By Steve Brawner , © 2024 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
Arkansans will have other presidential choices besides Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump this election. Chase Oliver will be one of them.
Oliver, 37, is the Libertarian Party nominee. Mike ter Maat is his vice presidential candidate.
Oliver will be one of up to five non-major party candidates on Arkansans’ ballots. Others who have qualified are independent Robert F. Kennedy along with the American Solidarity, Green and Prohibition parties. The latter three have submitted enough signatures but still must submit their presidential and vice presidential candidates by Aug. 22. The Green and Prohibition parties have submitted only their presidential candidates so far.
I plan to devote a column to each of these candidates who will talk to me. We’ll start today with Oliver.
Like other Libertarians, Oliver wants the smallest federal government possible. He said its role should be limited to protecting against invasion and adjudicating disputes, which means courts and law enforcement.
All other current government functions, he said, can best be done “through voluntary exchange and through the private market.”
“I’m a Libertarian because ultimately I think you can make better decisions for your life than I can or the government can, and that the only need for government is that people are violating the liberty of others,” he told me in a phone interview. “The government we have today actually does that – violates our liberty on a regular basis.”
Specifically, he would end Social Security after it serves Americans at or near retirement. Future retirees should rely on private mechanisms. Oliver says the federal government should have no role in highway infrastructure. Instead, roads should be built by state and local governments and private entities. He would seek to create a simplified, streamlined process to allow immigrants into America to work while using technology and law enforcement to protect the border. He called for balancing the federal budget deficit, which he said is the largest driver of inflation.
Oliver described himself as an anti-war activist who wants the United States to engage in more diplomacy, draw down its overseas military presence, and end its “militaristic” foreign policy. On Ukraine, Europe should take the military lead while the United States accepts Ukrainian refugees and provides amnesty to anti-war Russians.
This is Oliver’s third campaign. In 2020, he ran for a Georgia seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2022, he ran for Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker. His 81,000 votes may have been the reason that election went to a runoff, which ultimately was won by Warnock.
His Twitter headline in that race was “armed and gay.” He said that slogan was meant to convey his support for gun rights, along with his belief that those rights are needed so vulnerable populations like his can defend themselves without having to depend on the government.
Oliver supports ranked choice voting, where voters rank the candidates. If no candidate wins a majority, then second choices come into play. Such a system addresses the argument that third parties produce only “spoiler candidates.” The argument is, under the current system, voting for a third party rather than a preferred major party candidate “wastes your vote” and only helps the other major party candidate win.
He rejects that argument regardless.
“Well, the truth is you can’t spoil something that’s already rotten. And that’s the two-party system that exists both in Little Rock and in Washington, D.C.,” he said.
While the major party candidates each will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on their campaigns, Oliver’s will be much more modest. When I interviewed him Aug. 6, he was preparing to fly to Iowa for an eight-day campaign swing that would include a debate in New York and a couple of fundraisers. After a professional career that has included 13 years of working in restaurants and five in maritime logistics, he is living off savings while relying on his roommate’s generosity.
I closed the interview by asking about his message to Arkansas voters.
“My main message to Arkansans is, you can vote different, and you shouldn’t be afraid to vote different, to vote outside the two-party system,” he said as part of his response. “What’s holding you back is fear, and you shouldn’t have fear of something that’s new and of something that’s possible, and we’ll only change the system if we vote differently.”
That’s Chase Oliver, the Libertarian. More non-major party candidates to come.
Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 17 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.