The Republican Party ignored Gary Johnson when he was a Republican, in fact they ignored him. Now that Gary is a Libertarian, he is able to speak freely. Several former Republicans have fled the GOP to become Libertarians or Independent voters.
Allow this writing to be specifically directed to Libertarian and Libertarian-Republican voters…
Did you know that if Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson gets at least 5% of the vote, that means the Libertarian Party will have the OPTION to receive several millions in matching campaign funds in 2016? Johnson is polling at 6% nationally.
Johnson is clearly onto something. Major parties, along with minor parties that reach the 5 percent threshold, do indeed qualify for grants in federal matching funds (although the $90 million figure Johnson referred to is unclear at this point).
Remember when the Republican Party would not include then Republican Gary Johnson in the debates? Well it appears excluding Gary from his freedom of expression is not helping them this 2012 election year.
I predicted the GOP would regret excluding Johnson last year when I wrote:
Now that Gary Johnson has left the Republican Party, he will become political power house and help frame political discourse
And now the test of time has taken place and the prediction is coming into fruition.
TIME recently wrote:
For months, as Johnson ran in the Republican presidential primary, the GOP ignored him as best it could, hoping he’d just go away. Then he did, leaving the Republicans to join the Libertarians. When I ran into him at the GOP convention in Tampa, Johnson looked like a man far removed from his former party, blocks from the convention center, standing on a street corner in front of a Hooters doing interviews.
The GOP isn’t ignoring him anymore. Now that Johnson is threatening to siphon votes from Mitt Romney in close elections in Colorado and Nevada (he’s also on the ballot in 46 other states and Washington, D.C.), Republicans are doing whatever they can to limit his appeal. Michigan party officials kept him off the ballot because he filed his paperwork three minutes late. In Pennsylvania, the GOP hired a private detective who went to canvassers’ homes and flashed his old FBI badge before questioning the signatures they collected, a lawyer for Johnson’s campaign alleged. The state GOP and the investigator denied doing anything improper. (On Oct. 10 a judge decided that Johnson will be on the Pennsylvania ballot.) The experience has left Johnson, 59, alienated from some of his old comrades—which, it turns out, he doesn’t mind at all. “Going to Republican events, as I did a zillion times, I listened to Republican candidates do their spiel. I cringed at a lot of what they said, whether it was abortion, the terrorist threat, the homophobia, the ‘illegal immigrant is the source of all our problems’—man, that stuff made me crazy. The kook element of the Libertarians gets up, and I don’t cringe.”
