For the first time since 2004, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate will not be a prominent Republican defector, reducing the third party’s chances of spoiling the race between GOP incumbent President Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Libertarians nominated Jo Jorgensen, their 1996 vice presidential nominee, at a virtual national convention on Saturday. Supporters point out that she is a businesswoman and professor with both an MBA and a Ph.D. But she is not a big name likely to garner much media attention in a race dominated by Trump and Biden, the former vice president of the United States.
This comes after two straight elections in which the Libertarian Party ticket crossed the 1 million vote threshold and finished third nationally. Unless those contests conditioned disaffected voters to view the party as a default third choice, Libertarians could fall back to their normal 300,000-500,000-vote range without an established nominee.
The absence of a notable third-party candidate could be significant, given that Trump’s job approval rating generally peaks below 50%. Biden is trying to monopolize voters who disapprove of Trump.
The last obscure Libertarian presidential pick, 2004 nominee Michael Badnarik, received 397,265 votes and was a nonfactor in the competitive race between President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry, despite appearing on the ballot in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Bush and Kerry together won 99% of the vote, compared to 94.27% for Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Libertarians then began nominating well-known former Republican-elected officials for president. Former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, a longtime nemesis of President Bill Clinton, was the choice in 2008 in a bid to win over conservatives who were disenchanted with Republican nominee John McCain. Barr’s running mate was talk show host Wayne Allyn Root, who later rejoined the GOP. The Barr-Root ticket only modestly improved to 523,713 votes, which was still at the time the party’s second-highest raw total, though the 0.4% vote share was still within the normal Libertarian range.
Former Republican New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson made bigger inroads. In 2012, with Judge Jim Gray as his running mate, he received 1,275,923 votes. That was the Libertarian Party’s best popular vote total in history and nearly tied its best vote share at 1%. With former Republican Massachusetts Gov. William Weld as his running mate and two unpopular major-party nominees, Johnson smashed both records with 4,489,233 votes or 3.3% of the total cast.
Although Johnson won more votes than the number separating Trump from Clinton, both nationally and in several states, he received less blame for the 2016 outcome than fourth-place Green Party nominee Jill Stein. Green Party candidates, such as Ralph Nader in 2000, are seen as mostly siphoning votes from Democrats, while Libertarians are thought to draw them from Republicans.
Still, some Libertarians were disappointed with their ex-Republican nominees. They had expected Barr to do about as well as Johnson ended up doing in 2012, for Johnson in 2012 to do roughly as well as wound up running in 2016, and then Johnson 2016 to turn in a performance somewhere between independents John Anderson in 1980 (7% of the vote) and Ross Perot (19%). Weld ran an unsuccessful GOP primary campaign against Trump this year.
Some Libertarians were nevertheless heartened they could keep the momentum going when Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, a six-term Republican-turned-independent, announced a Libertarian presidential exploratory committee. Amash participated in one presidential debate and then bowed out, tweeting that it wasn’t a good climate for a third-party run. There had been considerable debate over whether Amash would hurt Trump or Biden more. Lincoln Chafee, a former senator and governor of Rhode Island who had previously been a Republican, an independent, and a Democrat, never saw his 2020 Libertarian candidacy get off the ground.
Before Johnson, the previous record for a Libertarian presidential ticket was the 921,128 votes Ed Clark won in 1980 with David Koch of the billionaire Koch brothers as his running mate. They polled 1.1% of the popular vote. Harry Browne won 485,759 votes, or 0.5% of the total, with Jorgensen as his running mate in 1996. Former and future Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul did about the same as the Libertarian nominee in 1988.
Jorgensen was backed by the pragmatic wing of the Libertarian Party, which has tended to support the ex-Republicans who have sought its nomination. It’s possible that Johnson’s campaigns set her up to also do better than a typical Libertarian nominee. So does the electorate’s theoretical openness to third-party candidates, repeatedly expressed to pollsters if rarely demonstrated at the ballot box. An Emerson College poll found that 51% of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders voters were willing to consider a minor party.
Yet with Amash, Chafee, and former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who had briefly toyed with a Green Party run earlier this year, on the sidelines, it looks like Trump and Biden will have the 2020 election to themselves.
