The heated competition to be America’s next top protest vote

The Scene

COSTA MESA, Ca. — This was a new experience for members of the California Libertarian Party: A checkpoint, standing between them and a candidate’s lunch speech. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s private security team was wanding everyone who entered the room. Two guards flanked the stage where the best-known potential contender for their presidential nomination would speak.

“I understand the Kennedy family history, but it’s a false premise that having armed citizens around makes you less safe,” said Starchild, a mononymous San Francisco sex worker and longtime Libertarian Party activist. “If somebody tried to shoot him, there’d be 10 or 12 people ready to take that person out.”

Kennedy hadn’t decided whether to seek the Libertarian nomination. “We’re keeping all our options open,” he said in an interview with Semafor, between an hour-long lunch address and a 90-minute appearance on a panel with Libertarian candidates. CALP leaders had invited every well-known third-party candidate to address their convention, including Cornel West and Jill Stein. They weren’t running for the nomination, but they had plenty to talk about — a ceasefire in Gaza, ballot access, and the opportunities every third party might have in a Biden-Trump rematch.

“Any time we talk about media, or we talk about a two-party system, it’s good to start at a deeper, more than spiritual and philosophical, level,” said West on a Sunday evening panel. “Even Plato argued that no democracy can survive, precisely because the demos would be driven by unruly passion and ubiquitous ignorance.”

The response to all of this: Polite, appreciative, and not convinced. Kennedy won a single vote in Sunday’s straw poll, and 94 delegates picked someone else. Twenty-four of them backed Lars Mapstead, the ponytailed co-founder of FriendFinder networks, with none of Kennedy’s problematic support for environmental regulation or redistributive taxes. Mapstead enjoyed every minute of his panel with West, bonding with him over their desire for peace and their anger at a “rigged” system.

“When people get disenfranchised, they get pissed off,” Mapstead said. “That’s how we ended up with [Black Lives Matter] and January 6. We have to unrig the system before this boils over.” But the party wouldn’t pick its nominee for another three months, and the interest it was getting from other two-party alternatives was intriguing.

“If I were the chair right now, I would consider all options,” said Jeff Hewitt, who’d served as chair of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, making him one of the most powerful elected Libertarians in the country. “I love this party. This party really represents the greatest chance for saving this country.”

David’s view

If you’re still in line to vote in Michigan, don’t read this. If you’re not: The Democratic and Republican primaries are effectively over, and a big question over the coming weeks and months is what protest voters will decide to do.

Nikki Haley has declared herself the avatar of “the 40 percent,” the people who backed her over Donald Trump in her home state, unsure of what they’ll do if she drops out. The “Listen to Michigan” campaign has urged voters to choose “uncommitted,” not President Joe Biden, to pressure him into demanding an Israel-Hamas ceasefire. Their voters are also queasy about the future, and third-party candidates see an opening.

“This dramatically increases interest in our campaign,” said Stein in a phone interview, after a medical emergency kept her from attending the convention in person. “We’ll be meeting with communities who feel like they have been thrown under the bus. That’s Arab Americans. That’s also students who feel like they are being blacklisted and censored for their beliefs.”

In 2016, voter frustration with the Clinton-Trump choice produced the largest third-party vote in a generation — 1.5 million ballots for Stein, 4.5 million for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson. Four years later, the third-party vote collapsed, mostly to Biden’s benefit.

Biden and Trump are less popular now, and there is new, high interest in third-party candidates, which worries Democrats. Kennedy, accurately, tells audiences that he polls better than Trump or Biden with younger voters, because they don’t like their choices and don’t read traditional media.

“Baby boomers get their news from MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, The Washington Post, The New York Times,” Kennedy said at his candidate panel, which spent about half its time on how a Libertarian nominee could overcome media skepticism. “If I was living in that information ecosystem, I’d have a very low opinion of myself.”

The Libertarians in Costa Mesa laughed along with Kennedy, but they weren’t willing to nominate a famous candidate who met them halfway. In 2022, the Mises Caucus won control of the party, advocating “nullification and decentralization” over nominating high-profile candidates who softened their platform. None of the candidates actually seeking the 2024 LP nomination were well-known outside of the movement.

Economist Mike ter Maat was running on a “New Gold Deal” for sound money. Michael Rectenwald denounced “the military funding and arming of the State of Israel and their genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people,” and decried any candidate — i.e. Kennedy — who could support that. Chase Oliver, who didn’t make it to the convention, won the delegates’ respect as a candidate in Georgia’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, with real experience in attracting voters who couldn’t stand one of the major-party nominees.

“We run on principle, whereas Kennedy allows himself to say — well, there’s exceptions,” ter Maat said after his forum with the ex-Democrat. “As Libertarians, that’s not how we think. We certainly don’t want to run a campaign that way, because it would incorrectly brand our party.” Kennedy, said Rectenwald, was a “mere voter-getter.”

Kennedy and West are both petitioning for ballot access with their own, new, candidate-specific parties. They left the convention with some new respect from voters who nonetheless did not want to settle for them. In her own speech to delegates, national party chair Angela McArdle urged Libertarians to “work with situational allies, whether that’s Bobby Kennedy, Marc Andreesen, or the Green Party.” She also warned them to be ready when a surging anti-establishment vote went for Kennedy, not them.

“We’re going to be in a tough election year,” McArdle told delegates on Sunday. “If Kennedy is on the ballot in 40 or more states as an independent, it’s going to really hurt the Libertarian vote.”

The View From Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy did not gladhand or pander at the Costa Mesa convention. He spent the bulk of his lunch speech describing his work to sue polluters on behalf of commercial fishermen in the Hudson Valley, arguing that “one of the first features of totalitarianism is the privatization of the commons.”

He got more applause when he changed course, attacking COVID lockdowns and big tech: “Siri is not working for you, it is working for Bill Gates.” But he’d spent most of his life as an environmental attorney, and believed his audiences would come along when he demystified that work and explained its historical basis.

“I’ve been an advocate of a market-based approach to environmental and energy issues for my whole career,” Kennedy told Semafor after the speech. “I feel like I have an easy rapport with Libertarians who believe in free markets, and who oppose corporate crony capitalism.”

Kennedy said he’d “do everything I can to restore transparency and or sovereignty over the Fed,” and wouldn’t want to “raise the overall tax burden on the public” to pay for his agenda — including new housing bonds and more border security funding. “Unwinding empire,” as he calls it, would free up money to spend at home. In short order, he’d also name a vice presidential nominee — “somebody who’s aligned with me” and “has courage in their convictions,” but with no conditions on elected experience.

Notable

• In Puck, Peter Hamby talks more with Kennedy about his electoral strategy, and how his “big challenge right now is ballot access.”

• In The Washington Post, Meryl Kornfield finds Kennedy getting irritated by a question about his specific abortion plan: “You tell me. What should I be doing?”

• In The Atlantic, John Hendrickson goes deep inside the No Labels third party project: “They’ve correctly diagnosed serious problems in the American political system, but their proposed solution could help lead to its undoing.”