Libertarian Party

Does the Libertarian Party Finally Have a Chance? 

How America’s largest third party could actually make a difference this time. 

By Brian Doherty

Paul Jost is a serious Republican. He sought the Republican nomination for a House seat from Virginia twice (but didn’t win his primaries). He works in real estate and considers himself a “small-business person” whose main interest is “really keeping taxes low, cutting back on government.” Jost and his wife, Laura, are the types who used to travel to New Hampshire for fun to check out candidate town halls and figure out who they might support.

Now, Jost is on his way to his first Libertarian Party convention, which will be held in Orlando this weekend. The most likely nominees for president and vice president are two other formerly die-hard Republicans, Gary Johnson of New Mexico and Bill Weld of Massachusetts, both of them popular ex-state governors. Other prominent Republicans such as GOP strategist Mary Matalin are also switching to the Libertarian Party.

Does this constitute a growing trend in this time of Trump—a time when many traditional Republicans can’t stand the thought of voting for a brash real-estate magnate who has shattered the GOP agenda, possibly beyond repair? Often ignored—not even a significant factor enough to play the spoiler in past elections—many Libertarians say yes. “We are seeing record interest in the party,” says the national Libertarian Party’s political director, Carla Howell. “Membership has spiked; it has gone up about 30 percent in the last few months. We’re also seeing record media interest.”

Johnson, in an interview with Politico on Monday, said he’s jazzed that Weld decided to partner with him last week to seek the vice presidential slot. Hearing someone is a Libertarian can, Johnson says, make them “infer loose screws, but [Weld] brings, oh my goodness, a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, and I’m not talking theoretical here. Over the last five days we’ve had 32 national media requests [after the Weld news]. That’s never remotely happened before.”

Moreover, the Libertarians have largely solved a third party’s biggest problem, ballot access, after decades of work and great expense every election cycle since their first presidential race in 1972. (They won an electoral vote from a faithless Republican elector that year, making their vice presidential candidate, Tonie Nathan, the first woman to receive an electoral vote.) They are already locked into 32 ballots for November. Though the signature deadlines for many states still lie ahead, the party is confident it's on track to nab them all.

Success, however, is about far more than ballot access. The Libertarians need a national profile they don’t really have yet. They are coming out of their highest raw vote total ever, with Johnson’s 1.27 million in 2012—but even that was slightly less than 1 percent of the vote. Johnson believes the only way to avoid a repeat of his 2012 showing is getting into a nationally televised presidential debate with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. That’s not going to be easy:

The rules of the Commission on Presidential Debates will admit only candidates who are on enough ballots to actually win in the Electoral College (no problem) and who poll at least 15 percent in five different polls. Only three polls so far have included Johnson, a Monmouth University one in March in which he came in at 11 percent, a Fox News poll in May in which he came in at 10 percent, and a Morning Consult poll out this week showing him at 10 percent. Johnson argues that if “Mickey Mouse were in a poll, he’d be getting 30 percent” against Trump and Clinton. But Mickey Mouse won’t be on the ballot nationwide; a Libertarian will—and an abortion-rights supporter at that, which could make him a non-option for many defecting Republicans.

Thus the road to playing a true spoiler role—to going from less than 1 percent to the several percentage points that could tilt the election—is a long one. Johnson and Weld would need to make the case that two experienced Republican executives are on the ballot as an alternative to a reality show host, even though John Kasich and others failed to make that same case in the GOP primaries. Johnson also holds out hope that as the most consistent and extreme candidate on issues like ending the drug war and limiting military intervention overseas, he can shave off Bernie Sanders fans repulsed by Clinton. Johnson even worked as CEO of a pot-industry company called Cannabis Sativa between campaigns. That could help with progressives, hurt with conservatives.

The biggest wild card for the Libertarians, perhaps, is that the electorate is famously dissatisfied this year, and both major party candidates are suffering majority disapproval ratings. Polls showing majority willingness to vote for a third party rose in 2010 as well as now. Even so, Rand Paul, the putative libertarian candidate in the GOP race, tanked badly in the polls and dropped out early. And Gallup reported in 2012 that specific third-party candidates’ polled support in June tends to fall by more than half by the time people really vote.

The core Libertarian Party message matches the post-Reagan Republican self-image in large respects: small government, low taxes, trusting the American people or the states to mostly manage their own affairs. That has attracted tea party defectors as well: Another attendee in Orlando will be Matt Kibbe, the former chief at FreedomWorks (a grass-roots small-government outfit that aligned itself with the tea party) who runs a super PAC, Concerned American Voters, that supported Paul. Kibbe knows many “tea partiers, constitutional conservatives who had been supporting Ted Cruz and liberty Republicans that were standing with Rand,” he says, “and they are all looking for a place to land.”

Johnson, who likes to sum up his version of the Libertarian message as simply “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” also says his New Mexico experience has him prepared, if he wins, for governing as a Libertarian nationally with a possibly hostile Congress.

Many in the GOP pooh-pooh the idea that he can make a difference at all, much less win. Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer insisted on CNN this week that Republicans don’t fear Johnson, and he said third-party mania, such as it is, was a media creation that will have no effect on the election.

But the Libertarians say this year is as good a chance as they’ve had to make their way into the national spotlight. Asked about specific strategies to attract Republicans this cycle, Johnson said defiantly: “If you believe we should deport 11 million illegal immigrants and build a fence across the border and believe we should kill the families of Muslim terrorists and bring back waterboarding or worse, if you believe free trade is about applying tariffs to incoming goods and services—then I’m not your guy.”

The Libertarians have broken a 550,000 national vote total for president only once before in their history, in 1980, before Johnson came along. Because of the congruence of small-government rhetoric in both parties, Republicans often assume any Libertarian vote “really belonged” to them and if a Libertarian beats the spread between a winning Democrat and a losing Republican, the Libertarians will be accused of “spoiling” it for the GOP. This has happened more than a handful of times in federal Senate and House races, but never close to happening with the presidency. Johnson points out that in one of the rare national polls he’s been included in this year, a March Monmouth University poll, when added to the mix he pulled more from Clinton’s support (6 percent) than Trump’s (4).

Ultimately the question of whether Johnson can swing it will be how many Paul Josts are out there. Jost was a campaign chairman for George W. Bush in his congressional district in 2000. He gave money to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in their Senate races. He figures he’s donated over half a million to Republican candidates and causes, and he’s never even thought about a third party before. Nor would he be on this trip to Orlando, he says, if “the Republican Party had a normal, stable guy. Even some guys I didn’t like, who I was unhappy with, I would have supported them.”

But Trump is too much. For the first time, Jost says, he needs to find a candidate outside his beloved GOP.

The Libertarians will need a lot of Paul Josts: Dues-paying members for the national party amount to only around 13,000. But in voter registration, Libertarians are the only ballot designation to have grown nationally since October 2014, by 3 percent. From October 2008 to February 2016, national Libertarian registration numbers rose from 240,328 to 411,250.

Even some Republicans who might be expected by their ideology to look fondly on the Libertarians are still willing to back Trump, in traditional party-first style. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a House leader of the “liberty Republicans” said in an emailed response this week that he is not himself looking to jump ship. “I'm doubtful that working from outside the two-party structure is going to be productive this year but I respect those who are trying.”

But Libertarian political director Howell sees an electorate that “wants to stir the pot, wants to change things, and we offer them a cohesive vision of that.” Against the promise of government giveaways at the expense of the rich as Bernie Sanders promises, or a tough boss to protect their jobs and keep out strangers as Trump does, Howell believes her party can succeed with a positive vision.

“Libertarians want less government so you can keep the money you earn and save for retirement,” she says. “We want to stabilize dollar prices so they don’t keep going up and you can afford to retire. You want to take care of your family, so we’ll end the war on drugs so streets are safer and people who have never harmed someone else go home to their families, so their kids grow up with a mom and dad; Libertarians want to create a system of justice that doesn’t hurt people who haven’t hurt anyone else. We want to get government off the back of small businesses so they can expand and hire and not get bogged down in permits and license fees and trouble from regulations.”

And before he takes on the national field, ohnson has something of a fight on his hands in Orlando first. One of his prominent opponents for the nomination is antivirus software pioneer John McAfee, running a willfully eccentric Wildman campaign that excites many Libertarians, seeing in his business experience and alpha male swagger their own Trump. (McAfee fled Belize in 2012 under suspicion of having killed one of his neighbors; he insists the government was punishing him for failure to pay bribes.) Another is Austin Petersen, a barely-presidentially-legal former producer on the canceled Fox Business Network program Freedom Watch. Petersen has the longest stretch of libertarian movement activism of the three, which has won him the trust of many delegates.

Johnson wants you to know he’s got real political moxie: He won the governorship against an incumbent in his first run for anything in 1994, as a Republican in a state then overwhelmingly Democratic, after building a 1,000-employee construction company from scratch.

In New Mexico, he faced an environment that was “completely adversarial, there wasn’t any cooperation whatsoever to help me shrink government” from his Legislature. Johnson is proud of his vetoes and line-item vetoes—he believes his over 700 vetoes amount to more than all his fellow governors combined. He kept taxes from rising, but all his vetoes weren’t enough to keep state spending from rising about 7 percent a year over the course of his two terms. (His veto of the entire 2003 budget, his last year in office, was overridden by the Legislature.)

As for Weld, his last foray into politics was a failed bid in New York’s gubernatorial race in 2006. Weld first flirted with the Libertarians then, initially seeking a fusion ticket in which he’d appear on the ballot as both Republican and Libertarian. He dropped out of both.

Weld is still a name to conjure with in the Northeastern world of Republicans and free-marketers, says Jim Stergios of the small-government Boston-based think tank the Pioneer Institute. Weld’s work in school choice is particularly fondly regarded, especially with the modern debate over charter schools and Common Core.

Two Republicans on the Libertarian ticket might seem like a pure bid to peel off Republican #nevertrumps. Johnson made a video last month explicitly attacking Trump. In it he used the words “conservative values” to describe himself. Yet he also likes to appeal to Sanders fans, often mentioning how on the “iSideWith” site, this Libertarian found himself in 73 percent agreement with the democratic socialist, of course all on social and foreign policy matters, not economic ones.

Johnson believes that the gravitas of two former governors combined with likely total ballot access will persuade pollsters to include him if they sew up the nomination. The chair of the Libertarian Party’s National Committee, Nicholas Sarwark, thinks that even if pollsters don’t like the idea of including the Libertarians, they will because they “like being wrong less” and Trump and Clinton clearly don’t represent everyone’s preferred choices. The party is also involved in two lawsuits, still in progress, to try to sue its way into the debates.

Libertarians embrace a Gallup poll from last year in which Gallup’s rough libertarian category—those believing that government does too much and should not promote traditional values—came in at 27 percent, the largest of the pollster’s four-philosophy typology. On fiscal policy, Johnson offers those potential voters radical moves like eliminating all personal and corporate income taxes in favor of a Fair-Tax-like national consumption tax.

On foreign policy, he says it’s important to have a “skeptic at the table,” someone whose record shows he’s “never shirked from heat,” thinking hard about whether any foreign intervention, even against the Islamic State, will “make things better or just perpetuate what seems to be endless war” over there, one intervention creating unintended consequences that set up the next intervention.

No matter how outré his positions might seem in the major-party context of the past decades, Johnson says what matters is that he and Weld are a proven team of executives, with more real governing experience than the major party candidates, who offer a “package not presented by either major party.” He is confident if the polls and debates and media give Americans a chance to hear the Libertarian message, a majority will realize they too are libertarians.

Or, at the very least, members of the not-Trump crowd.