes:
Was a write-in in the 1976 election. Andrew Young was the winner.
Was a write-in in the 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2017 and 2018 elections.
