the fiscally conservative, socially liberal platform will probably resonate with a lot of voters. I'm really surprised the Republicans didn't adopt this approach this election.. They continue to remain clueless, leaving that door open just a little for Johnson and the Libertarians. As someone who has long disliked both main parties, and the 2 party system, i'm considering voting for Johnson. What i like most is his commitment to reducing the deficit. What i like least is the NRA philosophy of 'the more guns the better', and having virtually no gun regulation. Even if he doesn't win, it would be good to send a message to the other parties what many voters are looking for (and not getting from them).
HR Perot got 19% of the vote in 1992 and it has been all downhill since then. You cannot build a viable third party at the Presidential level. You have to build it at the grassroots first, by taking on one or both parties at the local level and competing with them. Nobody has managed to do this since the 30's and even back then, when things were so bad for the average person that a revolution occurred in Washington and almost in the streets alongside that, both parties managed to beat back the threat and hold on. It's going to take a regional party beating one of the two main parties in that region and driving them from the ballot to get a third party going. Maybe the Tea Party driving the GOP off the ballot in the midwest or something similar. Without that regional stronghold the resources will still keep funneling upwards to the two main parties and the third party will not be able to break through into the mainstream.
well i agree, Johnson is a total long shot. That doesn't mean i won't vote for him though. have to start somewhere in order to move the needle. republican and democrat parties continue to push further right and left. If a 3rd party can build momentum, and/or the other 2 parties support more centrist candidates, it would be progress. there hasn't been representation for a fiscally conservative socially liberal candidate in awhile, and i think there is a need for that. the Perot election was fun........Dana Carvey's material alone made it worth it lol
I'll be voting for Johnson. I don't think he's actually presidential material. I just want to put forth support for a legitimate third party contender. Edit: That said, if a third party candidate were to step forward that could be taken seriously, sign me up.
This election and it's candidates have become a complete shit-show at this point. And I thought it was bad when we got Obama. This should have been a time when a good third option could present itself and be a possibility, but so many people can't think past Dem/Repub party lines. I'll gladly give my vote to Johnson, or almost anyone else at this point other than the trash we have to choose from. Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk
often in past NY elections they had candidates running under multiple parties. I always voted for the non-Republican/Democrat party when I could.
It does. If people voted based on positions rather than party lines (usually because "third parties have no chance"), the Libertarian platform is more popular than either the traditional Republican or Democrat platforms. If people weren't so set on voting R or D (because of everyone else), I really think Johnson would win because Trump/Clinton are very disliked, and for good reason.
When I lived in NY I always voted for the candidates under the Liberal party line if I could. The only way to fight back against the kind of entrenched duopoly that we have is to do whatever you can to empower the reasonable alternatives. I wouldn't have gone to the extremes of voting for Lyndon LaRouche just to give third parties a chance but when it was the same candidate under Democratic or Liberal it was an easy choice. I did the same thing in 2010 and 2012 in Connecticut for the Working Families Party. If the same candidate was available on Democrat and WFP I voted WFP. In truth it's a useless motion under this system. The two main parties are too entrenched at the local and state levels and that makes them invincible in Washington. If you really want to break the duopoly you have to break it at the local level first, then the state level and then finally it will crumble at the federal level. That's a decade long proposition. That's how long it took the Republicans to take the Whigs down. When they started they didn't even know they were going to be Republicans in the end, they just knew they were unhappy Whigs who did not agree with the Whig positions on slavery and were opposed to the Democratic positions on every issue in the book.
Seriously, does anybody think the average American voter wants to: 1. Abolish Income Tax in favor of a national consumption tax? 2. Get rid of the Mortgage Interest Deduction? 3. Legalize Marijuana? 4. Wink at illegal immigration and allow people who are good at sneaking in to do so? 5. Pull back from all of our overseas commitments? This is before we get down to the things that we know the average voter is a no on, like getting rid of Social Security and Medicare, etc. It's nice to think that the reasonable Libertarian positions are majority positions in the electorate but the facts are that they are not collectively majority positions. They're collectively a decent-sized minority at best and that's before you get to the fringe things, like judicial activism, social conservatism, fiscal liberalism, American Imperialism, etc. The Libertarian core in this country who will hold true to what the Libertarian Party's platform espouses is very small. It might be 15% of the electorate but I doubt the numbers really get that large.
I think the average American voter is disgusted with the 2 major party candidates and may well find they agree more with the libertarian platform than the others if they took the time to compare. I highly doubt Johnson wants to pull out from all foreign engagement but I could be wrong.is this something you read? Surely most Americans are sick of fighting a bunch of unnecessary wars that cost huge in dollars and lives. I do think most Americans DO believe marijuana should be legalized.
The most likely thing to happen is IF anyone ever decides to provide the sort of funding that would make the Libertarians a serious contender, their core principles will go out the window in favor of what said financiers desire. Politics as usual.
I don't think this is the case as he has stated many times national defense is important but the key word is DEFENSE. Not offense. He also has stated that North Korea is a real and serious threat and shouldn't be ignored.
If the Libertarians had a core donor group they wouldn't have to sacrifice their core principles to get the money they need to run. Bernie Sanders just funded a campaign by appealing to millennial voters enough that he raised more than $200M over 2015 and the first quarter of 2016. If he could do that why can't the Libertarians fund a candidate well enough to make a real splash in a national election? The answer is that they do not have a core to draw from that is either wealthy enough or numerous enough to get over the hump. They don't even have a mega-billionaire with deep enough pockets to fund a campaign on his own. That's because their core principles aren't held by enough people to make viable funding an option.
You think McAfee would spend $200 million dollars to try to get himself elected President? You think he'd spend it on another candidate? That's looking like openers now if you really want to win.
I think Rand Paul was a good Libertarian candidate and he got completely ignored by the money guys on the Right and he wasn't able to get much grassroots fund-raising going either. The problem? He was a principled Libertarian and so he didn't have any deep pockets behind him. There was nobody thinking they could make a buck off of him if they got him elected.
We'd be looking at Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush opposite Hillary Clinton in the general election. That's my guess at this point. It's possible it would have been John Kasich or Ted Cruz but the establishment favorites would have had the stage for the most part due to a heavy money advantage over their peers. I think Rand Paul would have been a better candidate if he didn't have to share the stage with a few lunatics in the formative process of the campaign but the money problem would still have haunted him. You have to be able to organize and order things well to compete in a fair competition governed by resources in play. Paul, like most Libertarians, doesn't have a well-defined sense of order. That's part of the Libertarian quandary, how do you win a competition in which you don't think rules are the most important factor? Trump did what Trump did because he got a huge amount of free publicity and that being in aggregate worth more than the resources of his opponents allowed him to drive them from the stage one by one during the primaries. He couldn't organize anything but his personal presence but the ability to do that allowed him to dominate over a vast array of media outlets and get his message out. An example of something that Rand Paul could have done that would have really energized his campaign and gotten him some of that bandwidth: he could have proposed that every state in the US hold a referendum after the election to see if they really wanted to be in the Union or not. He could have said that he'd fully support the results of the referendum in each state as President. That would have been completely and authentically Libertarian and it would have gotten him the spotlight for the entire campaign. He'd have gotten funding from every individual and group in the US that supported secession from the Union and cut the funding of his opponents dramatically in the process.
