Lots of people wondered why on earth Donald Trump accepted an invitation to speak at the Libertarian Party convention in Washington over the weekend, where he was booed and jeered as he urged attendees to support him.
The answer is pretty simple: He needs votes.
Some would say President Biden also needs votes, yet he didn’t accept an invitation to speak to the group. And sure, Biden, too, needs votes. The difference is that Biden, who would likely have been met with the same hostile reaction, has lots of room to grow and nail down support among his traditional Democratic base and among independents still on the fence or not yet focused. He doesn’t need to waste his time with desperate moves.
Trump, however, knows he’s hit his ceiling. Even The New York Times polling guru Nate Cohn, who’s come under criticism for his often sour analysis of Biden’s strengths as well as for the NYT/Sienna poll’s comparative tilt toward Trump,last week wrote about “the shaky foundation of Trump’s lead” (more on that later down).
Trump’s never received 50% or more of the national vote (he got 47% in 2020, when he lost, and he got only 46% in 2016, though the Electoral College squeaked him over the top against Hillary Clinton). He relied on third parties in 2016 to pull from Clinton in the three blue-wall states critical to his win.
But this year is different. RFK Jr., the biggest third-party candidate, is so far either pulling from Trump and Biden equally in several surveys or, more alarmingly for Trump, pulling more from Trump than Biden.
And in fact, RFK Jr., an avowed anti-vaxxer who spoke at the Libertarian Party convention just before Trump, was well-received by the group. In his speech, he went on the attack against Trump for his pandemic measures, speaking to an audience that is staunchly against government mandates of any kind. They cheered him on.
It’s unheard of for a major-party candidate—Trump is the presumed GOP nominee—to speak at another party’s convention. But again, Trump is desperate. Much of this was evident in Trump’s pathetic pleading during his speech, in which he begged for the Libertarian Party nomination—which was delusional—and said, at the very least, if they didn’t nominate him they needed to vote for him.
“Nominate me or at least vote for me, and we will win together,” Trump urged, as the crowd howled and scoffed.
“You have to combine with us,” he pleaded, “in a partnership.”
The crowd largely jeered and booed him, chanting, “Hypocrite!” and “No wannabe dictators!”, angered about everything from the pandemic lockdowns and running up government deficits to Trump’s plans to use the military against citizens and his promise to have the Department of Justice punish his perceived enemies.
Trump, not used to speaking to a group that isn’t full of adoring fans, made it all worse by lashing out at the crowd and belittling the party for never getting beyond 3% of the national vote in the past.
Needless to say, insulting potential supporters is clearly not the way to go in nailing them down.
The Libertarian Party, which claims to support small government and individual freedoms, is a mish-mash of people and ideals, and often hypocritical itself. Previous Libertarian Party candidates, like Gary Johnson, who was the party’s presidential candidate in 2012 and 2016, while supporting low taxation and opposing gun restrictions, staunchly supported marriage equality and abortion rights.
This year, however, those latter issues were muted, as a far-right faction of the Libertarian Party, the Mises Caucus—a MAGA-ish group that is opposed to abortion and which in fact invited Trump to speak—had taken over the leadership in an ongoing power struggle. To the consternation of many within the party, abortion rights had been removed from the party platform.
Still, in his speech, Trump stayed away from abortion, a staple of his stump speech, in which he ludicrously claims Democrats are murdering babies after birth. And while he did mention the “border crisis” that he would “end,” he didn’t make his usual promise to have the military round up millions of immigrants and put them in camps.
But that wasn’t enough to stop the crowd from booing him, even as his own supporters were in the back of the room trying to drown out the jeers with cheers.
Trump has seen what’s happening in the GOP primaries, where, for an incumbent Republican president (he’s a quasi-incumbent, having been president before), his support is weak. Nikki Haley has gotten a sizable portion of the vote, even after she dropped out. Those voters are people who aren’t happy with Trump. Many will vote for him anyway, but some won’t, as they’ve said in interviews, and that could hurt him.
Trump, unable to ever get above 47%, needs every vote he can get. He and his campaign also saw what happened in 2022, when polls predicted a red wave that didn’t happen, in large part because he’s a drag on the party. Either because of his pride after the way Haley attacked him or because he figures Haley’s voters, which include suburban women and educated voters, are gone to him, he isn’t even making a play for Haley’s voters—not yet anyway.
But he saw the libertarians as ripe, especially since some in the leadership supported him.
We also know that Trump, strapped with massive legal bills that are partly paid for by his campaign dollars as well as the RNC’s fundraising, is desperate for cash. He’s not done a big, costly rally in a swing state in a few weeks—despite claiming he was going to use his days off from his trial to do so—instead going to events like the NRA convention in Texas or having rallies in blue states (Wildwood, New Jersey, and The Bronx) close to the trial, where he also tries to raise money in small-dollar donations from attendees who haven’t been tapped out in the way those in battleground states have been at rally after rally he’s hosted.
So I imagine the Libertarian Party convention in DC was an opportunity for fund-raising too. But it turned into a humiliating slap in the face for Trump, a reminder that he is despised and hated by people who are also no fans of President Biden but whom he thought would provide fertile ground for him to pick up votes.
Trump saw RFK Jr. impress the crowd and actually get nominated at the convention to be the party’s nominee (Trump was not), though he lost among a big field to Chase Oliver, who is believed to have pulled votes from GOP candidate Hershel Walker in Georgia’s 2022 Senate election, where he ran as the Libertarian Party candidate, forcing a runoff in which Democrat Raphael Warnock won and expanded Democrats’ control of the Senate.
Oliver, now the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, could pull votes from Trump. And clearly, RFK Jr. impressed libertarians with his anti-vax crusade and was cheered at the convention. He could take some of their votes as well.
As the Times’Nate Cohn noted, (in what I’ve come see as a sort of CYA piece after he’s done a few click bait pieces that make things seem dire for Biden):
There’s one big flashing warning sign suggesting that [Trump’s] advantage [in New York Times/Sienna polling] might not be quite as stable as it looks.
That warning sign: His narrow lead is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news, and who don’t regularly vote.
President Biden has actually led the last three Times/Siena national polls among those who voted in the 2020 election, even as he has trailed among registered voters overall. And looking back over the last few years, almost all of Mr. Trump’s gains have come from these less engaged voters.
Surely Trump’s campaign’s own polling is showing the same thing. So it’s clear that he went to the Libertarian Party convention desperate for votes, knowing that his support is very soft. And instead of getting that support he desired, Trump learned that he's reviled by many he thought would be behind him, and that he’s got a lot of problems heading into this election.
