Reason blog has this article about Congressman Justin Amash and the idea that he might seek the 2020 Libertarian presidential nomination.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
Reason blog has this article about Congressman Justin Amash and the idea that he might seek the 2020 Libertarian presidential nomination.
HACKS IN MICH REGIME PLOTTING TO WIPE OUT THE JA GERRYMANDER DISTRICT ???
If he does end up running and winning the Libertarian nomination, the Libertarian Party would have an excellent shot at getting 5% of the vote. Amash is well known for being one of the few members of Congress that has integrity and is a halfway decent human being.
“If he does end up running and winning the Libertarian nomination, the Libertarian Party would have an excellent shot at getting 5% of the vote. ”
Not really. Results for Ron Paul 1988, Bob Barr and Cynthia McKinney 2008 and Virgil Goode in 2012 indicate US House member is just not high up enough to improve third party presidential results significantly. Without looking it up, how many members of the US House from other states who are not in congressional leadership can you name? How many can your neighbors name?
Also, 2020 is going to be a very polarizing presidential election – whether they are for him or against him, people have very strong feelings on whether Trump should stay in office or not, more so even than past Democrats and Republicans. As such, the pressure on anyone mulling a non-duopoly vote will be even stronger than usual. Sadly, Amash as the LP nominee would get the party back under 1%, and it’s unlikely that any other nominee would get them above it next year…but if anyone will, it won’t be a US House crossover, at least not unless he or she taps a megawealthy and megagenerous VP candidate.
Amash would be running as a sitting Congressman, not a former Congressman and certainly not one like McKinney or Goode who had been defeated for re-election. A closer parallel would be John Anderson in 1980. Anderson received 6.6%.
Anderson made waves in the Republican primary first before running as an independent. He had the benefit of primary debates with leading candidates for the Republican nomination and general election debates with the major party nominees. Presidential campaign spending in those days was a couple of orders of magnitude less than it is now. Since that time, the COPD (Commission on Presidential Debates) has been set up to enforce discriminatory polling criteria with the goal of keeping non-duopoly voices out of main stage general election presidential debates.
Then, starting in 2012, states and courts began to ignore Anderson’s legal precedents and enforce sore loser laws against candidates who appear in primaries and later run outside the duopoly. Ballot access deadlines have been moving earlier as well.
Amash wouldn’t get to debate Trump in the primary, nor would he get to debate Trump or the Democratic nominee in the general election. If he runs in the primary against Trump, states will keep him off the general election ballot if he then switches to the Libertarians. If he runs as a Libertarian from the get go, he won’t get the exposure that he might hope would come with running in the primary.
Thus, the other members of congress mentioned earlier are a closer parallel than Anderson in the ways that actually matter. Sure, Amash is still in congress, but to 99% of voters he is an obscure back bencher from a state they don’t live in. He may as well be one of the long time minor party activists currently announced for the third party nominations as far as any but the political geek voter knows or cares about him.
When was the last time anyone went straight from US House to President? Off hand I think it was the 19th century, but maybe I’m forgetting someone in the early 20th.
Amash won’t seek the GOP nomination. The discussion is about the possibility that he would seek the LP nomination. You contended above that he would not be able to break 1% but in this last post you move the goal post to questioning the last sitting Congressman to win the presidency(Garfield).
The question for Amash is where he has the most potential to make an impact. Is it with one more term in Congress before getting gerrymandered out or is it as the LP nominee? Considering that he would be a sitting member of Congress and would be following the most successful Libertarian presidential campaign ever and would be running against a GOP incumbent with very high negatives while the Democrats seem unlikely to try to nominate a candidate designed to appeal outside their base it seems to me that there is a lot of potential.
what a waste of talent … his legacy will be a small asterisk in the political history books … yawn
I would prefer Rep. Amash remain in Congress and fight like hell to win in a new district if he is gerrymandered out of his current one. He can certainly do more good for the libertarian movement to serve as a counter weight to Rep. Alexandria Ocassio-Cortez. If he does ultimately decide to seek the LP nomination I just hope he puts a hardcore philosophical libertarian on the ticket with him like Jacob Hornberger if Mr. Hornberger would agree.
I haven’t moved the goalpost. I stand by the prediction he would get less than 1% as the LP nominee, unless he gets a billionaire VP candidate who wants to spend a lot of personal money a la LP 1980 (and then they still got only right around 1%). It’s actually harder now since the spending by the two biggest parties has gone up so high in the stratosphere; Koch dropped the equivalent of $10 million in today’s dollars on the 1980 race, iirc, but that would be a blip on the radar compared to what candidates Trump and HRC spend these days.
The point of asking when someone last went from US House directly to president was whether average, non libertarian voters would be impressed that the LP would be running a member of the US House. Recent past results indicate they would not be. Someone whose resume is “business owner” may actually be just as good or better as far as that goes.
“The question for Amash is where he has the most potential to make an impact. Is it with one more term in Congress before getting gerrymandered out or is it as the LP nominee?”
Sadly, neither. Since he has been in congress, he proposed one bill that has passed, to rename a post office. He hasn’t cast the deciding vote any time that I know of, and even if he has, it has been very, very rarely. He does get to cast a few symbolic lonely no votes and make a speech here and there. As the LP nominee, he would be running out on a paddleboard against two hundred foot waves that are going to crash into each other. I wish him all the luck in the world but will be astounded if he makes much of an impact on that race.
“following the most successful Libertarian presidential campaign ever…”
That didn’t help Pat Buchanan much as the Reform Party nominee in 2000 following Perot in 1996, and Buchanan was a household name with several million dollars in federal election welfare and lots of media coverage. It didn’t help David Cobb much as the Green Party nominee in 2004 following Nader’s 2000 run, although granted Nader was still running as an independent in 2004 – but neither of them alone or combined did nearly as well as Nader in 2000.
“running against a GOP incumbent with very high negatives while the Democrats seem unlikely to try to nominate a candidate designed to appeal outside their base”
Both will have high negatives, thus both Ds and Rs will be attacking anyone even expressing a little interest in voting for a third or fourth option even more than usual. This is why top of the ticket third party votes were down in percentage terms in the 2018 midterms. That same dynamic will continue to play out and intensify in 2020.
Oops! That’s Ocasio-Cortez.
Minor party candidates should be seeking to shake loose the disenfranchised unmotivated voters. Their “silent majority” so to speak. Trying to carve up the existing pie of voters isn’t working for anyone. This is where unique ideas become important.
The LP should be looking for a candidate who espouses ideas that nobody IN ANY OTHER PARTY is talking about. What are the issues that the LP champions which none of the other parties do? And I’m not talking about issues where the Libertarians think they are just better than the others. What are LP issues which Republicans, Dems, Greens, and Constitution parties refuse to address?
Whichever candidate is best on those should be their presidential nominee.
FYI, only James Garfield was a Representative immediately before election as President. And yes, I had to look it up.
“The LP should be looking for a candidate who espouses ideas that nobody IN ANY OTHER PARTY is talking about.” – Jeff Becker
Arvin Vohra?
@ Casual – I am not a Libertarian, so am unfamiliar with the individual candidates. But, I will clarify my statement that the unique issues should be in line with the party’s principles and be reasonable and feasible. Vermin Supreme’s free ponies and zombie hamster wheel ideas, while certainly unique, would obviously not apply.
The politics1.com website has twenty five (25) declared Libertarian presidential candidates listed:
Dan Behrman (Texas)
M.E. Sergeant Cook Jr. (California)
Kyler DePriest (Wyoming)
Heather Horst (Nebraska)
William Hurst (Alabama)
Cecil Ince (Missouri)
Zoltan Istvan (California)
Adam Kokesh (Indiana)
Ben Leder (Texas)
Ben Layton (Utah)
Kip Lee (California)
Donald Eugene Lowe (Texas)
John McAfee (Tennessee)
Jason Peach (Utah)
Derrick Michael Reid (California)
Sam Robb (Pennsylvania)
Kim Ruff (Arizona)
Sandra Salas (Pennsylvania)
Mark Spivey (New York)
Leonard Sportsinterviews (Wyoming)
Vermin Supreme (Maryland)
Arvin Vohra (Maryland)
Christopher Weaver (Florida)
Krista Whipple (Colorado)
Terry Wilkerson (Pennsylvania)
ALL elected exec/judic offices should be NON-partisan via AppV – pending Condorcet.
Uniform definition of Elector-Voter in ALL of USA — USA Citizen, 18 + years olde — PERIOD
— repeal all the negative stuff — 14-2, 15, 19, 24, 26.
“Vermin Supreme’s free ponies and zombie hamster wheel ideas, while certainly unique, would obviously not apply.”
That’s the satirist in Vermin Supreme. He has a less well known serious side, and he uses his humor to make a point. “Free Ponies” is a parody of politicians who promise voters “free stuff.” Mandatory tooth brushing is all about making fun of the excesses of the nanny state, overregulation and excessive safety obsession (mandatory seat belts may have seemed just as ridiculous to many until they actually became laws). “Zombies” are the boogeymen “serious” politicians scare us with – criminals, drug dealers, terrorists, immigrants, etc. And so on.
If you think about it, the serious point his performance art makes is very much in line with Libertarian ideas. But, you don’t get to make any serious point if few people even notice you at all, and ridicule is more than deserved by the entire political system and the politicians who typically succeed in it.
For example, here is a Supreme send-up of Trump’s wall:
http://www.freeponyexpress.com/build-the-bubble/
With present ballot access censorship laws, the LP could nominate candidates with the celebrity of Albert Einstein and Elvis Presley and still have a slim chance to win any Presidential Elector votes. Even if they did send the election to the U S House of Representatives, they would still be dead on arrival to both Democratic and Republican Representatives voting by the Unit Rule.
The LP has got to get over this obsession with the political box canyon of Presidential politics. The candidates taken on lend-lease from the Republican Party know their candidacy is a zero threat to the duopoly.
The future for the LP, if they choose to pursue it, lies in candidates for state legislatures and the Congress.
@ Bill – I just want to see Vermin glitter bomb Austin Peterson at the party’s debates. Poor ol’ Austin. He hasn’t declared yet. Will he?
He may have taken too many turns through the Libertarian to Republican and back turnstile to have credibility with enough delegates, but we’ll see. Some candidates, including successful ones, don’t declare at this point (more than a year before the convention). Some even declare *at* the national convention. Besides, Petersen has already acknowledged that Vermin is his Supreme being. See details embedded within the post at http://www.freeponyexpress.com/original-libertarian-governor-bill-weld-endorses-vermin-supreme-for-libertarian-nominee-for-president/
“The future for the LP, if they choose to pursue it, lies in candidates for state legislatures and the Congress.”
Or sheriff, county commissioner, constable, city council, mayor etc. No dogcatcher though – contrary to stereotype none of those are elected.
Yep, get another Republican reject. That’ll win an election.
Is the party that desperate? Wait, yes they are.
Amash is going to get pushed out of his seat if he tries to stay in Congress. His best bet is to totally dedicate himself to the LP and win the nomination. Then he runs a solid LP campaign. He can probably get the nomination 2 or 3 times and be the recognized leader of the Libertarian movement. He can make a solid living selling various books and media properties and get a niche for himself in American politics.
There is about zero chance of a Grand Rapids district being eliminated.
JR —
gerrymanders inside each State = slice and dice
As I understand the potential gerrymander Grand Rapids certainly does NOT lose a district but another GOP Representative who is in “favor” with the GOP establishment will have his district pick up much of heavily the Republican portion of Amash’s district leaving him in the unenviable position of running against another GOP incumbent in a primary or taking his chances at a new district that much less GOP friendly.
“Adam Kokesh (Indiana)”
Since when is Adam Kokesh from Indiana? He currently lives in Arizona. He was born in California, and primarily raised in New Mexico. I don’t think he’s ever resided in Indiana.
The point of the Libertarian Presidential Nominee isn’t to win. It’s to get at least 5% of the popular vote and get automatic ballot access in as many states as possible, making it easier for Libertarians to run successful local and state campaigns.
Ballot access is a major hurdle for every candidate outside of the establishment, so getting automatic ballot access is essential. It means local candidates don’t have to spend a significant amount of time and resources just to hopefully get on the ballot. They can then spend every dime on winning their race, being more competitive with their establishment opponents.