Time for Soul-Searching and a New Direction: The 2024 L.P. Presidential Campaign

Beginning in the fall of 2023, when the Libertarian Party presidential race was beginning, and continuing all the way to the national convention in May 2024, during my campaign for the 2024 presidential nomination I emphasized the following message at every state convention where I spoke in person or by video message:

We already know the results of the 2024 presidential election insofar as the Libertarian presidential candidate is concerned: 0-1 percent of the national vote — that is, if we run a candidate with the standard reform-oriented, Republican-lite message that has come to define the Libertarian Party and our presidential campaigns for the past 20 years or so. The only chance we have to achieve a major breakout in votes — 10-15 percent — is to move in a totally different direction — with a message that rejects, fully and completely, reform and Republican-lite in favor of a message that adheres strictly to libertarian principles.

Alas, I failed to win the party’s presidential nomination. The winner was Chase Oliver, who who ended up garnering .4 percent of the vote — well within the 0-1 percent that I predicted.

Does my accurate prediction make me Nostradamus? No. It simply means that I was thinking logically.

The basis for my prediction

For the past 20 years or so, the L.P. presidential candidate has been garnering around 1 percent of the vote. An exception occurred in 2016, when the L.P. presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, a Republican who had come into the L.P. in 2012, garnered around 3 percent. But that was clearly an anomaly because four years later, the L.P. presidential candidate, Jo Jorgensen, went back to around the standard 1 percent.

In the fall of 2023, the presidential polls were reflecting that the L.P. presidential candidate was garnering 1 percent. Therefore, the argument I made at every state convention that I addressed was simply one based on logic: Given that voter sentiment toward the standard reform-oriented, Republican-lite message that has come to define our party and our presidential races has not improved over the past 3 years, it is a virtual certainty that it’s not going to improve over the next year.

As each month passed during the campaign, the presidential polls continued to reflect my point. Month after month, the L.P. presidential candidate was garnering 1 percent in the polls. Some months the number dropped down to 0 percent.

Therefore, the point I made at every one of those state conventions and also at the national convention was simply a logical one: If we run another presidential candidate with the standard reform-oriented, Republican-lite message that we have been running for the past 20 years or so, we are going to get 0-1 percent again because that is what the polls are showing. Therefore, to achieve a big vote breakout, I argued, it was necessary to do something radically different — i.e., run a presidential campaign that rejected reform and Republican-lite and whose message adhered 100 percent to libertarian principles.

Standing with the 99 percent

But my message went further than that. At every L.P. state convention at which I spoke — and in every video message to state conventions where I did not appear in person — and also at the national convention in May — I also pointed out the following: “I am with the 99 percent of the electorate who reject this message. I believe they are right to reject it. I stand with them. I reject it too.”

I’ll never forget what happened when I delivered that message during the nominating portion of the national L.P. convention. A guy in the audience yelled, “Then why are you here?”

The question did not surprise me. I have no doubts that that guy was being very genuine and sincere. He simply could not understand why someone who rejects the message that has come to define the Libertarian Party and L.P. presidential campaigns — a message that has come to be defined as “libertarian” — would be seeking the L.P. presidential nomination. I responded to him, “Give me a few minutes and I will explain it to you.” And I did.

As I emphasized throughout my campaign, the reason I stand with the 99 percent who reject a message of reform and Republican-lite is twofold: (1) It does not — and cannot — garner a large number of votes, as we have seen; and (2) More important, it is a bad message for a party that prides itself on advancing liberty and that calls itself “the Party of Principle.”

Oliver’s and ter Maat’s races for Congress

But there was another reason for my 0-1 percent prediction — Chase Oliver himself, along with the person who would become his vice-presidential running mate, Mike ter Maat (who also sought the 2024 L.P. presidential nomination).

Two years before, Oliver had run for U.S. Senate in his state of Georgia with the same reform-oriented, Republican-lite message that he was running on two years later in the presidential race. In that race, Oliver garnered only 2 percent of the vote.

The same held true for ter Maat. Two years before, he had run for Congress in Florida with the same reform-oriented, Republican-lite message. He garnered less than 1 percent of the vote in that race.

First of all, let’s dispense with two possible reasons for Oliver’s low vote totals. Oliver — and, for that matter, ter Maat — are among the nicest, most pleasant, genuine, intelligent people one could ever find in life. You can’t help but like both of these guys. So, there is no possibility that the reason that 98-99 percent of voters voted against them, either in their races for Congress or in the 2024 presidential race, was because people didn’t like them on a personal level.

Second, as I emphasized throughout the 2024 presidential race, it would be difficult to find better advocates of reform and Republican-lite than Oliver and ter Maat. They are among the best and most competent advocates of reform and Republican-lite in the Libertarian Party.

So, what explains their low vote totals?

In their congressional races, it can’t be because they didn’t get into the debates because they both did get into the debates. Oliver got into a widely publicized debate that was televised statewide against the incumbent U.S. Senator, Raphael Warnock. Since the Republican candidate, Hershel Walker, failed to show up, Oliver got half the time to get his message across to the voters of Georgia — and he did.

That debate can be watched online. Oliver did a first-class job of presenting the reform-oriented, Republican-lite message that has come to define the L.P. and L.P. presidential campaigns. It was no different with ter Maat. He too got into debates in his congressional race in Florida, where he presented a first-class case for reform and Republican-lite.

Could a lack of money explain the low vote results? Oliver’s Senate campaign proved that a lack of money is not the reason for the low vote totals. That’s because Oliver got the biggest amount of free publicity that any L.P. candidate has ever gotten in the history of the party, including L.P. presidential candidates. Since Oliver was likely to be the deciding factor in whether there was going to be a run-off between Warnock and Walker, Oliver ended up garnering unbelievable massive publicity, not only in Georgia but also nationwide. The New York Times, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, wire services, television, and countless other mainstream media all across the country, along with massive publicity on the Internet as well. Rolling Stone magazine’s naming of Oliver as the “most influential libertarian in the country” said it all.

That massive publicity was easily equivalent to at least $40-$50 million in in-kind advertising for Oliver’s campaign. After all, what would Oliver have done if he had received that amount of money in donations? He would have purchased advertising — the same advertising he got for free.

It didn’t do any good. Not only did Oliver not win the Senate race — and not only did he not make the run-off — he ended up garnering only 2 percent of the statewide vote — notwithstanding the fact that he got his message out to every single voter in Georgia.

That leaves just one explanation for the fact that 98 percent of voters rejected Oliver’s message: There was little or no enthusiasm among Georgia voters for his message of reform and Republican-lite.

“Publicity, Jacob! Publicity!”

In an email sent out on the eve of the 2024 general election, the 2020 L.P. presidential candidate, Jo Jorgensen, stated, “The media has ignored [Chase’s] campaign even though the potential libertarian audience now numbers in the tens of millions.”

Is Jorgensen serious? When one adds the massive publicity that Oliver received in his Senate race to the massive publicity that the L.P. garnered with the Donald Trump/L.P. national-convention fiasco and to the massive publicity that Oliver received in his 2024 race, no other L.P. presidential candidate, including Jorgensen, has ever come close to that amount of massive publicity. Just check out the Media section of Oliver’s presidential campaign website and you will see what I mean. He points out: “Chase Oliver has appeared on PBS, CNN, Fox Business, CSPAN, WSB TV and Radio, Fox 5, 11 Alive News, Vice Media, Reason TV. He has been featured in the NY Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone.” He also lists around 50 news articles or interviews about his campaign.

In fact, in Chase’s home state of Georgia, there is no doubt that he is very well known as a political candidate, especially given his widely publicized and televised debate with Warnock. Moreover, he focused heavily on campaigning in Georgia in the last month of his presidential race. It would be safe to say that most every voter in Georgia knows what Oliver’s message is. The result? Notwithstanding all that, Oliver ended up garnering .4 percent of the vote in Georgia in the 2024 presidential race (20,700 votes out of more than 5 million votes cast) — that is, the same percentage that he garnered nationwide.

The right-wing candidates

The right-wing element that currently controls and dominates the Libertarian Party was, to say the least, not pleased when Oliver and ter Maat defeated the right-wing presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Michael Rectenwald and Clint Russell.

The right-wing explanation for Oliver’s low vote total was (1) that he used a Covid mask at family gatherings, which, the right-wing incorrectly claims violates libertarian principles by “buying into the government’s propaganda” and (2) that Oliver supports family control over certain medical treatment of minors who feel they are transgenders.

But both of those right-wing explanations for Oliver’s low vote total are fallacious. That’s because the presidential polls all the way up to the L.P. presidential convention had the L.P. presidential candidate at 0-1 percent. From the fall of 2023 up to the national L.P. convention, people didn’t know who the L.P. presidential candidate was going to be. All they knew was that the L.P. was virtually certain to run a candidate with the same reform-oriented, Republican-lite message that has come to define the party and its presidential candidates for the past 20 years or so. Moreover, don’t forget — Jorgensen herself had gotten around 1 percent in the 2016 race.

Moreover, the fact is that there is no reasonable doubt that Rectenwald and Russell would have done much worse than Oliver did. As I have detailed in many of my Substack articles, there is a very good possibility that if Rectenwald and Russell had won the L.P. nominations, they would have dropped out of the race down the stretch and endorsed Donald Trump, especially given that Trump’s right-wing message was substantially the same as that of Rectenwald and Russell. After all, let’s not forget that both Rectenwald and Russell actually did throw in with Trump in the waning days of the campaign.

More important, given that Oliver garnered .4 percent with the standard reform-oriented, Republican-lite message, there is no reasonable doubt that Rectenwald and Russell would have done much worse — i.e., .1 percent or less even if they had won the nominations, stayed in the race, and not endorsed Trump. That’s because of the highly unusual “add-on” positions that they brought to the standard L.P. message of reform and Republican-lite, to wit: (1) a nationwide system of state border controls and the liberty-destroying police states that come with them; (2) labeling people who took the Covid vaccine or who wore Covid masks as dumb dolts of the state; (3) advocating a state reign of terror against doctors and government officials who prescribed the Covid vaccine; (4) a militarized border with Mexico, including the completion of Trump’s Wall (and the eminent domain stealing of people’s property that comes with such a wall); (5) the forcible deportation of all illegal immigrants, which necessarily would entail a massive coalition of the Border Patrol, ICE, Homeland Security, and snitch networks; (6) the continuation of the massive military-industrial complex to enforce the border; and (7) a system of “anarchy” that entailed the dismantling of Congress and the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary but retained the president, an all-powerful military-intelligence establishment, and immigration police states.

All that would be needed would be one article in the mainstream press advertising those add-on positions and there is no doubt that Rectenwald and Russell would have ended up garnering less than .1 percent of the national vote. Who would have ever voted for that package of positions? In fact, my hunch is that even many L.P. right-wingers would have ended up voting for Trump rather than Rectenwald and Russell.

Soul-searching and a different direction

It remains my conviction that if the Libertarian Party is going to succeed in leading America to liberty, which ultimately is its mission, the members of the party need to engage in serious soul-searching and ask themselves the following question: Should the Libertarian Party continue to embrace a message of reform and Republican-lite (or become an appendage to the Republican Party or, even worse, nothing more than a loyal servant of Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) — or should the Libertarian Party instead be an independent political party that embraces and promotes a message that adheres strictly to libertarian principles?

In future Substack articles, I will explain my own answer to that question by examining some of the specific positions within the message of reform and Republican-lite — positions, as we will see, that have incorrectly come to be defined as “libertarian.” I will begin with immigration, the burning domestic issue of our time that presented the Libertarian Party in the 2024 presidential campaign with the greatest opportunity for the most massive breakout in votes in the party’s history, an opportunity that unfortunately was squandered.