Taxing Matters
Overtaxed Member
No way to know how the Libertarian candidate not being in race would have impacted the outcome. There are all kinds of possibilities for what those voters would have done and we have no way to accurately determine that.What nobody has mentioned is that had the Libertarian Jo Jorgenson not been in the race and the votes have gone to Trump it would have changed the result in most of those states as well as others.
I think it's important to have more parties in the U.S. to allow voters to really express their views on what sort of policies they really want. In my state we had 21 parties on the ballot fielding presidential candidates. Sure, most failed to garner even 1000 votes, but a handful got over that. And it allowed voters to express their views about what they wanted. One of the reasons our two main parties are so awful is that they have little serious competition. Like in business, real competition tends to make those participating much better. They have to perform or they get left behind.
In any event, blaming a third party candidate for your candidate's loss overlooks the fact that your candidate knew that third party candidate was there and it was his/her job to deal with that and present a compelling message to those that might support that third party candidate.