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

Question

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?

Context

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

Answer

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.
this territory is moderated
I still remember that Gary Johnson really embarrassed himself when a reporter asked him what he'd do about Aleppo and he said, "What is Aleppo?" That was a major face palm moment
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210 sats \ 3 replies \ @freetx 30 Mar
I was not a Gary Johnson supporter (not against him really, just seemed pointless to support). However, I was with him on the Aleppo incident.
The implication that we should (a) know about every single foreign conflict, and (b) have strongly held views on such issues is in fact a psyop procedure promoted by the military-industrial complex. It implies that we are police of the world and should meddle in every single corner of it.
Now perhaps the joke is he failed geography or something, but the truth is a US president should primarily care about domestic issues and only concern themselves with foreign issues if there was a direct risk to the homeland.
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Fair enough. I agree with you on domestic focus vs foreign. Still, I think it's a pretty bad look when you don't even know that this is a city and that there's a war going on. It would have been better to say that he doesn't have an opinion because he hasn't studied the issue deeply, and nevertheless the focus of the president should be on improving citizens' lives, and to only intervene in foreign conflicts if it has a direct impact on citizens' lives.
Of course, the MIC controlled media would respond to that negatively either way, by calling him naive or heartless, just like how they accuse anyone skeptical of funding Ukraine a Putin apologist. You're absolutely right that our media is continually engaging in a psyop, and it's why we can't have nice things in this country
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The "Aleppo Moment" was a designed hatchet job by the corporate press. It happened right after the first polling showed him taking more support from Hillary than from Trump.
The interview had been very friendly and was not even remotely touching the topic of ISIS, yet. Then this deep state hack abruptly asks "What would you do about Aleppo?" Normally, even if only for the audience's sake, there's a transition between topics that gives people a moment to get their thoughts in order. They never just dive into a hyper particular element of a topic like that.
Also, all of the previously smiling hosts turned on him, right on queue: "Oh my god" "Are you serious?" It was obviously designed to catch him off-guard and it worked. That's the game, though (or at least it used to be), and ultimately he was a bad candidate because he wasn't prepared that kind of stuff.
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I oppose assistance to Ukraine
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Remind me what Aleppo is. I never bothered to look it up
Hillary didn’t know Julia Louis Dreyfus
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It was a town that ISIS had just taken very violently.
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Junior varsity
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Fun fact: my wife voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 and she based that on the fact that she was not going to vote for Clinton or Trump so I suppose that is the lesser of three evils or simply an I refuse to participate in this charade.
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I'm guessing she's not a libertarian purist, though. She's a good example of why I thought they had a real chance.
The corporate press turned on Johnson as soon as a report came out showing that he was taking more support from Clinton. Up until that point, he was getting lots of favorable coverage.
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My wife is not political at all.
She wasn't going to even vote in that election, as she had to request a mail in ballot for citizens living abroad, and really couldn't be bothered but I suggested she should still vote. Since she didn't like Clinton or Trump I suggested she look into Johnson as an alternative since the Libertarian party seemed to be gaining some traction. She looked into him a bit and decided she would vote for him.
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Did your wife receive a California ballot?
I am not sure if Americans living abroad should vote. If you live in another country you have less skin in America’s game
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She received California ballots for the past two elections 2016 and 2020. She no longer has a California address now though. She was using her sister's address as her US address but her sister moved to Texas in 2021. So, I guess if she is going to vote in this election she would have to register for an absentee ballot in Texas.
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More people leaving California!
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My wife's entire family except her nephew who recently got married and had a baby have moved from Cali to Texas. Her brother moved to Vegas many years ago and then she moved to Canada full time almost a decade ago. Her sister and her mom and dad moved to Texas a few years ago and after her mom passed away her other nephew moved to Texas as well to stay with my wife's dad so he wouldn't be alone.
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I'm all for skin-in-the-game based voting. Weightier votes for parents, spouses, property owners, etc.
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I think this is reasonable. What would it look like? How you weight each assuming the max is 1 vote and the min is no vote?
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I was thinking of it as getting an additional vote for any number of pro-social activities. A married person with kids who owns their own home and is employed would get an extra vote for each of those things.
Assuming I can count properly, that would be 4 extra votes. So, their vote would count for 5x the baseline vote every American would have.
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So you want to give votes not take them away. I thought you meant some kind of demerit system. Say, a married with kids, employed, homeowner over the age of 25 gets a whole vote. Then you deduct in increments from there say 1/10 of a vote for every demerit. So if I am a single, no kids, unemployed, renter, living off the welfare I get 0.5 votes.
Property owners only is my solution
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By that logic anyone not perfect is a lesser evil. Weigh your options and do the best that you can do.
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By that logic anyone not perfect is a lesser evil.
I don't think it has to mean that, but where that cutoff is might be tough to specify. I thought the simplest way to think of it is was "evil"=make things worse and "good"=make things better.
If Bob thinks that people were saying Johnson would make things worse, but not as much as the others, then I think that's what people usually mean by "lesser evil".
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The problem with Gary Johnson is that he is a quirky guy and his main focus was drug legalization.
I support drug legalization but that can’t be the main focus of your campaign if you want to win 20 percent of the popular vote
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I agree. That's why he was taking more from Clinton than Trump, which caused the corporate press to get their knives out, and why lost support with religious conservatives in the mountain west.
That didn't have to be his main focus though. As a governor, his focus was on reigning in spending.
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I think Harambe got more of the Libertarian vote in 2016 than Gary Johnson
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