Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
The Libertarian Party has seen a sustained surge of new members joining, with first-time registrants in May on pace to increase 20-fold over the same period from last year. New data obtained by The Hill shows that the Libertarian National Committee averaged around 100 new members a month last year, bottoming out with just 74 first-time registrants last May.
But beginning in early 2016, as the contours of the Republican and Democratic races began took shape, new membership began creeping upward to 148 in January, 323 in February, 546 in March, 706 in April, and now 1,292 in the first three weeks of May alone.
– From the post: May Registrations for the Libertarian Party Jump 20-Fold
I’m 38 years old and I haven’t had a decent choice for President from the two major political parties my entire life. In fact, it keeps getting worse and worse, particularly when it comes to civil liberties and belief in Constitutional government. Indeed, it seems all U.S. presidential candidates care about is getting their rear ends on the throne so they can do as they please.
On the positive front, it appears people are finally waking up. A recent poll showed that 55% of voters want an independent option in the 2016 election. Politico reports:
Either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is likely to be elected president in November, but voters are yearning for another option.
Both candidates, however, have high unfavorability ratings — 56 percent for Clinton and 55 percent for Trump, and nearly six in 10 voters surveyed are dissatisfied with the option of choosing between just Clinton and Trump in November.
Fifty-five percent favor having an independent candidate challenge the Democratic front-runner and presumptive Republican nominee for president. An unprecedented 91 percent of voters 28 or younger favor having an independent on the ballot, and 65 percent of respondents are willing to support a candidate who isn’t Clinton or Trump.
According to Data Targeting’s ballot test, an independent candidate would start off with 21 percent of the vote.
As it currently stands, there are already two intriguing third party candidates running in 2016 with reasonable ballot access: Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party. They are starting to be included in more polls, and the results can be very interesting.
For example, The Hill reports:
Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson leads presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton among self-identified independents, a new poll finds.
A Fox News survey released Thursday found Clinton leading overall with 39 percent support, followed by Donald Trump at 36 percent and Johnson at 12 percent.
But among independents, Trump leads, at 32 percent, followed by Johnson, at 23, and Clinton, at 22.
It’s the latest sign of early polling strength from Johnson, who many believe is poised for the best showing from a third-party candidate in decades.
The former New Mexico governor has been on a media blitz and urging pollsters to include him in their surveys.
The Presidential Debates Commission requires candidates poll at 15 percent in five polls leading up to the debates to qualify, but many pollsters only survey the two major party candidates.
In polls that have included Johnson recently, he’s landed in the 10 to 12 percent range — well within striking distance of where he needs to be to qualify.
Johnson told The Hill recently that he believes his polling numbers will go up once Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders drops out of the race.
The Fox News survey found Johnson taking 8 percent support from Democrats — better than Trump’s 7 percent support. Trump has similarly made an appeal to Sanders supporters.
Among Republicans, Johnson takes 11 percent, compared to only 6 percent for Clinton. The former secretary of State has talked about reaching out to members of the GOP who say they can never support Trump.
This is the part where people start to lecturing third party supporters about how they are “throwing away their vote,” or acting as “spoilers.” Fortunately, Ralph Nader addressed such nonsensical propaganda in a recent article.
Here are a few excerpts from the piece, There’s No Such Thing as a Political ‘Spoiler’:
The season for political exclusivity is upon us. Cries for Bernie Sanders to drop out for the benefit of the establishment Democrats’ nominee — Hillary Clinton— are rapidly increasing. In the close states, those same Democrats soon will be telling the Green Party and its probable nominee — Jill Stein — to get lost, calling a vote for Stein a vote for Donald Trump. Their counterpart Republicans will be giving the Libertarian Party and its nominee, Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, similar treatment.
In this season, the politically bigoted word on everyone’s lips is “spoiler,” which is rather bold if you pause to consider that the two-party tyranny is spoiled to the core and not just with quid pro quo campaign contributions. The name-callers do not expect to be charged with being anti-choice. Don’t we know that “no candidate is perfect,” and surely we’ve seen how bad the other party’s candidate is? Don’t we know that politics is all about pragmatism, and only one of the two major party nominees can win? This is no time, they say, for voters to let their moral compasses guide them.
I reject this logic. The least-worst choices are getting worse every four years, and the insiders only exacerbate the problem by trying to defang the third-party competition. So long as there’s no robust challenge to the duopoly, there’s no reason for insiders to improve. Pragmatism is just another name for electoral extortion.
Most voters support this view. Polls show a consistently low approval rating for the two parties and for members of Congress. Nearly 60%, according to many surveys, want a viable third party. And yet the voters often swallow the argument that they have no choice because they understand that the fix is in.
Let’s examine how the duopolists try to keep so-called spoilers out of competition.
Starting at the beginning of the process: They’ve enacted state laws that make it exceedingly difficult for outsiders to even get on the ballot. In California, would-be third-party candidates must submit valid signatures of at least 1% of registered voters (roughly 177,000) 88 days prior to an election. But that’s just the technical requirement; practically speaking, it’s necessary to submit roughly twice that because state officials jettison so many names.
If an outsider does manage to get on the ballot, he or she can expect to face a legal challenge. Indeed, Democrats and Republicans have filed many frivolous lawsuits, often before selected partisan judges, to get third-party candidates off the ballot. Regardless of whether these suits succeed, they inevitably drain time and resources.
The next impediment is the debate stage. In 1987, the two major parties created a commercially funded private corporation, called the Commission on Presidential Debates, which keeps away competition by setting a nearly impossible barrier to entry: at least 15% in the national polls.
We seem to have forgotten that third parties have historically served a vital purpose. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, third parties led the way in the abolition of slavery, the women’s suffrage movements and protections for farmers, workers and consumers. These parties did not go on to win national elections, but they didn’t “spoil” anything — they introduced many reforms that eventually entered the mainstream.
What would happen if small business was not allowed to compete? Economic stagnation from the absence of better goods and services. Because small parties cannot compete, we’re witnessing ideological and political stagnation.
Flawless as usual Ralph. Now let’s make sure we get both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein in the polls and then in the debates.
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