Whitfield Harrington Jr., a pastor from Chicago, is running to be the next U.S. Senator from Illinois. He registered as the candidate of the American Center Party, which he also founded as a state party.
Harrington faces steep odds against Democratic nominee Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and Republican nominee Don Tracy. He was also excluded from the only televised debate of the campaign, which was at WTTW-TV in Chicago earlier this week.
Although Harrington was not invited to participate in the debate, he joined the 21st Show for a conversation on policy, his view on where exactly the American center actually is, and what it means to campaign outside the two-party system.
Interview Highlights
On what it means to be in the center of American politics
“And so we feel that the government should be in a position to where it’s doing what’s in the best interest of the people as a whole, and not representing just one particular faction and trying to oppress another faction. But I think that’s what it means to be in the middle, where you find those particular individuals, whether it’s a senator or congressman, who are willing to say, ‘listen, we have to compromise to get some things done.’ We cannot expect, you know, the polarization of politics to produce progress. It just doesn’t.”
On the Trump administration’s changing narrative on Iran
“I don’t think many people in America had a problem with the first strike, because you just simply dropped a few bombs on a nuclear facility that was in the process of developing nuclear arms, what they believe, and you sort of eliminated that threat. Then all of a sudden the discussion and the narrative changed. ‘Oh, Iran is almost on the verge of building a new bomb.’ Excuse me? Didn’t we just blow up their facilities? … and now we have to go in and topple the regime to make certain that they don’t get a nuclear weapon? And I think that was a moving of the goalposts. It changed the narrative. And then not only that, we found ourselves sucked into the cyclone, and now we don’t have a clear way out — or should I say the administration doesn’t have a clear way out.”
On President Trump’s method of implementing tariffs
“Historically speaking, prior to the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement … America had an established, you know, system for having reasonable tariffs in place. And I think Donald Trump is trying to get us back to a system similar to that, but the manner in which he’s doing it is causing a lot of, um, you know, pushback from around the world. I’m open to reasonable tariffs that protect American jobs, that protect American businesses. But you have to do it in a way that doesn’t invite retaliation. You know, the public spatting with, you know, national leaders from around the world, international leaders from around the world — that’s inviting retaliation. And so you get into a trade war.”
On the challenges of getting on the ballot
“You’re given 90 days to collect 25,000 signatures. The [Democratic] and Republican candidate[s] were also given 90 days to collect 5,000 signatures. Let that sink in for a moment, all right? So it took us 45 days to get the 5,000 signatures, with 45 days remaining to collect over 20,000 signatures. And maybe three weeks out, we still hadn’t hit 20,000. Within the last two weeks, we were able to get 14,000 signatures in two weeks. And so I said the process was like climbing Mount Everest just to fight Bruce Lee. All right. Because once you collect the signatures, now you have to survive a challenge. Well, fortunate for us, um, the Republican Party challenged us and they didn’t have their stuff together, to make a long story short.”