By William Lewis
Looking ahead to next year’s mayoral race on the Republican side, one candidate will be the Rev. Michel Faulkner, a pastor of a Baptist church in Harlem.
He has been campaigning constantly during the past year. He is a conservative Republican and intends to govern as such if elected. For a while after graduating college he played professional football for the New York Jets.
Among the issues, he is emphasizing jobs and hopes to encourage small businesses to grow as a means of encouraging more jobs. He is a strong advocate of education and favors charter schools. Faulkner also supports the police. He feels there should be more contact between the community and the police department.
He also favors, in some form, stop and frisk. He sees the present mayor as lacking in leadership. He mentioned as an example the mayor’s supporting banning carriage horses in Central Park. Faulkner favors continuing the horse and carriage trade. During his campaign he has met thousands of people.
Soon we will have people challenging the incumbent mayor in a Democratic primary. Faulkner may get competition in a Republican primary as we get closer to the actual campaign. Faulkner feels he has a chance to win the mayor’s race and become our next mayor in 2018.
The Queens Village Republican Club recently held its June meeting. They passed a resolution unanimously endorsing Donald Trump for president. There seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for the Trump candidacy.
The main guest speaker was state Sen. Jack Martins, who is running for Congress in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes a section of northeast Queens as well as parts of Nassau and Suffolk counties. There was talk of a Trump for President headquarters being set up in Queens since Trump came from Queens. For that reason a Queens headquarters may be opened in addition to other political reasons, such as Queens being an important area politically.
With both major candidates coming from New York it will be a campaign of immense interest. There will be a lot of speculation as to what Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters will do about supporting a candidate in the fall election. It is estimated that a quarter of them will not support Hillary Clinton. If that is the case the question is, will they support Donald Trump?
Among the other Sanders supporters, how much support will they give to Clinton?
The results of the 2016 presidential race will be decided to an extent by how Sanders’ people decide.
Both Trump and Clinton are excellent public speakers. The debates they are going to have should be of considerable interest since they have completely different ideas about economic and social issues.
The future of our country over the next 20 years depends on the outcome of this year’s presidential election. The presidential race this year will be considerably different from presidential races of the recent past.
