Robert Robb

opinion columnist





Wealthy, libertarian-minded guys and gals spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year trying to move the political needle.

They fund think tanks and grassroots organizations. During election season, they spend big bucks on independent campaigns to boost the chances of preferred candidates.

Yet, they are largely skipping over the best opportunity to move the needle since Ronald Reagan.

RELATED:Rich GOP donors are sitting this one out

The two major political parties have put forward highly flawed, distasteful and unlikable candidates.

Donald Trump is vulgar, offensive, ill-informed and impetuous.

The American people have finally caught on to the Clintons. They play politics for money and power, dissemble and cut ethical corners.

Finally, they've got a serious candidate

Ordinarily, the Libertarian Party isn’t regarded as a serious vehicle for potentially moving the needle. It’s known as the guns and dope party for a reason.

This time, however, the Libertarian Party has done something different. It has fielded a serious, well-qualified, experienced ticket in Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. Both are former Republican governors who had strong fiscally conservative records. Both were comfortably re-elected in blue states, New Mexico and Massachusetts respectively.

Now, Gary Johnson has a better chance of getting elected president than being hit by lightning, but not by much. So, the libertarian money, which can’t stomach Trump’s nativism and protectionism, is largely sitting out the presidential race, concentrating on Senate and House races.

That’s a missed opportunity.

This is a chance to appeal to Millennials

The American people don’t like the major party candidates and are disgusted by the presidential campaign. But they seem engaged in it. Like a car wreck, it is impossible not to watch. If ever there was an opportunity to get them to consider libertarian ideas and approaches, this is it. And Johnson and Weld are credible candidates and advocates.

This is particularly an opportunity to engage millennials.

Trump is dead in the water with millennials. Some polls have him running not only behind Hillary Clinton but also Johnson and even Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. His vulgar nativism conflicts with the politically-correct multiculturalism on which they have been weaned.

And millennials don’t seem as excited about Clinton as the first woman president as they were about Barack Obama as the first black president in 2008. Some older feminists have taken to tut-tutting about this.

Who wins this battle will sway the future

There are unresolved paradoxes in the political views of millennials. My colleague Phil Boas has pointed out one of them. In their personal lives, they favor decentralization and autonomy. Yet they went gaga over Bernie Sanders and his advocacy of central government control.

There are others. Millennials seem to want government to do more and more, while having less and less confidence in government’s ability to do anything.

How millennials resolve these paradoxes will hugely influence America’s future. The Johnson-Weld message of smaller government and less foreign interventionism should have some appeal and could shape how these paradoxes are resolved.

How to move the needle without winning

There is an opportunity in the broader electorate as well. Disgust with politics should lead to a desire for smaller government, which, after all, is led by politicians. But someone needs to point in that direction.

Johnson-Weld could move the needle without winning, if they get heard. But that requires money.

To get into the first presidential debate, Johnson needs to be polling 15 percent in identified national surveys. He’s currently at about 10 percent.

The Johnson-Weld ticket hasn’t raised much money. There are a couple of independent campaigns that have been launched to promote them, but they are spending nowhere near what would be required to move public opinion five percentage points.

And time is running out, if it hasn’t already expired. The Commission on Presidential Debates says it will decide who gets in after Labor Day but well before the first debate on Sept. 26.

In national libertarian circles, there has been much discussion and speculation about when the libertarian moment in American politics might arrive. It may be passing them by.

Reach Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com.