By Steve Brawner, © 2024 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Arkansans who don’t want to vote for former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris will have four other candidates to choose from, not including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has left the race but will remain on the ballot. Today, let’s meet Peter Sonski with the American Solidarity Party.

The ASP was incorporated in 2016 and largely bases its platform on a Christian worldview and Catholic social teaching, Sonski said. Its website says its presidential candidate received 42,305 votes nationwide in 2020. That included 1,713 in Arkansas, or .14% of the vote statewide.

The party believes in the sanctity of human life and that all public policies should benefit human beings. 

“We start with that foundation, and we are pro-life from womb to tomb, as we like to say,” he told me. 

The party does not fit neatly into the left-right spectrum. It opposes abortion but also capital punishment. It has a conservative view of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. At the same time, some of its policies concerning environmental stewardship, labor rights and marginalized people might put it more on the left side of the spectrum. Sonski supports social programs but believes those often can be better managed at the local level or privately.

Asked what “solidarity” means, Sonski said it refers to unity, respect, and mutual support. 

Sonski said the ASP strives for peace among people and nations. He supports enhanced border security but says the United States also must be open to people seeking asylum or an opportunity because of a crisis in their homeland. He said Israel has a right to defend itself, but he wants it to cease fighting in Gaza, allow more humanitarian aid, and negotiate to release the hostages. He supports defensive military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine and economic sanctions on Russia. However, he opposes providing some offensive weapons like F-16 jets, and he would like to see a diplomatic resolution where Ukraine makes concessions.

An exam administrator from Connecticut, Sonski said most of his career has been in communications. He’s been a journalist, editor and public relations professional. He has been elected to town council, finance commission, and regional board of education positions. His running mate, Lauren Onak, has a master’s degree in adolescent education and is a homemaker and mother of three living in Boston.

Asked if he is ready to sit across the table from Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Sonski said being an elected official for more than a dozen years had helped prepare him. 

“I understand how government operates,” he said. “I understand the need for cooperation. I understand the need for making a case and also looking at the needs of others. So I understand diplomacy, but I also understand that I have to stand on principle. I have to stand on the values that are important to my country and its people, and I’m not one to capitulate.”

He said he grew up in a working-class family and first registered as a Democrat, but the party moved left on social issues. He became a Reagan Democrat, then a Reagan Republican, and then was unaffiliated from the late 1990s until 2018. A friend introduced him to the ASP.

“It fit me like a glove,” he said. “Everything that I had identified with to a marginal extent, either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, was harmonized, was brought together in the American Solidarity Party, and I found a political home.”

Sonski is married with nine adult children ages 38 to 19 and six grandchildren. He jokes that when he and his wife were dating, she wanted three children and he wanted six, so they compromised on nine.

“The reality is that we just love children,” he said. “We have a beautiful family. The kids from top to bottom know and enjoy one another’s company, and I believe that having a large family is a way to maybe not have an abundance of material things, but to have an abundance of relationships and of wealth of a different sort. And so I am a very wealthy man.”

That’s American Solidarity Party nominee Peter Sonski. I previously wrote about Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver. You can read about him here.

Also on the ballot are Michael Wood with the Prohibition Party and the Green Party’s Jill Stein.  

I hope to help you meet them, too.

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 17 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.