Libertarians skip over Trump and RFK Jr. for Chase Oliver

Kennedy, who was a late addition to the official list of potential nominees on Sunday morning, was eliminated in the first round of voting Sunday afternoon, with 19 votes — just 2% of the total. Trump, who was not an official candidate, received six write-in votes in the first round.

The Libertarian Party is among the better-established minor parties, with name recognition and placement on the majority of state ballots in November.

The party took more than seven hours, and seven rounds of elimination voting, to get a presidential nominee — and even then the party nearly ended up without any candidate at all, as more than one-third of the final voters cast ballots for “none of the above.”

In his acceptance speech late Sunday night, Oliver, 38 — who has described himself as “armed and gay” — pledged to unify the party along its common principles and to expand its reach around the U.S. “We can set the world free in our lifetimes,” he said, adding that he would help bring to an end the “genocide in Gaza,” would get rid of the Federal Reserve and would “stop the thieving” of taxation.

The sixth round of votes was expected to be the last: Oliver faced off against Michael Rectenwald, a former professor at New York University who left the school in 2019 on the heels of several controversies.

But neither Oliver nor Rectenwald reached a majority in that vote: Oliver got 49.53% of the vote, and Rectenwald, who had led every previous vote, got 44.73%. Just over 5% voted “None of The Above.”

Rectenwald, as the lowest performing official candidate, was dropped from the ballot, and the party faced the prospect of having to back either Oliver or nobody at all. Just after 10 p.m., the final votes came in.