This is part 8 of answering Bob Murphy's "Tough Questions for Libertarians". See the original post for details: #458128

For Gary Johnson supporters, were you mostly arguing that he was the lesser of three evils and wouldn't that imply people should just vote for the lesser of the two evils that actually have a shot?

Gary Johnson was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 2016. He and his running mate Bill Weld had both been two-term Republican governors of blue states, New Mexico and Massachusetts respectively.

Gary Johnson is a mainstream libertarian. He's not particularly ideological, but he tends to oppose state interventions into people's lives and into the economy.

Bill Weld is only libertarian in the vague sense of being socially liberal and fiscally conservative. He very much believes in state interventions, though, and is pretty bad on foreign policy.

This was a very controversial presidential ticket amongst the party. They certainly had the most "electability" of all the candidates, but were also the worst message spreaders because neither of them understood the message to begin with.

Libertarians had many criticisms of various positions taken by this campaign and the response was generally that they were so much better than Trump or Clinton on most issues of importance.

Here's the relevant clip from Bob's show: https://fountain.fm/clip/yj8UHEObn2WW0WEQBZ1D

I almost always want the Libertarian Party to nominate the best messengers for President and VP, because there's never any real prospect of the ticket winning. The whole point of these campaigns is to spread the message. However, I thought Johnson was the right choice that year (although I would have personally preferred McAfee).

Obviously, there's no way to play out the counterfactual, but I think Johnson/Weld had an actual shot at winning. The share of real support for Trump in 2016 was very small and Hillary was the least popular candidate ever. The LP's ticket had far more executive experience than either of the other candidates and they were more palatable to the establishment than Trump. Had Gary Johnson not been a complete goofball stoner during the campaign, I think there was a real shot of him essentially displacing Trump as the Republican nominee. When he had previously run for president, he did not come off that way.

Gary Johnson is libertarian enough that it's unfair to call him the lesser of three evils. Had he become president there would have been better policies across the board. Also, had he become president, the Libertarian Party would have been catapulted into relevance. It was a risky pick and it blew up in our faces, but I'm still not convinced it was the wrong pick.