The Libertarian Party debate was on TV yesterdayFollow

Luckily, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson won the delegate vote at the convention today (on the second ballot; the first ballot results are kind of funny/sad, especially the one guy that wrote in "Vermin Supreme"). Johnson is the one slightly mainstream (read: sane) politician of the bunch. Already picked former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld as his running mate, so that's a lot of executive experience.

I have no illusions that they'll win the general election, but hopefully they can make enough noise (5% of the popular vote?) to make the two major parties take notice.

Isn't it like 3% to get federal matching funds next election?

There's also state thresholds to get automatic ballot access without having to collect signatures.

It's a result of the "first over the line" system. The only places that the two major parties don't win are yahoo-filled crazyvilles in Maine and and Oregon.

Oh Zam, better every day.

Edited, May 29th 2016 11:55pm by Allegory

Expanded their efforts how, exactly? The nutjob is popular with their voting base. If they deny him the nomination, they risk alienating the people that put them in office. It's not only about the White House.

Also, let's not forget that the other major party chose a corrupt, power-entitled sociopath over a self-described socialist who has historically praised strongmen like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

Why would the GOP promote another political party? By definition, they're competing entities, doubly so because Republican and Libertarians voters tend to have more overlapping positions that Libertarians and Democrats. This, in conjunction with the "first over the line" system, means that any support the GOP threw to the LP would have essentially been an effort in cutting off their nose to spite their base face.

He's polling at 10% precisely because people have never heard of him. Once the election drags on and the idea of Trump as GOP nominee stops being such a new idea, Johnson's numbers will deflate. Much as I'd like it to be true, Johnson is not going to win double digits in the popular vote, much less 30%.

Edited, May 30th 2016 11:59am by Demea

No one cared about stopping Trump because they all figured Trump would stop Trump.

True, because no one wanted to put effort in that wasn't going to elevate themselves over the rest of the crowd. I mean, the BEST way to stop Trump would have been for ten people to drop out after New Hampshire.

I don't think having bat shit policies is a hurdle any longer. Nah, you know it's just obvious that once the crowd was naturally eliminated the real conservatives influence will take over and Trump's numbers will go down.

I'm not sure what you're saying they should have done. For the actions of "the GOP" (assuming you mean the RNC here?) to have any effect, it has to occur within the confines of the GOP primary process. So to support a candidate at all, that candidate would have to actually run as a Republican in the GOP primary. I suppose any of a list of Libertarian candidates, having taken a look at Trump, could have done so (but waaaaay too late, a fact you still haven't grasped in terms of how primaries work), but there already were a dozen or so candidates in the GOP primary that were "more closely aligned with the GOP than Trump". How would adding another have helped?

If you're talking about actually supporting the candidate for another party in that other party's primary, that's not the job of the RNC. What you're saying is the equivalent of arguing that the solution to the Yankee's having a hard time selling tickets cause their team lineup sucks is for the Yankee's management to promote the Met's lineup. Hey. They're closer than any other team, right? Um... Not going to happen. Now, the fans can choose to do this, just as the voters could choose to flip over to another party, but that's not the same thing. No one on the Yankee's staff will tell fans to do this, just as no one in "the GOP" will do this.



I'm not sure what you're advocating for here. In this context, who is "they", and what constitutes "working together". Be specific.



Yes. But that's because the Democrats, and the politicians who run on that platform (at least at the national level) are more of a "play ball" kind of mindset than the Republicans. They're more willing to toe the line for the good of the party, while Republicans care more about the principles they believe in. You're free to argue which is better. I'd argue that one produces better policy within the party, while the other produces better election outcomes for the party. We don't live in a perfect world.

Just making a minor correction. I've raised the same issue with Joph in the past, but it's also relevant here. Trump is most popular with people who are *not* part of the normal GOP voting base. One of the interesting bits of data about his support (collected before primary voting began, so not affected by any swing within the GOP itself), is that his highest support numbers were among self reported Republicans who were actually registered as Democrats. These were people presumably angry at their own party and looking for something different, thus identifying as Republicans, but not looking to a rank and file member, thus finding Trump to be a good fit. The original assessments of this data leaned towards this data showing him having a tough time in the primary, since his strongest support was among people least likely to vote in the GOP primary.

As I've pointed out several times in other threads though, voter turnout in the GOP primary has been massively higher than normal. One could make the argument that the wide field of rank and file GOP candidates magically generated a massive turnout. Or, one could argue that Trump managed to overcome the hurdle mentioned above by getting a whole boat load of people who would not normally show up and vote in the GOP primary to do so, and vote for him. And the numbers he's gotten seem to suggest this is a fair assessment. GOP primary numbers are about 160% of normal. Which means that 37.5% of the total primary voters are "new" voters (ok, not really, but close enough for an approximation). If a large portion of those voters are there to support Trump, then it means two things:

1. Trump is not so much popular with the GOP voting base, as he's swamped that base with new voters and created his own.

2. This has less to do with party and more to do with Trump himself. If Trump had decided to run as a Democrat, and brought the same number of new voters into the DEM primary, we might be talking about how Clinton just got Obama'd again.



Yeah. This election cycle will be "interesting", if nothing else.

+1

Edited, May 31st 2016 6:44pm by Demea