How Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson Could Get 23 Electoral Votes

This is how the US electoral map could look in 2016:

Take a good look at that big, fat, electoral swatch in grey right in the middle of the country. That is prime for the taking for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. This is how he can do it.

Thanks to Trump hatred and to some extent Clinton fatigue, Libertarians are doing very well in general, and especially so in the grey states above:

This table indicates the current polls for 2016 from Nate Silver's well respected averages. Gary Johnson is polling very high in these states relative to 2012's actual results. In Utah, thanks in no small part to the Mormon's absolute hatred of Trump, it is possible Gary Johnson will receive 10X more votes than in 2012!

The Strategy

These states, especially WY, have relatively few people compared to the nation at large, so they should become the central focus of the Libertarian presidential race. The strategy is go hard in these states, win a few or all of them outright, and leverage you ability to win states over the next 4 years.

In this table the 2012 total voters are multiplied by the currents polls to show the current expected vote totals for 2016. Then the delta is calculated in order for the Libertarian candidate to win. For Hillary, the assumption is the difference between her vote total and Obama's in 2012 is due to Trump hatred. This is very apparent in Utah (which is somewhat surprising) versus the other 4 states (in the case of NE and especially MT, she is polling worse than Obama's actual 2012 total). So getting these voters to pull the lever for Johnson would be relatively straight forward as long as he is presented is a better, viable choice to Trump than Hillary is.

For Mr. Trump voters, this is where the real work is. Johnson has to slice off enough votes to get his 10-14% polls up to about 35% in order to eke out the big W in each state. The central point of this spreadsheet is to figure out exactly how many votes that is.

The number of total voters is relatively small, especially compared to a running national campaign

In Wyoming alone, Johnson needs to move the needle on ~50,000 voters who otherwise voted for Romney to flip the state and gain the electoral votes. If you have as little as $5M to spend in Wyoming, this is an enormous $100 per voter you need to flip. (being able to spend even $20 per voter in Florida is considered to be very good).

For $64M (~$20M per month starting now), Johnson could parlay this strategy in just Wyoming to the friendliest 5 states he could potentially win, worth a staggering 23 electoral votes. His asset would then be a big ol' Libertarian Swatch on the 2016 electoral map he can take into the 2020 election. Granted, he has only raised $1.4M so far. However, if he presents a credible strategy to the American people and to deep-pockets that hate Trump (like the Koch's) this amount could change significantly. That's still assuming an enormous $100 per voter. For $50 (still a great number), he could do the whole campaign for only $32M. That's very very doable.

Hillary will not fight Johnson in these States. In all likelihood she would support him. If Johnson takes 23 electoral votes from Trump (in states she was sure to lose anyhow), it only helps her. Also, Trump will be too busy trying to hold battleground states to notice. So this Libertarian campaign could go full force with almost no competition. But that's just in 2016. Now we can start to talk about 2020. I've already pointed out in a unread post how the Libertarians can leverage this 2016 small, focused, Western State strategy to win in 2020 here. So I won't belabor it. But winning 1 to 6 States and pickings up the electoral votes that go with it is a critical starting point that shows the party has a message and can win states with it.

This win, of course, "looks big" because these 6 states are relatively huge with small populations (as opposed to a population-proportional map). But this is often how the map is presented, so that big Western chunk simply looks impressive. Johnson has 4 years during the coming crap show (whether Hillary or Trump) to show this off to every single American voter while on his 4-year, 50-state march to the White House in 2020.