Measured the way an economist would, the expected value of one ballot in a statewide race sits somewhere between negligible and comic. The odds that yours is the one that breaks a tie are worse than most of the lottery tickets sold at the gas station you pass on the way to your polling place. If you brought voting to a financial advisor as an investment strategy, he would gently suggest you do something more productive, like snipe hunting, or cutting off a few fingers.
I know this. You know this. Every consultant, pundit, and disingenuous politician who has ever told you this is the most important election of your lifetime knows this, which is part of why they scream it at the top of their lungs every insufferable election cycle.
And yet, I am here to ask, beg, even implore you to go out and vote Libertarian.
Voting is not an investment, it’s a contribution. And it is the cheapest contribution anyone in this movement will ever be asked to make.
Consider what we normally ask of people. We ask them to stand in a grocery store parking lot in February collecting signatures from strangers. We ask them to put their own name on a ballot knowing exactly what the odds are. We ask them to make donations to an organization that will often spend the money suing their state government for the distinguished privilege of ballot access. We ask y’all to give money and time, day in and day out, with little expectation of short-term returns, in pursuit of the most noble cause there is — Liberty. Against that list, “show up and fill in an oval” is a rounding error.
The Liberty movement is bigger than the Libertarian Party, and it should be. We have think tanks doing research, journalists exposing corrupt politicians, lawyers litigating, and several million Americans who want to be left alone and have no interest whatsoever in attending a meeting about it.
But the Libertarian Party is the movement’s political branch. We are the part that puts names on ballots and works to get them elected. Nobody else in this ecosystem is tasked with that work, and, if we stop, it doesn’t get done. Backing our candidates is not a courtesy we extend to the Party out of sentiment. It is the mechanism by which these ideas get a seat at the table where decisions are actually made.
Political movements that win at higher levels of office do not arrive fully formed. They compound. A state representative race this year becomes name recognition next year, becomes a county commission seat after that, becomes a credible congressional campaign the cycle after that. Every durable political movement in American history was built this way, almost always by people who lost first and kept going anyway.
That compounding runs on three inputs, volunteers, money, and votes. We talk about the first two constantly, because they require asking. The third we take for granted, treating it as nothing more than an output.
This is the wrong way to look at things. A vote total is the only part of a campaign that becomes a permanent public record — the citable, unarguable count of how many people in a given place were willing to be counted with us. The next candidate’s ballot access gets decided by that number. So does her press coverage. So does whether a television station decides she belongs on a debate stage.
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A vote total is the only part of a campaign that becomes a permanent public record — the unarguable count of how many people were willing to be counted with us. |
And those numbers have started to buy us things.
Every morning I spend part of my time reading media monitoring reports (one of the many benefits of being the National Party Communications Director). Here is what the past two weeks looked like.
In South Carolina, Kasie Whitener stood on a U.S. Senate debate stage on October 11 and spent her time answering the questions while the major-party candidates spent theirs arguing with each other. A single Greenville station named her across eight broadcasts. CNN discussed her race on national television.
In Arkansas, Colt Shelby debated a sitting governor on statewide television. Afterward, writers for The Arkadelphian announced they were supporting him.
In Indiana, Lauri Shillings shared a debate stage with every other ballot-qualified candidate for Secretary of State, and WTHR in Indianapolis built an entire segment around what the race means for keeping the Libertarian Party’s voice in the state.
In Ottawa, Ohio, Christopher Elder accepted an invitation to a candidate roundtable. The Republican incumbent was invited as well, but he couldn’t be bothered to show up for his job interview with the American people, so the Libertarian and the Democrat debated, while the man who holds the office stayed home. It turns out that the bar for being taken seriously is sometimes just clearing your calendar.
And on a commercial radio station in Buffalo, a host asked his listeners to name the one thing Republicans and Democrats in New York had managed to cooperate on. The answer was getting the Libertarian Party off the ballot. That wasn’t something we planted, it was just someone who noticed.
We are also becoming large enough to matter arithmetically (to assuage those economists out there). In Texas, the University of Houston’s Hobby School has the U.S. Senate race inside two points, with Libertarian Ted Brown at three.
In a race separated by a sliver, there is a bloc of voters larger than the sliver that has looked at both major parties and declined. People are abandoning the broken uniparty and choosing Liberty.
There is a lazy version of this argument, and I would be remiss not to mention it, as much as I despise it. The point is not that we can cost somebody an election. It is that we have become a constituency nobody can afford to talk past. When a bloc is bigger than the margin, both parties have to come and get it, and coming to get it means engaging with what we actually care about. That’s earning a seat by advancing our candidates and our ideas — the polar opposite of “spoiling an election.”
Which brings me to the most useful thing I have read all month.
In a Fox News poll taken October 9 – 12, nearly nine in ten voters said they were extremely or very concerned about corruption in government. That puts corruption ahead of inflation and the cost of living, which came in at 85 percent. In August, Change Research found 40 percent of voters naming corruption among their three most important issues — more than any other issue tested, and up six points since February.
The number one concern in America right now is that the government is corrupt.
Of all the issues that could have risen to the top, this is the one the two major parties are least able to do anything about. They cannot campaign against the machine. They built it, they maintain it, and they are the ones it pays. They are the corruption. We are the antidote. Not because Libertarians are better people — we are, in fact, people, imperfect as any other — but because we are standing outside the arrangement, and we have been describing it accurately for fifty years.
When we say ballot access laws are written by incumbents to protect incumbents, we aren’t being hyperbolic. If anything we are understating it, when we should be shouting about how corrupt and anti-American the uniparty’s gatekeeping really is. That is the corruption issue that has captured voter concerns.
When we say debate stages are controlled by corporations and commissions accountable to no voter, that is the corruption issue. When we say Congress wrote itself a stock-trading rule that conveniently lets members keep the stock they already own, that is the corruption issue. And when we say a government big enough to hand out that much money will always attract the people who want it, that is the corruption issue, one that voters are finally starting to get.
Our candidates are not adapting to this moment. They have been at the vanguard the entire time, waiting for everyone else to show up.
Your vote is not going to decide this election. It is going to do something slower and more durable. It is going to put a number on the board, a number that the next Libertarian who considers running sees, a number that an elected official takes into account when making policy, and a number that convinces voters it is worth checking the box with the “L” next to it when they are back in the polling booth.
This doesn’t happen overnight. It took 250-ish years to get where we are. The last time this country changed dramatically in favor of Liberty, it took more than eight years of war, costing nearly 1 percent of the population. I would prefer alternative pathways to freedom over violent revolution, and I am willing to bet most everyone agrees.
So, vote the Libertarian line on November 3, all the way down the ballot. Yes, it’s a small piece, but it is a real piece of the movement we are building.
Rob Yates is the Communications Director for the Libertarian Party.