Cornel West dismisses fears his independent presidential run will snatch votes from Biden – saying he’ll focus on persuading supporters of  ‘neo-fascist’ Trump into voting for him

Presidential candidate Cornel West dismisses concerns that his independent run will hurt Joe Biden among key constituencies, describing his campaign against 'civil collapse' and the US 'empire' as an attempt to convince Trump voters to join his crusade to close.

“I'm trying to convince people who are thinking about voting for Trump to vote for me,” West said Thursday.

“But I don't think about whether I'm helping or hurting someone else,” said West, a prominent public intellectual and left-wing activist who is running for office after abandoning a bid to win the Green Party nomination.

“To me, Brother Donald Trump is a bona fide gangster and a neo-fascist – it has been that way for a long time, so I understand the fears,” he said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in Washington.

“Brother Biden has military adventurism as an essential part of his past and present. So we end up with two candidates, both of them below mediocrity for me, even though Biden has some positive qualities that Trump does not have. But the bar for Trump is so low,” he said.

“We have one pushing us toward a second civil war at home, and the other pushing us toward a third world war abroad,” he said of Trump and Biden.

West's comments about the role of his own candidates and those of other third parties are consistent with some recent polls showing independent candidacies eating away at Biden's support compared to a head-to-head race with Trump.

Some show that independents like West are pulling more support from young voters away from Biden. Those 18-29 year olds were a key part of his winning coalition in 2020, and there are signs that support is fraying.

West drew 2 percent in Georgia, 2 percent in Michigan and 3 percent in Wisconsin in a new Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll Thursday, in which Trump led Biden through seven swing states.

He told DailyMail.com that his campaign was targeting young people and those who did not vote in the last presidential election. Other surveys show Biden losing some of his support among younger voters. 'Part of what this campaign is about is to convince young people that there are examples of individuals who are concerned about public life having moral and spiritual greatness rather than just upward mobility, and to really see it in action,” he said. .

He is also focusing his efforts on Michigan, a key state where Biden defeated Trump but where a shock poll this month gave Trump a 10-point lead. That's a state where Biden's embrace of Israel in his war against Hamas poses potential problems, in an area with a large Arab-American population.

(West said it is now impossible to conceive of a two-state solution, saying that if you are “moving towards a secular state, a Jewish state or a Jewish supremacist state is no longer part of the process.” He denounced anti-Semitism but called for a state that 'would no longer be a state in which non-Jewish persons were second or third class.')

When asked about his outreach to younger voters, West had an invitation for Biden. “Steal my thunder, come out.” He then hypothetically spoke of a hidden plan to eliminate the problems of “these precious homeless brothers and sisters across the country – wonderful,” he said.

What kind of organization West, who is a first-time candidate, can create is an open question.

At Thursday's event, he rattled off the names of top staffers by their first names and mentioned his wife, who helps with media planning. He said he got on the ballot in Alaska, but after abandoning his Green Party efforts, he lost that group's voting infrastructure.

“Alaska with the polar bears and the beautiful people up there,” he said.

“We raised $250,000 last quarter, which we were very happy with,” he said.

He cited states like Tennessee, which have a low threshold to vote, and said his campaign has 18,000 volunteers.

Of greater importance to Biden could be whether he will mount an aggressive run in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which require just 5,000 and 4,000 signatures, respectively, to get on the ballot. Biden carried both states in 2020, but is expected to face a tough race there.