Irrelevance or kingmaker?
There is power to be found in recognizing one’s true place
Six weeks and a wakeup until we can stop worrying about what new bit of mischief the outgoing administration might cook up on their way out. Well… mostly stop worrying.
Continuing last week’s theme of “know yourself so you can make good decisions”, I’d like to bring it a little closer to home and discuss the US Libertarian Party.
I‘ll start by quoting from the official LP platform:
Our goal is nothing more nor less than a world set free in our lifetime…1
With no disrespect intended either to the LP or to Ukraine, this goal is about as likely to occur as is a restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders.
There’s nothing wrong with establishing an aspirational ideal—a vision, something to strive for. Shoot for the stars, and at least you’ll hit the moon.
However, as a goal, “a world set free in our lifetime” fails utterly. It is missing the “A” in “SMART”, as in “achievable”. There simply ain’t no way that Putin will give up Crimea, and there simply ain’t no way that the entire world will be set free within our lifetime. There just ain’t.
Without a valid goal, you can’t develop a strategy. And without a strategy, you can’t build a political following. You might be able to bring people into the room with rhetoric and emotional appeals, but you won’t be able to get them to stay.
Then you have the more practical aspects of American politics. To begin with, nobody knows any Libertarians.
Some people know Dave Smith and Liz Wolfe. A few might know Scott Horton and Keith Knight. Some may have heard of Mises and Rothbard, especially if they’ve been following Javier Milei. And of course, there’s Milei himself. So let me rephrase my earlier statement:
Nobody knows any Libertarians who are running for political office in America. (Chase Oliver doesn’t count. Sorry / not sorry.)
This isn’t really all that surprising; sort of in the same way that nobody is too surprised that there aren’t many white supremacists joining BLM for the purpose of weakening it from within. Committed Libertarians are opposed to the state, and many choose not to participate in the rituals of statism—even for the goal of bringing the state down.
Also, American politics is dominated by the two major parties. A third-party candidate can certainly siphon votes away from one or both sides, but the odds of actually overtaking either R or D are very long, indeed.
It’s not really enough to say that third-party candidates don’t get a lot of votes. We should really look at the numbers to appreciate more fully the sheer magnitude of the number of votes they don’t get2:
The state where the LP presidential candidate got the most votes was Texas, with 68,551 for Chase Oliver. Compare to Harris’ 4,834,608 and Trump’s 6,393,036. Oliver’s vote total represents just 4% of the difference between Harris and Trump’s totals.
The second-most was in California, with 66,308 for Oliver, 6,026,535 for Trump, and 9,226,397 for Harris. Oliver had 2% of the difference.
Of course, it may not be fair to look at such strongly polarized states.
In hotly contested Pennsylvania, Oliver took 33,323 against Harris’ 3,423,100 and Trump’s 3,543,532. Oliver’s vote total was 28% of the difference.
The most potentially significant state for the Libertarians was Wisconsin, where Oliver had 10,511 votes against Harris’ 1,668,229 and Trump’s 1,697,626. The LP’s vote total was a whopping… 36% of the difference.
In fact, here’s a chart of the 10 states where the LP had the largest vote total compared to the difference between the two major parties’ totals:
There is no state in the Union where Chase Oliver got enough votes that, even if he could give all of those votes to either Trump or Harris, he would have changed the results for that state.
Go down-ballot
The LP ran almost no senatorial or gubernatorial candidates in 2024 (almost… more on that later). And quite a few down-ballot votes were decided by much smaller margins than the presidential races were in that state.
For example, you might recall that in Pennsylvania’s presidential race, LP took 33,323 votes (28% of the margin) against Democrats’ 3,423,100 and GOP’s 3,543,532. However, in the senatorial race, D had 3,384,119 and R had 3,399,318: a difference of only 15,199 votes. 33,323 is more than twice the margin of victory in the PA senatorial race; 219%, to be precise. If the LP had run a senatorial candidate in PA, and that candidate had won a comparable number of votes to the national candidate, it could very well have swung the results of the senatorial election by siphoning off enough R votes to give victory to D.
This phenomenon isn’t particularly widespread, as we can see from a chart showing the top 10 states for LP votes in that state’s presidential race as a percentage of the gap between R and D senatorial candidates:
Coming back to “almost no senatorial or gubernatorial candidates” for a bit. There was one state where the LP ran both a senatorial and a gubernatorial candidate: Indiana. And while the LP’s would-be President Chase Oliver only pulled in 20,524 votes in that state, would-be Senator Andrew Horning got 73,780 votes and would-be Governor Donald Rainwater got 131,156. So the LP actually did significantly better in the state-level races than it did in the national—by a factor of 6.4 in the gubernatorial race—even if their candidates still brought in relatively insignificant vote totals.
Pennsylvania and Michigan were two states where the LP could have drastically affected the outcome by supporting one of the two major parties, or by running a third-party down-ballot candidate. And the results in Indiana indicate that they could actually have a much more significant impact on state-level races than their paltry national vote totals suggest.
So while the LP candidate has no real shot at the crown, the party can still play kingmaker. By offering to support or oppose one of the major party candidates, or by threatening to run their own spoiler candidate, they can extract commitments from whichever side they back—as long as that side wins, of course.
What sort of commitments? The most obvious examples are from Trump’s visit to the LP National Convention, where he offered to put a Libertarian into his cabinet. The fact that the crowd booed his offer suggests that it wasn’t accepted… which was a clear case of cutting off the nose to spite the face. The LP was so committed to ideological purity that it passed up on the opportunity to have real national-level impact—something it currently lacks.
It is pleasant for Ukraine to dream of 1991 borders and membership in NATO and the EU. However, as discussed in last week’s article (linked at the top), this is a daydream brought on by Former President Zelenskiy’s wish fulfillment. He thinks of Ukraine as a power; but what it is, is a buffer state. He sets a power’s goal, but lack a power’s means, and so he is thwarted.
And it is pleasant for the Libertarian Party to envision a world where state power is minimized or even eliminated—a world set free; a world that those who are alive today will live in. But this, too, is a daydream; the LP does not have the influence or power to bring this about against the will of the deeply entrenched and vastly more powerful statist interests it opposes. And so, the LP is thwarted.
By focusing on what is actually achievable and by using each incremental gain as a springboard for more, the LP can wield the behind-the-scenes power of a kingmaker and put some policy wins on the board. But by insisting on its quixotic quest for ideological purity, it insists on keeping itself an irrelevance.
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https://www.lp.org/platform/
All election numbers pulled from: https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/results/
The absolutely most frustrating part of the LP is the fact that they won’t participate. It’s like playing chess and moving all the pieces like pawns. The game has rules— whether you like them or not—-and you can’t win without using those rules to your advantage. Given how much the populist movement of Trump’s campaign leans into getting rid of bureaucracy and government overreach, you’d think they’d want to have a say in that. While it’s not THE goal, it’s a stepping stone towards it.