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The Case for Voting Libertarian for President
Our own James of England wrote an excellent article — and, I can only imagine, the first of many — for NRO. In it, he details why voting for Gary Johnson would be a mistake and he lists a variety of sins Johnson committed while governor of New Mexico. In increasing severity, James’s list included Johnson using state money to hobnob with celebrities, the state’s budget explosion under his watch, and the debacle that is Johnson’s stated position on forced cake baking.
To put it mildly, this is not a libertarian record or evidence of libertarian positions. The only one I might try to defend is for spending increases, since someone had to send him those bills. But either way, I’m not really here to defend Johnson. These are obvious sins and argue strongly against him. But at the end of the day, they don’t hold a candle to the anti-liberty positions of the two major party candidates. This brings me to what I believe is the biggest motivation behind James’s piece: The potential for Libertarian Party to do well enough this year to earn public financing in future elections.
Not only does Johnson’s faction seek the anti-libertarian objective of public campaign funding, but it tilts elections to Democrats. The potential negative impact of the Libertarian party can be clearly seen in the election for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota in 2008. Al Franken beat Norm Coleman by 215 votes, with the Libertarian party netting 13,916 votes for a candidate focused on economic issues, particularly drilling. A little more than a year later, Obamacare passed with 60 votes, Franken providing the 60th. With public funds and a professional ground game diverting votes, who knows what Congress might pass?
James is right that seeking public financing is un-libertarian and that Johnson has apparently admitted this as a goal. But when you really get down to it, there’s something un-libertarian about seeking office in the first place, and purity tests can be the enemy of the good, especially when there’s a chance of major positive consequences. We now have the chance to put a relatively strong — albeit, flawed — voice for liberty on the stage next to two criminally statist celebrities. And while a strong, well-financed Libertarian party could shave-off enough votes to cause Democratic wins in otherwise Republican-leaning races, the potential upside could make the risk worthwhile.
Additionally, the Libertarian party candidate is the best alternative for those who are in both the #NeverClinton and #NeverTrump camps. Whichever of the major-party disasters wins will likely go into office with an abysmally low portion of the vote, robbing them of a reasonable claim to a mandate. Often, the best kind of president is a neutered (or spayed?) president.
And yet, it’s still not certain who the Libertarian candidate will be. While Johnson is the favorite, there are those who could be more palatable to Conservatives, such as Austin Petersen:
Whoever wins in November will have a myriad of flaws, but flawless people cannot win the presidency. We don’t know what the future holds, but the possibility that a more liberty-focused candidate could catch fire and give the two-party monolith a run for their money is just too juicy to pass up. It might be too soon — as a matter of history — for Libertarians to exploit a strong showing, but this is the best opportunity in a generation to throw a wrench into the status quo.
I, for one, am excited to root (and vote) for this.
Published in General
Also, conspiracy theories and dislike for “politicians” and the establishment. If you’re worried about the Trilateral Commission, Paul was likely your vote in the past and Trump is likely your vote this time (although Sanders has put in a good effort). There’s a reason that Johnson emphasizes his agreements with Sanders.
Did you read the article? Voting Johnson provides funding for future campaigns. It also means that Johnson voters are not objecting to ugly statist politicians, but endorsing them. Write-ins or other third parties allow one to actually avoid embracing the lesser evil.
What was your intended capitalization there?
This is true; also, just repeating over and over that water is wet doesn’t make water wet.
Petersen and McAffee each offer some hope of influencing the country, and hence the party, by making limited government arguments that are not about pot.
Johnson would also pull the party to the right, but only because losing close elections would leave only members in redder states. He’d move the country to the left.
Washington.
Do you think that the Green Party resulted in the Democrats becoming more environmentalist after 2000? Do you think that the Klan resulted in the Democrats becoming more anti-Catholic in the 1920s? Do you think that the Dixiecrats and American Party resulted in the Democrats becoming more pro-segregation in the 1960s? Did the Progressive Party bring the Republican Party further into the progressive fold?
It is almost always the case that third parties push their parent party away from their ideology. If you want a seat at the table, you need to sit at the table; it’s always tempting to take your ball and go home, but it turns out that the anticipated response of the previous political foes seeing the error of their ways and crying desperately for the return of their wayward members never happens. Or, at least, I can’t think of an instance of it happening; I’m open to instances of historical third party successes.
I don’t think I’m a libertarian, but I will probably vote Libertarian this year. At this point, whatever vote we make in this election will be handing the presidency to someone dangerously unfit to be president. That’s out of our hands. My only goal for the upcoming presidential election is for the combined vote total for Hillary and Trump to be as low as possible. Barring a “none of the above” choice, the only way to lower both of their vote totals is with one or more third party candidates doing well.
You can do that better by voting for any other third party, not voting on the Presidential line, or, ideally, writing in a name. Why vote LP over any of the superior choices?
I think this is steel manning the message. Yes, a couple of high-minded intellectuals believe this, but for most people I think the message is, “Hey, don’t forget about us economically insecure statists that make up the majority of the party, oh look, a reality TV celebrity is saying things that sound good to us, we can get behind that!”
The reason is because it’s the Schelling point. You were right, my words were inartfully chosen by saying that the Libertarian would be the “best choice” when I meant to say the “most obvious choice.” It’s the vote that people are most likely to go to as a third party candidate, so the way to send the strongest protest signal is to maximize the vote for the candidate that is most likely other people are going to vote for without requiring communication.
No, a unified third party vote looks like a positive endorsement. A large and diverse third party and write in vote is the clearest NOTA response.
Well, okay. What’s the anti-economically insecure statist platform that Johnson is running on that Clinton isn’t? So far as I can tell, the big non-pot item is a VAT.
Part of the reason your arguments are unsatisfying this cycle, James, is that it’s hard to write Trump off as merely a setback. That it’s just one of those things we have to put up with as we try to thread the needle that gives us the least statist government going forward. Even if you are technically right, and I think there’s a decent chance you are, playing that game now has such little payoff for the individual that taking the higher risk path of attempting to destabilize the race in the hopes that a miracle happens and when the dust settles we end up better than we otherwise would have, sounds like the reasonable bet.
As I tried to emphasize in my OP, I’m not trying to defend Johnson. I would greatly prefer either of the other two, especially Petersen (who’s name didn’t appear in my original post, so the typo was not mine), but even if Johnson is the nominee hearing that he was an awful person isn’t going to do much to convince people not to vote for him because he sends such an obvious signal despite your attempts to ruin it.
Writing in a name is not the ideal choice, it is equal to not voting. 5-7 states don’t allow writing in candidates. In over thirty more states a candidate has to file paperwork to run as a write in candidate, if the candidate has not filed the paper work, a vote for that person does not count. So you could write in Ben Sasse but in most of the country that vote will never be counted.
Yes, this. So few people seem to understand this.
Yeah, as soon as I’d written it I realized I should have added “other than Washington”.
I’m not sure I follow. We’re both talking about a protest vote, right? Why is voting for an opportunistic and unprincipled statist bigot as a protest vote a strategy to end up with something better than we otherwise could have? Why not support someone supportable?
He does send an obvious signal. We just disagree over how different that signal is from voting for Trump in the primaries.
Whenever I give advice, I’d appreciate it if people read in the usual disclaimer that they should comply with all relevant laws. Yes, in some states Sasse isn’t an option, but in many states he is, and in most states you have write in candidate options. Even in the five-seven, your ballot gets counted as spoiled, which makes clear the nature of your vote without confusing the message by voting for the thing you’re standing against.
I guess I don’t understand the merely a setback thing. It’s true that my views on handing the 2020 election to the Democrat are based on the assumption that there will be a 2020 election. Is that what you’re disputing, or do I make an additional assumption?
I don’t want to be nit picking but Sasse is only an option if Sasse decides to run and complies with the local laws for being a write in candidate. The candidate decides if they are a write in candidate not the voters. 7 states don’t allow write in candidates. 35 have some official paperwork that must be filed before the election. If a candidate does not fill out the paperwork, that vote is not counted. It has the same net-effect as not voting at all.
So the only way Sasses is an option in most states is if he mounts an official candidacy.
I’m going by the signal that most voters are likely to receive rather than the way someone like you perceives it. By the way, if you can find someone more supportable who I can vote for in Ohio and my vote will be recorded, I’ll consider it.
Well, people I’ve talked to seem to believe he at least says enough of the right things to differentiate himself from the other two candidates and in a liberty direction. Even if (the majority of) his rhetoric is the only thing that makes him seem libertarian, voting for someone who seems and talks like a libertarian sends a much different (and better) signal than voting for someone who seems and talks like Trump (of which I haven’t been convinced Johnson is generally interpreted).
I’m saying that your opinion of him is far enough outside of the mainstream that even if the signal you perceive is the one that should be perceived, it is not the one the majority of people are likely to come away with. Your article was an attempt to shift this opinion, and unless I see evidence that you are succeeding on a large enough scale, I’ll have to disagree with your conclution.
There’s a lot of time before the election, I am by no means certain who I’m going to vote for, but I wanted to lay out my reasoning at this moment.
Seeing people in the Republican party, especially people like Peter, come around to supporting Trump is a surreal experience for me. I mean, I knew people’s reasoning was heavily compromised by Stockholm Syndrome, but I guess I refused to believe the extent of it. I suddenly feel much more foreign than I usually do. It’s like I’m watching events play out on an alien planet and I am on the outside looking in, dumbstruck.
This realization has disturbed me to the point that trying to salvage a governing majority with the people I thought I knew seems less and less worthwhile.
^ This.
Most people won’t know that Johnson is a kinda crap libertarian. Most people aren’t into politics enough to know that. Most people aren’t even into politics to understand how deeply several politically-connected conservatives worry about the Libertarian party undermining real libertarian reform.
Many conservative political junkies understandably worry that anything big-L Libertarian is a cruel joke elevating drug-fueled bondage orgies over important stuff like economic freedom. But most people aren’t conservative political junkies.
I confess I don’t know for sure what the average American’s perception of Libertarian candidates is. I would guess, though, that it’s something like, “Oh, those right-wing free-market loons who are somehow also into sex and drugs.” I doubt it’s “hippies with guns”. “Hippies with guns” – a description reflecting the worry that Libertarians end up doing more to help Progressive statism than they do to hurt it – is quite likely to be a niche perception of what voting Libertarian stands for. Some vague idea that Libertarians do kinda stand for smaller government and economic conservatism is likely to be more widespread in the populace.
I agree that most, although not all, states would require him to mount a candidacy; since the paperwork is generally a letter telling the Sec. State that you plan to run, while Sasse might not run, there will certainly be many candidates with policies you can vote for this cycle. Indeed, I shall be mildly disappointed if Ricochet does not have at least a couple of Presidential candidates in its membership.
Well, BrentB67 has made a vow to never again set foot outside of Texas, so I guess he’s out. No one with as many cats as Claire Berlinski has could ever be elected, so she’s out. I wouldn’t want RyanM for president, because he wouldn’t have time to do Flyover Country anymore. How about Frank Soto?
Candidates, dear sir, candidates…
Car-fanciers with magnificent manes, crazy cat ladies, humans who identify as crazy cats… they all could run for president – especially, I’m sure James would point out – in the Libertarian party as it currently stands ;-)
If Johnson does well, people will find out who Johnson is; most of the media coverage of him as “a libertarian” stems from the media not bothering to investigate. I suspect that the Trumpian burqa stuff will be a bigger deal than most stuff, but film subsides are a pretty big deal, too, as is Weld’s views on guns; I think it’s possible that the debt will be, too. In this instance, shibboleths work against them, since while most of the MSM aren’t interested in government spending in general film subsidies are one of the go to cliches for denouncing wasteful spending. Similarly, debt is important because Johnson uses the claim that he passed balanced budgets every years as a core part of his platform, and because it’s the equivalent of someone portrayed as a SoCon having a Gingrichian sex life.
It’s worth remembering that in office he didn’t pass the anti-drug war stuff that Martinez did with civil asset forfeiture abolition. Like Sanders in the socialist commune he was kicked out of in the 1970s, he really preferred to talk about politics than to pull his weight in implementing a better tomorrow.
There’s only one part of the drug war that Johnson is interested in, and that’s, coincidentally, protecting the sort of pot habit that Johnson had and supporting the sort of pot industry that Johnson owns a non-trivial chunk of.
I feel like Weld is probably helpful in dispelling the “hippies with guns” image. I agree with your “small government libertines” stereotype as being key, although I’d add conspiracy theorist to the pop culture stereotype; TV doesn’t get everything wrong.
It’s partly because of that that Johnson having such a terrible fiscal record is harmful. It contributes to the sense that everyone on the right is a hypocrite, which is one of the most powerful charges laid on us by the entertainment industry.
I agree it’s reasonable, if one is thinking of casting a protest vote one hopes will signal “generic freedom-loving protest”, to consider how well the candidate one is voting for is likely to do, how well he’d have to do to really come to the attention of people not already in the know, and what kind of dirt there is on him that would serve to undermine the message of freedom if he attracted enough attention to have that dirt widely exposed.
These are, I think, prudential calculations, where people’s estimates of the likelihoods may differ.
Is there a “sweet spot” where enough people vote for Johnson to signal “a noticeable amount of voters are expressing a ‘libertarian’ dissatisfaction with both parties” but not so many that Johnson becomes the new and confusing face of all things libertarian? It’s not inconceivable that there might not be, but as of now I think it’s more likely that there is, and that even with the best of luck, Johnson would have trouble attracting enough votes to exceed such a sweet spot.
It’s not just a matter of success, it’s a matter of where we are in the cycle. Right now, Romney and Sasse are still the names that comes up most often when people talk about rightist alternatives to Trump in the less wonky parts of the web. Eventually, America will internalize that that isn’t a thing, and investigate other options. Also, we’ll have the results of the primary on Sunday. There’s already been a huge boom in articles about Johnson over the last month, and there’ll be a lot more in the future. As this happens, institutional knowledge builds and the articles will improve.
If you’re concerned that no one will know that there was dissatisfaction with Trump and that much of this comes from the small government/ affluent/ educated portion of the party then I think you’re seeking to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. There are many, many, avenues appropriate to this. Primaries were a big one, as is the media (you’ve been published in the Federalist, right?).
To my mind, votes are doing something rather than saying something. As such, voting Green seems like a far more sensible use of one’s vote than anything else; if they get to 5%, they get public funding and they use most of their efforts to attack Democrats.
Still, even if you think of it more as a way of writing a letter to those people who pore over vote totals, voting Libertarian as a measure of libertarian dissatisfaction with Trump (because, let’s be clear, no one outside the LP is imagining that there’ll be a lot of libertarian votes expressing dissatisfaction with Clinton) is expressing a voice in a way that cannot be heard. Look at the vote totals for libertarians over the years and you’ll see that they are essentially entirely independent of the dissatisfaction of libertarians with the candidate. Libertarians went nuts about Bush, but fewer people voted LP in ’00 and ’04 than voted against Dole. The big spikes in the vote are in 1980 and last cycle because Koch funded the ticket in 1980 and Johnson is an excellent fundraiser.
It’s essentially inconceivable that the LP won’t get a bigger share of the vote than it has ever gotten. Johnson’s machine politics are not bad on account of being ineffective, but bad because they are unprincipled. Plus, there’s a lot more folks than usual wanting to throw their toys out of the pram. The difference between, say, 3% and 4%, or 5% and 6% isn’t going to tell people that there were libertarian concerns, just that the LP was the only party with 50 state access. Talk to people who say they’re voting that way and they’ll often say that they’re not libertarian, but anti-Trump. If you’re talking about sending a message to people who are familiar with Johnson, you’re telling them that your problem with Trump is essentially the volume; you want a more soporific version. If you’re talking about sending a message to moderately informed people, you’re telling them that you engaged in a generic protest vote against Trump, just like the vast bulk of other “it’s the only 50 state third party” voters. You may also be telling them that you like third parties.
(Don’t get me wrong, I like third parties, too; Thatchet dominated British politics essentially exclusively because of them, Bush became President because of them, Nixon and Dewey almost beat Kennedy and Truman because of them. Third parties always and everywhere undermine the cause they stand for, cost their and drive their parent party away from their ideology, and since they’re generally leftist they’ve done the world a lot of good. In this instance, though, you’d be communicating a sense that you’d like to see your own ideological grouping split its vote in a first past the post voting system.)
If you’re talking about sending a message to the less informed, then you would be asking people who didn’t pore over the election results to take a message from the fine print of the election results.
There were nearly thirty tickets who were either write-in or on ballot candidates in the 2012 Presidential election, despite unusually high demands (Illinois comes as close to banning write-ins as any state that permits write-ins with onerous requirements). There’ll be many more this time; there’s got to be someone who picks your fancy.
I don’t think it’s possible for votes to avoid saying something as well as doing something. They don’t say much, and as we both agree, what they say isn’t clear and is open to interpretation. But a weak, hard-to-interpret signal is still different from no signal. It is really hard to avoid communicating anything at all.
I’m not discounting the funding argument, or the “it’s better to split the left rather than the right” argument, both of which deserve consideration. What I wonder is whether we can as a matter of psychology expect large numbers of people who believe that both major parties are “too X” to protest-vote by voting for the minor party that they believe is even more X, especially if another party which seems less X is on the ballot.
How many people could bring themselves to protest-vote for a third party whose ideology is actually repulsive to them?
For example, I couldn’t bring myself to vote for a neo-Nazi party, no matter how badly I wanted to protest-vote, even if that were the only protest-vote option on the ballot.
I remember once considering voting Green in order to lodge a protest vote, but one that would seem to split the left rather than the right. Ultimately I couldn’t bring myself to do it, especially after seeing the Green’s platform for that race. I don’t really know why I couldn’t bring myself to do it – it just seemed wrong somehow, even though I wouldn’t judge someone else doing the same thing as immoral in any way.
I think that fairly large numbers of people are able to grasp it, but I agree that it is a stumbling block for some. That’s why, although I don’t personally see much of a justification for a non-Green vote this year, I didn’t talk about it in the article.
Exactly. If, like Jonah, your vote’s most important criterion is how it will make you feel, and you view the vote as a statement about who you are, then Green probably isn’t an option. If it were the only category of Green voter, there would be few people out there contributing. Fortunately, as with all party’s political support, the Greens have a substantial raft of morons who will consider voting for them; strategic voters merely help on the margins.
Sure. Just for clarity, I don’t think that the Green vote should be thought of as a protest vote. It’s an investment in a weaker Democratic Party going forward. Just like a Libertarian vote, whatever its emotional value as a protest, will have its chief impact in funding the opposition to the small government candidate in 2020.
I’m not going to condemn you for not engaging in a protest vote. Indeed, I’m somewhat surprised that a Green protest vote might ever have appealed to you. Full disclosure; if it were not for scheduling/ geographic reasons, I’d have canvassed for the UK Green Party in a council race when my brother was the candidate.
As Mike H and others would point out, our emotions are a kind of internal signaling, adapted to alert us to stuff that may in fact be important.
Obviously our emotions are hardly adapted to be perfect – they didn’t need to be perfect, just good enough to comport with survival advantage in our ancestral environment – but in most circumstances, it’s a good thing when people listen to that little voice telling them “I’ll feel really rotten if I do this”. There’s nothing preventing voting from being a complete exception to this heuristic – perhaps doing the best thing in the voting booth really should involve overriding that little voice.
But it’s also understandable when decent people, who are gonna spend the majority of their lives doing stuff that isn’t voting anyhow, are reluctant to practice overriding the inhibitions and sentiments that they generally rely on to be decent people in the first place.
Moreover, it’s possible that, depending on who you are, telling people how you voted might do more for the political process than actually voting – and for the reason given above, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect decent people to be willing to vote one way, then say they voted another, even if, in their judgment, doing that would maximize the effectiveness of their voting-and-telling strategy. That some people may place the utility of being able to say to others honestly, “I voted this way,” over the utility of what their vote does for election totals strikes me as neither irrational, nor necessarily bad strategy, even if it’s easy to argue there are cases where it should be considered bad strategy.
You know, I wonder about that… and I keep wondering about that.
I still get the overall impression that one reason the Left has had the success it has is that our moderate Leftists don’t hate and get embarrassed by the extreme Leftists all that much, and in fact still count their wacko fringe groups as allies, despite the occasional problems that inevitably arise with vote-splitting.
Admittedly, the Leftists I’ve known best have been the sort very sympathetic to the Greens to start with – they might discourage people from voting Green in order to preserve Democrat unity and power, but they also kinda grudgingly admire (and even wish they could be) the kind of idealist who kicks off the traces and votes Green anyhow. I know not all portions of the Democrat coalition are as sympathetic to the environmentalist/Green agenda as these particular Democrats are, though.