That’s a question I see a lot of liberals asking on social media. The gist of the query was probably best summarized by celebrity George Takei on Twitter September 24: “Libertarian Johnson supports TPP, fracking, Citizens United, and no min wage. How any Sanders supporters could back him is baffling to me. ”
Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee, has gotten a lot more attention than most third-party candidates, often for the wrong reasons. But while never having much of a chance, Johnson cannot seem to be killed. Even despite his own best efforts. I had thought that this means that Johnson has learned from Donald Trump that any publicity is good publicity. But I have also said that the primary lesson of the Trump campaign is that voters will lean toward you if they identify with your own ignorance. It seems that others agree. The Christian Science Monitor had a recent article citing the polls on Johnson’s foreign policy gaffes.
“It isn’t that foreign policy doesn’t matter to young voters, although older people do place slightly more importance on it. … But the young also tend to view foreign policy differently. A 2015 study by the libertarian Cato Institute concluded that Millennials – defined here as those born between 1980 and 1997 – see the world as “significantly less threatening than their elders,” and policies drawn up to deal with foreign threats as less urgent. They’re also more supportive of international cooperation, and far less keen on the use of military force, the report found. Both major candidates are considerably more hawkish than this standard. In comparison, Johnson’s floundering on foreign policy questions might seem relatively benign. ”
Indeed, his polls don’t seem to be going down. The same article says, “The lapse didn’t hurt him in the polls: for months, about 7 or 8 percent of likely voters have said they would support him. His peak, of just over 9 percent? According to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, it came from Sept 8-14: the days immediately following the first incident.”
And more than that: On September 27, Johnson was endorsed by the Detroit News. This was followed two days later by his most prominent newspaper endorsement to date, when the Chicago Tribune officially endorsed Johnson for president.
In context, what makes these endorsements that much more remarkable is that they were issued AFTER Gary Johnson started having his “Aleppo moments.”
I direct the reader to the Tribune article, because it’s one of the better opinion columns I’ve read on this subject and the 2016 campaign in general. It goes over why (despite his problems) Gary Johnson is a serious and qualified candidate for President, and why Clinton, despite her obvious superiority to Trump, has too many problems to endorse, addressing much the same points that I did earlier, but in much greater journalistic detail.
I’m sure these editors, like the rest of us, are perfectly aware that “third” parties don’t win elections, at least for president, because to get Electoral College votes you need to win at least one state, and third parties don’t have enough votes to do that (without effectively supplanting one of the other ruling parties) and they certainly don’t have those votes this year. Knowing that, and knowing that other conservative papers have endorsed Clinton, I take these endorsements to be a “no confidence vote” in our political system from a center-to-Right community that is not “with Hillary” and also recognizes that the Republican Party, at least currently, is too broken to fix.
What then of all those lefty “progressive” Millennials who supposedly should be voting for Clinton? Why are they looking at the “neoliberal”, pro-market, pro-privatization Gary Johnson and preferring him to Hillary Clinton or even Jill Stein? It’s actually a good question.
Because if I were a “progressive”, I’d probably follow the logic of Bernie Sanders: Run for the Democratic Party nomination on the premise that they are a more effective vehicle for my ideas than the Green Party or an independent run, and if I win the nomination (unlikely given my lack of network in the party), that’s great and I can move on to the general election. If I don’t win (likely because of the structure of the party) I can still use my support base to agitate for reform of the convention platform- and at that point, I will endorse the eventual nominee on the premise that she now IS the most effective vehicle for my ideas.
Of course I’m not a progressive, but broadly speaking, the Democrats have done a fair job adapting to that community, to the extent that the party has experienced less internal dissent than the Republicans with their civil war of Tea Partiers versus “Republicans In Name Only”. But a lot of leftists do remember that Bill and Hillary Clinton didn’t seriously endorse gay marriage until after the Obama Administration did. With the Affordable Care Act, there were several opportunities to make the final project more “progressive” and closer to single-payer (like the public option) than the corporatist project that the ACA became. And the main reason it had to be compromised down was not to win Republicans, who were already a bloc against any Obama legislation but were not yet a majority, but moderate (often pro-corporate) Democrats. Not only that, Senator Barack Obama had promised as a candidate to roll back the security state that George W. Bush and Congress had created in the wake of 9-11, and his record in that area has been uneven at best. And if a young and woke Barack Obama has proved disappointing by “progressive” standards, they won’t be much more enthused by Hillary, who as Senator voted for an Iraq invasion that Senator Obama opposed.
It’s pretty clear that just from the standpoint of not making things worse, a center-to-Left voter ought not to choose Trump, or even to abstain from voting Clinton if she is the most realistic way of stopping Trump. But on economic issues at least, a lot of voters are seeing “progress” only in drips and drops, often despite and not because of the Democratic Party. This is why a lot of them supported Bernie Sanders in the first place. And the way that ended up is part of why they still don’t trust Clinton.
During the Clinton-Sanders run to the Democratic Party nomination, Clinton ended up winning a majority of states without counting superdelegates, although there were several states where results were close enough and tabulations were vague enough that the outcome was in doubt, and Sanders voters felt the need to investigate. The state of Nevada was the most prominent example. Under the caucus process, which is questionable to begin with, Clinton ended up winning a majority in Nevada, but that simply meant electing delegates to represent candidates at the county conventions, which would then send delegates to the state convention to vote at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. To the surprise of the Democratic Party in Clark County, more Sanders people showed to the Clark County convention than Clinton people, despite their pre-emptive suspension of the party credentials chairwoman for allegedly being pro-Sanders. So going into the State convention, Sanders people had a technical majority, except that this time the party got more Clinton people to show up. According to party rules, delegates had to be approved by two-thirds voice vote, which party chairwoman Roberta Lange ruled for Clinton. Even a Politifact article which was sympathetic to the party position conceded “trying to determine the outcome of a voice vote from a video of around 3,000 delegates is somewhat arbitrary to begin with. The only person with authority to call for a different voting mechanism is the convention chair: Lange.” And: “Volunteers circulating the petitions changing the rules abandoned their efforts after the permanent rules were adopted, saying they missed their chance to introduce them. Either way, any rule change would require a two-thirds majority vote which would be highly unlikely given the Clinton campaign’s public opposition to any rules changes.”
Now with me, I think that the September 26 debate proved Clinton to be far superior to Trump in both knowledge and temperament, while Johnson is getting problematic in both areas (although STILL better than Trump). But the liberals ‘shakin my head’ as to why Sanders fans would pick Johnson apparently didn’t remember that the lackluster past eight years inspired a “change” campaign with both Trump and Sanders after Obama’s “change” failed to give us much. They forget that some of us were physically present (and posting on social media in real time) about the “Democratic” establishment ginning the results at party conventions. And establishment liberals look at something like Secretary Clinton’s email issues (which the press has obfuscated as much as illuminated) and ask why she is considered “untrustworthy” as though not being forthright on email security was one isolated reason why she would be considered untrustworthy.
This undermines the final promise of the Sanders campaign: that even in the likely event that he lost the nomination, he would still have an influence. A party establishment that goes to such lengths to control results can’t be trusted to maintain its promises more than it absolutely has to. Yes, a lot of the dissenters are grousing because they’re “kids who don’t understand how the world works”, but I’m not sure that anybody who gets into American politics for the first time would come away thinking that it DOES work.
And a lot of those folks look around and if they’ve rejected the Green Party (because it has that much less organization, registration and exposure than the Libertarians) they look at the Libertarian Party and think, “okay, these guys aren’t really aligned with me on a lot of things, but they are with me on some things, and they seem like they would actually LISTEN.”
Not only that, but there’s the impression that Donald Trump could be a Central Casting villain recruited by a Democratic focus group to trigger all the buttons of feminist/liberal support networks, AND is so incompetent at running his own campaign that he might as well be throwing the race, and it just contributes to a sense that the fix is in.
Indeed, this resistance (subconscious or otherwise) to the establishment foist of Queen Hillary the Inevitable would explain not only why the anti-Trump majority hasn’t fully rallied around Clinton but why Trump remains competitive in the polls despite his kamikaze debate performance in September, not to mention despite objective reality.