While battleground states continue counting votes—and some may not have official results for some time—it seems that the Libertarian Party (L.P.) will fall short of its relative recent successes. The 2012, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections constituted three of the four highest vote totals in the party's history. The 2024 L.P. candidate Chase Oliver looks likely to underperform 2020's numbers, when candidate Jo Jorgensen won more than 1.8 million votes and 1.2 percent of the national total.
Speaking from his election night watch party in Dallas, Texas, Oliver tells Reason he isn't surprised that he fell short of other recent L.P. presidential tickets, but he has no regrets—and he has some choice words for his party.
"I think we did the best we could, considering there's been a lot of headwinds in this campaign," he says. "First and foremost, the two-party system is always trying to relegate alternative parties' voice[s]," and "internal disputes within the party…led to less than full-throated support from our national leadership."
"National party support is very important, especially in the initial couple of weeks to get a campaign on the right track. And we just didn't have that," he continues.
This was the first presidential election since the L.P.'s takeover by the Mises Caucus, an internal party faction more conservative than the previous rank and file. Michael Heise, the Mises Caucus founder who helped engineer the party takeover, endorsed former President Donald Trump last week in a post on X. Over the weekend, L.P. Chair Angela McArdle shared a pro-Trump video and added, "You know you wanna be a part of this. It is irresistible."
Oliver sees his campaign as indicative of the party's struggles, and he hopes it can turn around in the future: "Our campaign is not the low-water mark. In fact, we've been seeing a downward trend…because leadership has just not been able to retain membership. And I think that's due to the internal conflict. That's due to focusing more on shooting inward at each other than actually doing the professional party building. And I'm going to be looking forward, as an activist, as a lifetime party member, as a former candidate for president, to be looking to find members of the Libertarian Party who want to professionalize our operations and put us into a growth mode."
That said, Oliver says he does not have regrets about his experience. "Running as the presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, the party that I love, for the principles that I stand by, has been the true honor of my life," he says. "Even with any headwinds that I faced, I know that I've done everything I can to try to spread the message of liberty in a positive way. I'm so thankful that I have a staff and volunteers across the country who have put in the work."
Would he run again in the future? "I think so," he says. "But what I need to do first is focus on building our party [so it] can properly support a presidential campaign the way we have in the past. And I think that's my work over the next four years…trying to identify people across the libertarian spectrum, in states across the country, who want to organize and really build our party up going forward, and not being the [junior varsity] league for the Republican Party, and not thinking that Donald Trump is what we have to settle [for] in this country."
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