Chase Oliver, the gay Libertarian from Georgia who is his party's presidential nominee, got an unexpected boon August 23, when Democrat-turned-independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race and endorsed Republican nominee former President Donald Trump.
Oliver's message to disappointed RFK Jr. supporters — who at the time he suspended his presidential bid was polling nationally around 5% according to 538's average of polls — is they need look no further. Running with Oliver as his vice presidential nominee is Mike ter Maat, a retired police officer from Virginia.
"I can say first I empathize with the many who feel very disappointed — they were supporting RFK to declare themselves independent of the two-party system and they may be feeling frustrated or let down," Oliver told the Bay Area Reporter in an August 26 phone interview. "We welcome them into the tent. Many of the issues they care about — corporate capture, medical freedom — these kinds of things are very much in line with the Libertarian philosophy, so many people can feel at home and welcome in the Oliver-ter Maat campaign, and we hope they join us."
Initially, ter Maat ran against Oliver for their party's presidential nomination.
"I said if you'd like to be my running mate, I accept it and he accepted it on the [convention] floor," Oliver said August 26. "I knew he was the person who could help us with a unifying ticket for the party we can move forward with throughout the country."
Starchild, who uses one name and is the chair of the San Francisco County Libertarian Party, was a delegate at the Libertarian convention that was held in Washington, D.C. in late May. He told the B.A.R. he was initially hesitant about ter Maat but now supports him.
"He also was my second choice, despite being an ex-police officer, which gave me misgivings, but he is one of the very few good cops who understand and respect civil liberties," Starchild, who is pansexual, told the B.A.R. August 26.
Oliver, 39, had spoken with the B.A.R. back in August 2023, when he was the first-ever third-party candidate to speak at the Iowa State Fair Political Soapbox. At that time, the former U.S. House and Senate candidate in Georgia had said, "We have extremely high voter dissatisfaction with the two parties."
Outlining a platform meant to maximize personal liberty, whether it's on transgender people in sports or regulation of the economy, Oliver said, "I want to run with a message that's confident, aspirational and taps into Gen Z."
Oliver, who is single and lives north of Atlanta, had been an Obama Democrat. But he soured on then-President Barack Obama due to his expansion of the security state, the continuation of U.S. detention of foreign nationals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the expansion of international counterterrorism efforts of dubious legality under international law. He called those moves a "slap in the face to the anti-war movement that helped [Obama] win both the primary against Hillary Clinton and the White House."
He discovered the Libertarian Party in 2010 at a booth at the Atlanta Pride festival. Fourteen years later, he became the party's presidential nominee at a raucous convention in Washington, D.C., as the B.A.R. reported (https://www.ebar.com/story.php?ch=news&id=333456) that saw Trump unsuccessfully ask for the nomination.
Slim chance of victory
Third-parties and independents running for president — even when there is little-to-no-chance of winning the election outright — is a long-standing tradition in American politics despite the domination of the Democratic and Republican parties. As recently as 1992, Ross Perot's quixotic independent bid for president won 19% of the popular vote, though no electoral votes.
Third-party, independent, write-in, and "none of these candidates" options won 5.7% of the vote in 2016, most of which (3.2%) went to Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson. But Democrats blamed third-party options, particularly Green Party nominee Jill Stein, for throwing the electoral college to Trump, and third-party voting decreased in 2020. (2020's Libertarian nominee, Jo Jorgenson, won 1.1% of the vote).
Since then, Trump has sowed doubt about the legitimacy of U.S. elections, falsely continuing to claim the 2020 presidential election that he lost was stolen from him, and going as far as to conspire to "impair, obstruct and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are counted," according to an August 27 court filing re-indicting him for the events related to January 6, 2021, when an armed mob rioted at the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the election from being certified by Congress.
The B.A.R. asked Oliver what he'd say to the argument that the threat to democratic elections posed by Trump necessitates uniting behind Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, who formally accepted her party's presidential nomination August 22 at the national convention in Chicago. Harris became the nominee after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race July 21 and endorsed her to succeed him.
"I would argue the conditions that allowed someone like Trump to make their way to the forefront of American politics is the two-party system we have that polarizes and creates hyperpartisanship, and allows the worst voices to rise to the top," Oliver said. "If we had a democracy with more voices and more choices, we'd have more honest and civil elections."
Starchild agreed, and said nobody's vote is the deciding factor in the election, pointing to the fact that even the razor-thin margin in Florida's 2000 presidential election was in the hundreds.
"The chances of Chase Oliver getting elected president is better than the chances your one vote is going to change the outcome," Starchild said. "Anyone who says 'he can't win, I don't want to waste my vote,' they are throwing away their vote on an even slimmer chance."
Starchild also agreed it's the two-party model that created the existential-seeming standoff between two nearly-equal sized factions, which Biden terms America's "uncivil war."
"Every four years, 'this is the most important election of your lifetime,'" Starchild said. "Trump is a symptom that grew out of the current climate and that climate was already one of increasing polarization. George W. Bush was being compared to Hitler. I remember the rabid hate against Clinton — Bill Clinton, never mind Hillary."
Oliver has been accused of being a spoiler before — in 2022 he was credited with forcing the U.S. Senate race in his home state of Georgia into a runoff between Democratic Senate candidate the Reverend Raphael Warnock and Republican former football player Herschel Walker after he got over 2% of the vote. Warnock went on to win the runoff.
Starchild said that though Trump "is uniquely authoritarian in ways other U.S. politicians on that level haven't been" in recent decades, Republicans don't have a monopoly on authoritarian attitudes. He said that Democrats leaned into COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates more than Republicans, and highlighted the Biden campaign and then administration's pressure on social media companies to bar discussion topics unfavorable to them, such as the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, and attempts to censor alleged disinformation regarding COVID origins that federal agencies were later unable to disprove.
A federal jury in June found Hunter Biden, President Biden's son, guilty of three felony gun charges. The laptop controversy arose after Hunter Biden, a recovering addict, left the device at a computer shop. Emails on the laptop eventually made their way to the media, alleging they showed corruption between father and son.
Twitter had prevented a 2020 New York Post story on the laptop from being shared, and Facebook reduced its ability to circulate. Other outlets refused to report on it. Over 50 former intelligence officials claimed at the time it was Russian disinformation. Evidence that it was Russian disinformation has not come to light since then. Investigations into Twitter documents after its acquisition by Elon Musk did not find government involvement in the suppression of the story.
In a letter to congressional leaders August 26, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for censoring speech.
"I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it," he wrote. "I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today."
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on June 26 that the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Biden administration's alleged pressure on social media companies didn't have standing, overturning a lower court that had found officials' efforts to combat alleged disinformation violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
These approaches weakened the Democrats' arguments against Trump, Starchild contends.
"Right after January 6 happened, I didn't get a sense a lot of people were eager to have Trump back again," Starchild said. "The Democrats missed an opportunity in blaming him for COVID, but they couldn't, because they doubled down on his bad [lockdown] policies."
Oliver said that in his view, government is "the least efficient way to help people."
"My opposition to the authoritarianism on the left is their need to use central planning and government programs to run every aspect of our lives," Oliver said. "Every time a problem arises, the left says, 'Let's use central planning to clamp that down.' And, like a hydra, that creates more problems than it solves. That's my biggest gripe with big government folks. ... Just because we don't want a huge welfare state doesn't mean we don't want to help people who are in need."
Oliver said he is planning a California swing toward the end of September — including a stop in the Bay Area. He contrasted the national focus of his campaign with Trump and Harris keeping their "focus on a handful of swing states" in the Electoral College.
"I'm focusing on where we can grow the Libertarian Party," Oliver said. "We're looking at ballot access and party status, which makes it easier to run more candidates and be more visible to voters."
The Libertarian Party, so far, has ballot access in 40 states and the District of Columbia this cycle. With over 700,000 members, it's America's third largest party by voter registration.
Starchild thinks what the two major parties need is a "time out."
Oliver is "the real peace candidate in the race," Starchild said, and he can see him bringing balance to the Oval Office.
"Hyperpartisans will find things to dislike about his politics — being out and gay, supporting trans rights, supporting the Second Amendment, what have you," he said. "In an era when the tensions are so heightened that people are talking about a second Civil War, electing someone like Chase who can be seen as being from the middle — even though it's the radical middle — could be a national pause. ... Both sides can realize maybe there's more than two camps here, and this is a nuanced situation."
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