After a hard pass on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Donald Trump as potential presidential nominees, the Libertarian party has chosen Chase Oliver, a gay Atlanta man, to serve as the Libertarian candidate for president.
Libertarian party stats
As of May 2024, there are roughly 178 Libertarians that hold elected office in the United States. At last report, there were approximately 742,000 registered Libertarians in the 29 states and the District of Columbia, which report Libertarian registration statistics.
Who is Chase Oliver?
Chase Oliver was previously a Democratic party member and supporter of Barack Obama. A native of Georgia, he was reportedly born in Snellville (a small Metro Atlanta suburb town with a population of approximately 22,000) but has called Atlanta proper home since sometime around 2011. Despite his long-term residency in the city, it appears he has had scant involvement in local LGBTQ+ politics and culture. There is no mention of him in local queer press. In mainstream Atlanta media, one story began with the line, “Who in the heck is Chase Oliver?”
Oliver’s platform
Some aspects of Oliver’s presidential platform are positive, while others are questionable and contradictory. For example, Oliver supports access to abortion for all, but does not believe the federal government should fund family planning clinics.
If elected president, he plans to do away with foreign aid to Israel and Ukraine, but said as a nation the United States would always offer “moral support” to countries that maintain friendly relationships with the US. While he has said he wants to “end genocide in Gaza,” as reported in the New York Times, it’s unclear how that would come about, given his non-involvement perspective.
Additionally, he has said that he believes all Americans should have access to firearms, he wants to abolish the death penalty, decriminalize marijuana and pardon individuals convicted of nonviolent drug offenses.
For more information on the Libertarian party platform, you can go here: https://www.lp.org/platform/
Will his candidacy impact Biden’s run for a second term?
While Oliver will reportedly appear on 37 ballots across the United States, including North Carolina, there simply aren’t enough registered and active Libertarians to make much of a dent in the campaigns of the big two: Biden and Trump. Across all the leading cable news networks, anchors, reporters and pundits have posited that Oliver’s run could potentially sway the election in favor of Biden or Trump, but it seems extremely unlikely. In the last presidential election, the candidate running for office won only one percent of the vote.