Madelyn Hoffman, longtime Green Party leader and candidate, dies at 69

Madelyn Hoffman, a longtime environmental and peace activist who became one of the most recognizable figures in New Jersey’s Green Party and made repeated bids for public office over three decades, has died.  She was 69.

Hoffman died of complications following surgery in Colombia, where she had been living and working, according to InsiderNJ, which first reported her passing.

“We’ve lost a spirit that we will never find again,” Green Party elections chairman Barry Bendar told InsiderNJ.

During multiple bids as her party’s standard bearer,  Hoffman used her candidacies to promote issues that had defined her activism, including renewable energy, opposition to U.S. military intervention, single-payer health care, higher wages, immigrant rights, and shifting federal spending from the military toward domestic programs.

Hoffman spent eighteen years as executive director of New Jersey Peace Action and had been involved in environmental and social justice causes since the 1980s.  She led opposition to a proposed Warren County trash incinerator and headed the Grass Roots Environmental Organization.

Her first statewide campaign came in 1996, when she was Ralph Nader’s vice presidential running mate in New Jersey.  Because of the state’s unusually early filing deadline for independent candidates at the time, Nader ran with Hoffman in New Jersey while Winona LaDuke was his running mate in most other states.

Nader and Hoffman received 32,465 votes, or 1.06%, in New Jersey.

A year later, Hoffman ran for governor as the Green Party candidate, finishing fifth with 10,703 votes, or 0.44%, in a race in which Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman narrowly defeated Democrat Jim McGreevey.

Hoffman ran for Congress in 1998 against Rep. Michael Pappas (R-Rocky Hill), receiving 1,409 votes.  Democrat Rush Holt defeated Pappas in that election.

After two decades away from the ballot, Hoffman returned as the Green Party’s U.S. Senate candidate in 2018, receiving 25,150 votes in the race won by Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez. Two years later, she ran for Senate again, challenging Democratic Sen. Cory Booker and finishing third with 38,288 votes.