Gary Johnson and Evan McMullin Ought To Collaborate

In order to make sure the 2016 U.S. presidential election goes into the House of Representatives and consequently somebody better than Donald Trump (a lecherous authoritarian oaf who isn't the great businessman his supporters think) or Hillary Clinton (who will tilt the Supreme Court leftward, is opposed to gun rights, will empower the "illiberal left", and may get the US into more confrontations abroad) becomes president, the two most significant third-party candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson and #NeverTrump Republicans' unofficial nominee Evan McMullin, should enter into a vote-sharing arrangement.

This idea is not my own. Casey Cho, an online pen-pal whom you can follow on Twitter here, suggested that Johnson and McMullin enter into an arrangement to maximize each others' chances of winning electoral votes and pushing the election into the House. 

To that end, Gary Johnson voters should support McMullin in Utah and other states in the "Mormon cultural sphere" (Casey said Idaho and Wyoming) and McMullin supporters should vote for Johnson everywhere else. This would be especially crucial in New Mexico, where Johnson was a popular governor and where people are predicting he could get an upset victory. I'm not basing my position on one news story--here's another source citing Republicans defecting to Johnson in the aftermath of Trump's "Grope-Gate."

Why, do you ask? According to the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, if no candidate gets a certain number of electoral votes (270 in this election), the contest goes to the House of Representatives. Congress will then pick from the top three electoral vote earners. This has not happened since 1824's infamous "Corrupt Bargain" election. No third-party candidate has won any states since 1968, so this has never been a realistic possibility, even though Ross Perot pulled nearly 20% in 1992.

Until now.

Before McMullin entered, I assumed that #NeverTrump Republicans would support Johnson by default. In one poll, in one district in Utah, Johnson was tied with Clinton and Trump, so the possibility he could get electoral votes in Utah (historically Republican, but owing to conservative Mormons not likely to support the libertine Donald Trump) and push a close election into the House was a very real possibility. 

However, McMullin, a Mormon himself and more palatable than the pro-choice pro-legalization-of-drugs Johnson to Utah's Mormon majority, came in. Now McMullin is polling 22% in Utah, just 4% behind the tied Trump and Clinton, while Johnson is polling at 14%. This article claims McMullin is in a statistical tie with the Big Two. If even half of Johnson's supporters in Utah vote McMullin, that could be enough to push him over the top and secure Utah's six electoral votes. Trump may yet collapse further to McMullin's benefit, but given the reality's of America's electoral system, this is the easiest way.

McMullin doesn't appear to be a significant factor in New Mexico and Johnson, depending on the polls, is as few as four points behind Trump and Clinton and as many as 14, in order for Johnson to push ahead of the Big Two, all hands will need to be on deck for him and every little bit will help.

Depending on how the states break down November 8, a McMullin victory in Utah and a Johnson victory in New Mexico alone might push the election into the House. In that case, McMullin will be the third candidate, not Johnson (Utah has six electoral votes, New Mexico five), but depending on how badly Trump implodes and how much damage Wikileaks does to Clinton, there might be more states in play.

Still, Johnson can't win Utah at this point and McMullin sure as heck can't win New Mexico. Working together is the only way I can think of that they can win electoral votes and (potentially) stop Trump and Clinton.

So make this go viral. Make Mr. Johnson and Mr. McMullin take notice of it. We can still save the Republic.

The Gary Johnson Campaign: Media Buys or Consultants?

I promised one of my readers just before the election that I would do a blog post citing some links he found about how Gary Johnson's 2012 Libertarian campaign and how Jill Stein's 2012 Green campaign spent their money. During a discussion on Facebook, he posted these links showing that the Johnson campaign spent very little on advertising and a great deal on administration and consultants, while the Stein campaign spent a significantly larger percentage of its money (and more in absolute terms) on advertising. The breakdown as to what money went where is even more damning, with Stein's largest expenditures being media buys and Johnson's being various advisers.

What the heck? The Libertarian Party, although it's got the best ballot access of all the third parties, still suffers from the popular image that it's a party focused on legalizing drugs. When I was in high school, a friend of mine gave me a photo showing the three parties as cartoon characters, with the Democrats as a donkey carrying a board with a nail in it, the Republicans as big, burly elephant, and the Libertarians as a pot leaf with an assault rifle. Humorous as that was, the Libertarian Party is not going to get any traction if it's viewed as the party of stoners and gun fanatics. I'm not saying the campaign wouldn't need consultants and advisers, but when they eat up money that could be spent on, well, getting out the vote, there's a problem.

I do recall seeing a Gary Johnson advertisement on YouTube about how he was the only candidate who did not want to start a war with Iran, but when I searched YouTube for Gary Johnson advertisements, that was all I found other than an ad for Ron Paul and Gary Johnson that was around four years old. Meanwhile, I found several Jill Stein advertisements that got a lot more YouTube hits.

Of course, the obvious response is that Johnson ran one of the most successful Libertarian campaigns in history, getting one million votes and one percent of the popular vote. Jill Stein's results were much less impressive.

However, imagine how much more successful Johnson could have been if he spent more money on advertising. He could have gotten his name out there as the civil-liberties candidate, in contrast to both Obama and Romney. Although Romney could have used "the president can make you disappear" as a hammer to beat Obama with, he basically said both he and Obama can be trusted not to abuse this power and said U.S. citizens who join al-Qaeda are not entitled to due process because that's treason.

(Never mind the Constitution has specific provisions dealing with treason, but that's a different matter.)

Johnson could have also piggybacked on the successful marijuana-legalization initiatives in both Colorado and Washington. Given how Romney and Obama are both opponents of marijuana legalization, even in limited medical circumstances, promising not to interfere with state-level drug policy would have been a way to gain support from the voters who made marijuana legal. Given how Colorado Democrats feared Johnson would take enough votes to push Colorado to Romney, that was a MAJOR missed opportunity.

I did not hope Johnson could win the election outright, but I was hoping he'd be a spoiler in enough states that it might force the election to the House of Representatives. Colorado would not have been enough to do this in and of itself, but it might have been part of a larger strategy.

2012 was a massive missed opportunity. Who knows if another such opportunity will come again?

Gary Johnson: What I Like

The other day, I said I would post what I did like about Gary Johnson, the presidential candidate I did vote for, rather than what I didn't like about Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

It took longer than I intended, but as Horton the Elephant said, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant." So here goes...

*Civil Liberties-This is the absolute biggie. Our nation, from its very beginning, has emphasized the personal freedom of its citizens. In the aftermath of 9/11, various "anti-terrorist" measures jeopardized those freedoms our Founding Fathers fought so hard to attain, freedoms protected and expanded by the hard work and sacrifice of those who came later. The federal government has used its police powers to demand library reading records without a judicial warrant and detained an American citizen without trial. Although some of the most dangerous provisions have been recently struck down, others remain in place and the parts that were ruled unconstitutional might still return, as the Obama Administration has appealed. Johnson said he would not have signed the Patriot Act and the later National Defense Authorization Act that have threatened American liberties.

What good is defeating the Islamists of al-Qaeda whose demands go beyond the U.S. not having bases in the land of Mecca and Medina, all the way to demanding we convert to Islam and abolish separation of church and state if we end up becoming a police state at home?

*Free Trade-At different points in the past, I have praised Obama for supporting free-trade agreements with other nations like South Korea, Panama, and Colombia. I read a book in high school entitled The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression about the Great Depression and how tariff walls and despotic autarkic regimes like the fascists and Nazis made things worse. There's an adage, "If goods don't cross borders, armies will" and although that doesn't always hold true (people thought the First World War was impossible due to intra-European trading relationships), economic integration has contributed to the cooling of tensions between the United States and China that led to war scares in the late 1990s and things like the capture of a U.S. spy plane by the Chinese early in the Bush presidency. Johnson has strongly committed to free trade.

*Foreign Policy-To be perfectly blunt, war sucks. War is evil. War is dead men (and women), or mangled men and women whose lives will be diminished forever afterward. War is broken families. War is burned houses and cities. War destroys rather than creates. I shed no tears for Saddam Hussein and his two evil sons, but the cost to the United States of the Iraq adventure has been enormous, in terms of money, lives, and America's strategic position.

I am not so naive as to believe the outcome of beating our swords into plowshares will lead to anything but us plowing for those who don't, but that doesn't mean we should go looking for trouble. Bin Laden is dead and the Cold War is over and an interventionist foreign policy is something we are increasingly unable to afford.  It's time to re-evaluate our foreign policy priorities. Full-blown withdrawal from everywhere in the world is not practical--for starters, the U.S. Navy guarantees freedom of the seas for all countries--but there are plenty of areas where cuts can be made that leave us strong enough to deal with legitimate threats. Gary Johnson has explicitly stated he is not interested in picking a fight with Iran, which could turn into a bloodbath and strategic disaster.

*The War on Drugs-Let the record state I do not use any recreational pharmaceuticals. In fact, I do not even drink alcohol or coffee. However, the Drug War has jeopardized Americans' freedoms in various ways (asset forfeiture abuses are a biggie) and cost vast amounts of money. Drug arrests often set otherwise-harmless people on the road to becoming hard-core criminals. Prohibition of alcohol failed; why would doing the same for, say, marijuana, be any better? Johnson has advocated legalizing, regulating, and taxing currently-illegal narcotics. Legalizing and taxing marijuana would save billions of dollars and generate billions more in tax revenue.

I could post some more, but I have some more urgent projects I need to work on. Don't forget to vote tomorrow, or today if the lines aren't too long.