LAS VEGAS: The narrow margins that separated the president of the United States. Donald trump Rival Democrat Joe Biden in several swing states raised the question: Was the Republican incumbent hurt by the libertarian candidate’s third-party race? Jo jorgensen?
At noon on Friday, the vote gap between Biden and Trump in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona was less than the number of votes Jorgensen won in those states. In Nevada Y Wisconsin, Jorgensen’s total plus the number he selected “none of the above” exceeded the gap.
Jorgensen said in a phone interview Friday that Trump played the spoiler role, pushing disgruntled Republicans in his own way. He added that he also heard from many disgruntled Democrats in the election campaign.
“They were their own saboteurs, failing to deliver on their campaign promises,” Jorgensen said.
She had a particular criticism for Trump, who said he sold himself in 2016 as “a political outsider who knew how to balance the budget and cut the deficit, and he didn’t do either.”
Jorgensen criticized the political establishment for not allowing him to participate in presidential debates.
She argued that libertarians rely on the best that the Republican and Democratic platforms have to offer: fiscal restraint on the one hand, social freedom on the other. If a deeply divided electorate could be more exposed to that, more voters would have voted for her, she said.
‘We do not know’
It’s tempting to assume that Jorgensen’s votes were at Trump’s expense, given past alliances between conservative Republicans and some libertarians, not to mention that the president recently said it was considered “somewhat libertarian.”
But most analysts said that is not the case.
“We just don’t know what would have happened if libertarians hadn’t come up with a candidate,” said David Boaz of the Cato Institute, author of books on the movement. “Libertarians also get votes from people who just wouldn’t bother to vote if they had no other choice.”
There is disagreement over which of the two major parties receives a greater impact when a libertarian is in the race. Boaz pointed to a 2016 CBS exit poll that showed that 25% of libertarians who voted that year would have supported Democrat Hillary Clinton had there not been a libertarian candidate. For Trump that figure was 15%, while 55% said they would not have voted.
Kenneth Mayer, professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin, said about Jorgenson: “She may have played a role, but there is no way of knowing and it does not matter. The results of the election are the results of the election,” he said.
Mayer said that rarely in American politics has a third-party candidate made any difference. One notable exception was that Ralph Nader got more than 97,000 votes in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, when George W. Bush won the state by just 537 votes. If the votes of a third-party candidate dwarf the electoral margins of the winner, then it matters, he said.
And that, Mayer and Boaz said, was definitely not the case this year.
John Vaught LaBeaume, a libertarian political strategist who worked on the 2016 campaign of the libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, said that most libertarian voters simply would not vote for a Democratic or Republican candidate.
Some libertarian voters agree.
Morgan Thompson, a 39-year-old private detective in Waukesha, Wisconsin, said it enthusiastically voted for Jorgensen due to the “further radicalization” of the two major parties.
If no libertarian candidate had been on the Wisconsin ballot, Thompson said he would have submitted a blank ballot.
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