Will the Libertarian Gains Last?

By any measure, 2016 has already been a banner year for the Libertarian Party—and that’s even before the presidential election. Fundraising is up dramatically, for both the national party and presidential nominee. Registration has also spiked dramatically across the country. The defection of several Republican state legislators angered by Trump’s rise and nomination has lead to the highest number of affiliated representatives in party history, tied only with 1992. And national polls are currently predicting that record numbers of voters will vote for the Libertarian presidential nominee, with a chance that he could qualify for the general debate stage for the first time in party history.

The question Libertarians are now asking is, Will this last? Is this a one-off election solely because of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, with 2020 symbolizing a return to normal, or is this a new beginning for third parties?

I think that depends to a large degree on what happens in November. No one reasonably expects Gary Johnson to actually win the Presidency. If Clinton wins, then Trump and his campaign will have been discredited, he and his supporters will no longer have any great sway within the Republican Party, and the GOP will settle back into being the main opposition party—with many of the most serious rifts from the Trump campaign, from rhetoric to policy, being debated internally.

But if Trump somehow wins, Trump supporters will feel vindicated, and their strangehold on the GOP will only tighten even further. Even if a Trump Presidency was a complete disaster, the party would be split between those who would support him no matter what, whether because of blind loyalty to the man himself or out of a hunger for power, and those who would continue to oppose him on principle. The Republican Party would no longer be big enough for both groups.

Such a split wouldn’t happen overnight of course, but when it did it would be chaos to behold. As far as the Libertarians are concerned, it would in large part be up to them to shape an outcome best for their own party. There would be a movement among many conservatives to start a new party, a new home for the conservative movement in exile. Many others would likely prefer to join an existing one, with a fully developed campaign apparatus. The question would become, then, how many of the latter there would be versus the former, and how much the Libertarian Party would be willing to change for the sake of increasing its electoral influence.

Many of these newly homeless former Republicans, while appreciating the Libertarian commitment to limited government and free markets, would also have problems with many other planks of the current platform, specifically on issues such as abortion, drug legalization, immigration, and a non-interventionalist foreign policy. The party as a whole could either adapt some of those planks to lure in more conservative voters, or refuse to change and ensure that the majority of disaffected Republicans look elsewhere for a new home. If they choose the former option, over time those conservative voters would further pressure the party to introduce additional changes, making it even more pro-life for example.

It honestly doesn’t matter to me which long-term path the Libertarians choose. If they want to make the party more appealing to conservatives, great. If they want to stand for their own principles and stick to strictly libertarian, rather than conservative, values in their platform, I can understand that too. But ultimately, the decision of whether to retain the gains made in 2016 will be up to them.