Libertarians lost Trump the election!

Or that is what was, once again, being screamed by Republicans across the country, yet again. The same thing happened in 2016 when we were accused of giving away the election to Trump by not voting for Hillary and we were once again accused of "throwing our votes away."

This is something that the people deeply and emotionally involved with the two major parties can't really seem to understand: We are not throwing our votes away, we are probably some of the only people in America that are actually voting for candidates that they believe in.

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It must be tough being the Libertarian Presidential candidate: You put in all the work to get on the ballots, go do fundraisers and reel in peanuts, rely almost entirely on grassroots advertising and promotion, and rarely pull in more than 1% of the overall vote. The one exception to this was in 2016 when Gary Johnson nearly did the impossible and got close the 5% threshold required to get national recognition and government-sponsored funding (I don't fully understand the rules, but 5% is the required number.) Gary Johnson was a very flawed candidate and any time the media had an opportunity to make him look bad, they did so. It didn't help that Johnson gave them so many soundbites and opportunities to do so though.

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When the vote tallies were coming in on election night in 2020, Trump had a big lead when the polls closed and when this happened the Democrats were very quick to accuse Libertarians of ruining the election for them. They don't seem to realize that government overreach and excessive spending is the reason why any real Libertarian would never vote for almost all Democrats. When the next morning arrived and Biden was now in the lead, Republicans started pointing the finger at Libertarians claiming that the amount of votes that Jo Jorgenson received exceeded the lead that Biden now had over Trump. All of a sudden our "wasted votes" were the most important votes in the country!

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_{Yep, totally our fault!}

When you look at polling data (and that stuff is never rigged, right?) it indicates that "3rd party voters" preferred Biden but I would be willing to bet that they are pulling from the Green Party (who would love Biden's environmental agenda) excessively while avoiding the "get off my lawn" low-spending, non-intervention-oriented Libertarian.

As a Libertarian, I kind of watch politics from the sidelines because I know that "my team" is not going to win. We grow in numbers each year but never really make an impact because like the Orange Man once said "The system is rigged." It is just funny to me that any time an election is close, the media and political pundits always try to pin it on us that we "stole the election" from them. What they don't realize is that the two-party system has been stealing elections from the American people for as long as I have been alive. I can only hope that the growing number of registered Libertarians continues to grow and that before I die we can see it grow into a viable party.

In the meantime, go ahead and keep pointing fingers at us and you know, stay away from my property.

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