Chase the Young

 

The presidential nominee of the American Libertarian Party for the upcoming election is running on a platform of guns, drugs and gender wars.

One thing American voters do agree on is that they don't like always having to choose between just the two big parties: the Republicans in the red corner and the Democrats in the blue corner. Yet the third party candidates that do run historically have had little impact on elections.

Step forward, now, though Chase Oliver (39) who is bidding to appeal to both sides of the political divide, presenting himself as 'a gay gun owner from Tennessee'. Oliver began his political activism opposing the war in Irak.

He's the candidate of the Libertarian Party, which is the third largest party in the US and claims nearly a million members. By comparison the Greens have barely a quarter of that.

The party is in favor of small government and freedom of the individual, which leads them to be progressive on social issues and conservative on economics.

Policy recommendations for 2024 include :

 

• Immigration reform

• Eliminating student loans

• Expanding gun rights 

 

Early on in the campaign, Donald Trump attended the Libertarian National Convention hoping to win them over but the delegates were having none of it and he was soundly booed. Oliver himself took aim at Trump, stating the Former President was: "not a Libertarian" but "a war criminal".

Trump and the Libertarians made unlikely bedfellows anyway. Trump sought to outlaw abortion, the Libertarians to enable it. Trump indicated during his 2016 campaign that he favored leaving the issue of marijuana to the states and in office upheld laws prohibiting cannabis, even removing special protections for medical marijuana. By contrast Libertarians seek to legalise it nationwide. Trump sought to build a border wall and generally make immigration much more difficult while Oliver argued that the US should return to what he called an 'Ellis Island' style process, with a large processing site running medical and criminal checks in a matter of days.

On foreign policy, Oliver wants to dismantle NATO and as for the US's links to Israel, he wants the US to act against what he has called "the genocide" in Gaza. Rather cynically, Oliver told Politico that the party had identified this issue as a way to target the youth vote.

Oliver and the libertarians are hard to place on the traditional left-right spectrum. Just possibly they offend all sides! Their strategy seems to be to try to pick up disaffected voters such as those who flirted with the, now abandoned, Robert Kennedy Junior presidential bid or Democrats appalled by their party's military, diplomatic and financial entanglement in the ongoing slaughter of the Palestinians.

It is certainly desirable that there should be a wider political debate in the US, but the perennial objection to third party candidates is that they 'waste' votes with, for example, voters who like the Libertarian line on Gaza surely risking diverting support from the Democrats and handing swing states such as Michigan to the Republicans instead. Republican politicians whose support for Israel is even more vociferous and uncritical than that of the Democratic establishment.

Indeed, Oliver already has experience of tipping elections. When running as a candidate for the US senate in Georgia, despite having himself only two per cent of the vote, he forced the state into a run-off, resulting with the Republican favorite actually losing to the Democrat challenger.

 

All of which underlines that third party candidates can be very influential in deciding the outcomes of elections - even if they rarely get elected themselves.