Libertarian shakes up the status quo
‘Armed and gay’ Oliver pushes Ga. Senate race in runoff
ATLANTA — Chase Oliver’s political positioning can come across as both intriguing and a little hard to categorize: He’s a Libertarian who proudly describes himself as “armed and gay.”
In his bid to become the next U.S. senator from Georgia, he raised a mere $7,790 through the end of June. And he earned just over 2% of the total vote.
Yet his losing effort could have a tremendous impact on the nation’s politics. His candidacy has denied a majority of the vote to Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, and Herschel Walker, the Republican challenger, forcing them into a Dec. 6 runoff.
Oliver said he had no regrets. The problem, he said, was the system, and he objected to the idea that he was spoiling anything.
“I don’t think you can spoil something that’s already rotten,” he said. “And I think that’s what the two-party system in Washington, D.C., currently is — it’s rotten.”
Third-party candidates are nothing new in American politics. Theodore Roosevelt played a significant spoiler role in the 1912 presidential election as a member of the Progressive, or “Bull Moose” Party. And in 2000, Ralph Nader was accused by some of helping George W. Bush win Florida and the presidency.
In recent years, a couple of Libertarian Party candidates have had an outsize influence, particularly in elections that have turned on a few percentage points.
In 2020, the Libertarian presidential candidate, Jo Jorgensen, made a modest showing in several key states — enough, it is believed, to
have tipped that election in favor of
Joe Biden.
That same year in Georgia, the Libertarian Senate candidate, Shane Hazel, earned 115,039 votes in the general election, more than the margin that separated David Perdue, the Republican incumbent, from Jon Ossoff, the Democratic challenger. Ossoff went on to defeat Perdue in a runoff.
Oliver noted that other stable democracies have more than two viable political parties and that he was the only candidate in the Georgia race that had supported ranked-choice voting “as a means to no longer have runoffs in the future.”
“I want to save the taxpayers millions of dollars and
prevent future runoffs that take weeks, and cost millions of dollars to facilitate,” he said.
On Wednesday, Oliver squeezed in time for his interview among the demands of his day job as a human resources executive. (He has a second job at a financial services company.) He said he was not planning on endorsing either of the candidates, but was hoping to host a candidate forum that would allow them to speak at length to Libertarian and independent voters.
All of this only adds to the mystery of who will win the support of his 80,000-plus voters in the runoff — that is, if they turn anywhere.
Historically, Republicans in Georgia have had
the upper hand in most statewide runoff elections. But some political watchers think the coming runoff could favor Warnock, given Walker’s extensive record of personal scandals and false statements.
Some of Oliver’s supporters may have been Republicans who could not bring themselves to vote for Walker, said Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia.
“Will they bother to come back?” Bullock said. “Will they vote at all in the next round?”
Oliver, writing on Twitter on Wednesday, said he believed his support came from across the political spectrum. “Libertarian votes came from all types,” he said. It was not a left- or right-wing philosophy, he said, but rather, “it’s the right
to be left alone.”
Oliver’s positions reflect that sentiment, with something to both attract and repel liberals and conservatives. On the question of guns, he described himself as a “strict Second Amendment supporter,” but he also is in favor of a woman’s right to choose abortion. (Although he also noted that as a small-government disciple, he supports the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal Medicaid funding for abortion.)
On Wednesday, Jorgensen said in an interview that Libertarian candidates like Oliver inject cuttingedge ideas into the national discussion, noting her party had supported gay rights and cannabis legalization long before they were mainstream.
“If it were up to the Democrats
to come up with some of the social liberties that we now have, we would still be waiting,” she said.
Oliver was able to present his ideas to a wide audience in mid-October during a debate in Atlanta with Warnock. Walker did not attend.
The first question went to Oliver, who was asked why third-party candidates tend to not break through. Oliver compared the two major parties to pro wrestlers.
“It’s like having two people in a ring who are really pretending to fight each other,” he said. Then they go backstage, he added, and laugh about how “they got so much attention.”
The next question went to Warnock, who ignored the insult. Instead, he spoke of the man he called “my opponent,” the absent Walker.