Not a very libertarian view actually since generally libertarians are opposed to a person being required to trade with anyone. The person who discriminates suffers by their decision to do so.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hsIpQ7YguGE
That being said such views are hardly unique to him. Also the church is on record as supporting laws banning discrimination against gays.
But most of the people who oppose discrimination against gays are going to be voting for Clinton and aren’t looking for a third party alternative.
The reality is that if people wanted to elect Libertarians, they could do so. The only thing keeping Libertarians out of office is that they have virtually no support among the electorate.
If there was some silent mass of Libertarians who felt left out by the political mainstream, then Rand Paul (or Ron Paul or Gary Johnson) would have gotten the kind of support that Bernie Sanders did. But these guys went out and offered themselves up as leaders - and found that nobody wanted to follow them. The reality seems to be that the one or two million people who vote Libertarian now aren’t the vanguard of a movement - they’re the totality of the movement.
The question libertarians can’t answer is this: If libertarianism is so great, why hasn’t any nation in the history of the planet ever tried it?
Johnson may well win double digit support in Utah, but will still finish in third place. Utah is very reliably red, but if Republicans nominate more candidates who deal in religious bigotry, that will change. I’m not a Mormon and find their beliefs unpalatable, but I admire their traditional support of religious freedom. In the end, I think Utah goes for Trump, but narrowly.
New Mexico? You’ve got to be kidding. That is getting to be a reliable blue state. Hillary cruises there.
Since it’s not going to happen, perception is correct reality.
Please look at the larger picture, though. A third party candidate can win a state election, if the expected winner splits in two. Look at Joe Lieberman in Connecticut or James Buckley in New York winning Senate seats. Or kunilou’s set of presidential examples.
Those never lead to successful, continuing third parties. The why can be explained in two words: Republicans, Democrats.
There are over a half million elected officials in the U.S., including one dog catcher. My guess is that 99.9% of those in partisan elections are from the two major parties. That’s because the two major parties are very, very, very good at winning elections. They have the bureaucracy and infrastructure. They have the bodies and the money. And they have the loyalty. They have been there your entire life and the entire life of your parents and the entire life of your grandparents.
You can get people to rally behind an individual or against an individual. Forming a party means you have to develop candidates that nobody knows, who are probably not as good as the ones that automatically gravitate to the two major parties, backed by people with less experience and money and who know that their chances of advancement at better elsewhere. Who goes into politics to lose their entire lives? Losers. (Thanks, Donald.)
You say that winning an election changes perceptions. It doesn’t. We have 150 years of evidence for that. Winning many elections over a period of time changes perceptions. The Libertarians and Greens will not change perceptions. (Frankly, that’s because they are stupid caricatures of a party.) A splintered Republican party may generate third parties because they can leverage all the apparatus already in place. But I doubt that’s what you meant or want.
Are you sure? My city’s council has been a Green stronghold for years.
As I said, there is always that 0.01%. But where has that success taken them? Four independents have seats in the Maine House out of 154. No candidates for governor in two elections. About 1% of the presidential vote. And the total number of Green elected officials in Maine peaked in 2009.
Yea, I think there’s sort of a bizarre tendency in these conversations to treat being a “third party” as some sort of end in itself. But most voters aren’t really interested in just voting for a third party for the sake of voting for a third party, the actual ideology of the party in question is what matters. And US voters have basically shown little interest in either a Libertarian or Green party, and even less interest in any other third party option.
The OP is actually a pretty good example of this. Johnson’s actual politics is pretty far outside what one would expect to appeal to conservative Utah voters. That he’s getting votes from them, its pretty clearly not due to any desire for a Johnson presidency, but just as a place to park a protest vote against Trump. Since Johnson’s never going to win, his politics is more or less irrelevant anyways. Voting for him is just another way to give an opinion about the two major party candidates.