Libertarian-leaning right-wingers were repeatedly derided as ideologically and electorally irrelevant during the Trump era. And after the Libertarian Party’s disappointing 2016 presidential ticket of former Govs. Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, from a strategic perspective, Trump’s “national conservative” movement seemed to have a point in deriding them. Save for a residual but nominal conservative concern about overspending, libertarian-leaners were a dying breed.
Or so we thought.
Even with millions of votes outstanding, this year’s Libertarian Party nominee, Jo Jorgensen, has accrued more than 1.7 million votes at press time. She probably will not match Johnson and Weld’s nearly 4.5 million votes from 2016, but it’s impressive given that Johnson benefited from media coverage and donations orders of magnitude greater than what Jorgensen got. More important is the distribution of her support in key states. Her totals are bigger than Joe Biden’s margins over Trump in the key states that decide this election in his favor.
In Arizona, Jorgensen has more than 50,000 votes, with 98% of total votes counted. Biden leads Trump by fewer than 15,000 votes. In Georgia, Jorgensen’s total is nearly six times Biden’s lead. In Wisconsin, it’s nearly double, and in Pennsylvania, it’s almost the same story.
All of this has led to a bit of meltdown on both sides of the aisle, complete with the ever-inane debate over whether third parties “steal” votes from major parties. But the important fact is that a crucial segment of the public does not buy into the “binary choice” theory of elections. Does this really come as a surprise when the two main parties keep producing unacceptable candidates as their nominees?
No party or candidate is entitled to your vote, or anyone else’s for that matter. If you want the votes that straddle between Biden’s key state margins, you have to earn them. And further, maybe the reluctant persistence of the Libertarian Party is a sign that Republicans really do need to cater to that vote. On foreign policy and criminal justice reform, Trump is likely the most libertarian candidate of my lifetime, but he embraced blowing out the national debt even when the economy was thriving, rejected the entitlement reforms required to curb an incoming debt crisis, and refuses to dismantle the surveillance state that spied on his campaign.
No president in a post-coronavirus world will be able to immediately reclaim the Tea Party mantle, but perhaps there does have to be a discussion of the millions of Americans who might vote for Republicans if they actually kept their promises. Jorgensen voters likely did cost Trump the election, and that’s no one’s fault other than the Republicans’.
