Former governor Christie and activist West are extending the list of candidates for the White House

The list of candidates for the White House continues to grow. African American progressive philosopher and activist Cornell West announced his third-party candidacy for president on Monday People’s Partyand Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, did it this Tuesday for the Republicans.

christie has become an ally of Donald Trump one of his fiercest critics within the Republican Party. Although he supported the tycoon’s candidacy in 2016 after his own failed, in 2020 he became one of his fiercest critics after Trump was accused of election fraud. At the time, he said the former president’s “behavior” was “completely unacceptable for someone who held the highest office the United States can bestow.”

For his part, West was a professor at Harvard and is currently professor emeritus at Princeton University.

Among the measures advocated by progressive Cornel West are universal expansion of Medicare coverage (currently limited to people over 65 and people with certain disabilities), a ban on corporate lobbyists and the dissolution of NATO.

In the video of the presentation of his candidacy, in which photos of his life and his activist career are interspersed with media interventions, the academic defends that he is presenting himself “for truth and justice”. In 2020, West claimed he would vote for Joe Biden to “get the gangsters out of the White House,” referring to Donald Trump. Looking ahead to 2024, his candidacy could backfire. While independent candidates were never successful, sometimes the votes they received served to tip the election toward one of the two major parties (for example, for Trump in 2016 or Bill Clinton in 1992).