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 is brushing off concerns that his independent run will hurt Joe Biden among key constituencies, describing his campaing against 'civic collapse' and American 'empire' as an effort to persuade Trump voters to join his crusade.

'I’m trying to convince people thinking about voting for Trump into voting for me,' West said Thursday.

'But I don't go in thinking about whether I'm helping or hurting someone else,' said West, a prominent public intellectual and left wing activist who is running as an independent after abandoning an effort to capture the Green Party nomination. 

'To me, brother Donald Trump is a bonafide gangster and a neo-fascist – been that for a long time, so I understand the fears,' he said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in Washington.

'Brother Biden has a military adventurism as part and parcel of his past and present. So we end up with two candidates, for me both beneath mediocrity even though Biden's got some positive features that Trump doesn't have. But the Trump bar is so low,' he said.

'We got one is pushing us toward a second Civil War at home, and the other is pushing us toward a World War III abroad,' he said of Trump and Biden.

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

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

West was drawing 2 per cent in Georgia, 2 per cent in Michigan, and 3 per cent in Wisconsin in a new Bloomberg / Morning Consult poll out out Thursday that had Trump leading Biden across seven swing states.

He told DailyMail.com his campaign was targeting young people and those who didn't vote in the last presidential election. Other surveys have showed 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 persons who are concerned about public life having quality moral and spiritual greatness rather than just upward mobility and to see that in action in the flesh,' he said.

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

(West said it was now impossible to conceive of a two-state solution, saying if you 'move toward a secular state, then 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 person was second or third class.')

When pressed about his outreach to younger voters, West had an invitation for Biden. 'Steal my thunder, come out.' Then he spoke hypothetically about a hidden plan to eliminate the problems of 'these precious homeless brothers and sisters around the country – beautiful,' he said. 

What kind of an organization West, a first time candidate, can put together 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 scheduling. He said he has gotten on the ballot in Alaska, but after abandoning his Green Party effort he lost that group's ballot infrastructure. 

'Alaska with the polar bears in the wonderful human beings up there,' he said. 

'We raised $250,000 last quarter - we were very happy,' he said. 

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

Of more concern to Biden might be whether he mounts an aggressive run in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which require only 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.