The Libertarian Party nominated party activist Chase Oliver for president at its convention in May.
(AP Photo/Ben Gray, File)
Openly gay Georgian Chase Oliver is the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president
JOHN FERRANNINI | Bay Area Reporter
Reprinted courtesy of BAR and News Is Out
DITOR’S NOTE: The Libertarian Party of Texas will host Chase Oliver, the openly-gay man who is the party’s presidential candidate, Saturday, Sept. 21, at the Plano Balloon Festival at Red Tail Pavilion in Oak Point Park. The festival opens at 6 a.m., with the balloon launch at 7 a.m., and closes at 10 p.m. An LPTexas spokesperson said Oliver is expected to be at the event for most of the day. Visit LPTexas.org for more information.
Chase Oliver, the gay Libertarian from Georgia who is his party’s presidential nominee, got an unexpected boon Aug. 23, when Democrat-turned-independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race and endorsed Republican nominee former President Donald Trump.
Oliver’s message to disappointed RFK Jr. supporters — who at the time he suspended his presidential bid was polling nationally around 5 percent according to 538’s average of polls — is that they need look no further.
Running with Oliver as his vice presidential nominee is Mike ter Maat, a retired police officer from Virginia.
“I can say first I empathize with the many who feel very disappointed; they were supporting RFK to declare themselves independent of the two-party system, and they may be feeling frustrated or let down,” Oliver told the Bay Area Reporter in an Aug. 26 phone interview. “We welcome them into the tent.
“Many of the issues they care about — corporate capture, medical freedom — these kinds of things are very much in line with the Libertarian philosophy, so many people can feel at home and welcome in the Oliver/ter Maat campaign, and we hope they join us.”
Initially, ter Maat ran against Oliver for their party’s presidential nomination.
“I said if you’d like to be my running mate, I accept it and he accepted it on the [convention] floor,” Oliver said. “I knew he was the person who could help us with a unifying ticket for the party we can move forward with throughout the country.”
Starchild, who uses one name and is the chair of the San Francisco County Libertarian Party, was a delegate at the Libertarian convention that was held in Washington, D.C. in late May. He told the B.A.R. he was initially hesitant about ter Maat but now supports him.
“He also was my second choice, despite being an ex-police officer, which gave me misgivings, but he is one of the very few good cops who understand and respect civil liberties,” Starchild, who is pansexual, told the B.A.R.
Oliver, 39, had spoken with the B.A.R. back in August 2023, when he was the first-ever third-party candidate to speak at the Iowa State Fair Political Soapbox. At that time, the former U.S. House and Senate candidate in Georgia had said, “We have extremely high voter dissatisfaction with the two parties.”
Outlining a platform meant to maximize personal liberty, whether it’s on transgender people in sports or regulation of the economy, Oliver said, “I want to run with a message that’s confident, aspirational and taps into Gen Z.”
Oliver, who is single and lives north of Atlanta, had been an Obama Democrat. But he soured on then-President Barack Obama due to his expansion of the security state, the continuation of U.S. detention of foreign nationals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the expansion of international counterterrorism efforts of dubious legality under international law. He called those moves a “slap in the face to the anti-war movement that helped [Obama] win both the primary against Hillary Clinton and the White House.”
He discovered the Libertarian Party in 2010 at a booth at the Atlanta Pride festival. Fourteen years later, he became the party’s presidential nominee at a raucous convention in Washington, D.C., that saw Trump unsuccessfully ask for the nomination.
Slim chance of victory
The B.A.R. asked Oliver what he’d say to the argument that the threat to democratic elections posed by Trump necessitates uniting behind Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, who formally accepted her party’s presidential nomination Aug. 22 at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“I would argue the conditions that allowed someone like Trump to make their way to the forefront of American politics is the two-party system we have that polarizes and creates hyper-partisanship, and allows the worst voices to rise to the top,” Oliver said. “If we had a democracy with more voices and more choices, we’d have more honest and civil elections.”
Starchild agreed, saying that nobody’s vote is the deciding factor in the election and pointing to the fact that even the razor-thin margin in Florida’s 2000 presidential election was in the hundreds.
“The chances of Chase Oliver getting elected president is better than the chances your one vote is going to change the outcome,” Starchild said. “Anyone who says, ‘He can’t win; I don’t want to waste my vote,’ they are throwing away their vote on an even slimmer chance.”
Oliver has been accused of being a spoiler before. In 2022 he was credited with forcing the U.S. Senate race in his home state of Georgia into a runoff between Democratic Senate candidate the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Republican former football player Herschel Walker after he got more than 2 percent of the vote. Warnock went on to win the runoff.
Policies, positions
Oliver said that in his view, government is “the least efficient way to help people.”
“My opposition to the authoritarianism on the left is their need to use central planning and government programs to run every aspect of our lives,” Oliver said. “Every time a problem arises, the left says, ‘Let’s use central planning to clamp that down.’ And, like a hydra, that creates more problems than it solves.
“That’s my biggest gripe with big government folks. … Just because we don’t want a huge welfare state doesn’t mean we don’t want to help people who are in need.”
Oliver, who will be in North Texas next week, said he is planning a California swing toward the end of September, including a stop in the Bay Area. He contrasted the national focus of his campaign with Trump and Harris keeping their “focus on a handful of swing states” in the Electoral College.
“I’m focusing on where we can grow the Libertarian Party,” Oliver said. “We’re looking at ballot access and party status, which makes it easier to run more candidates and be more visible to voters.”
The Libertarian Party, so far, has ballot access in 40 states and the District of Columbia this cycle. With more than 700,000 members, it’s America’s third largest party by voter registration.
Starchild thinks what the two major parties need is a “time out.” Oliver is “the real peace candidate in the race,” Starchild said, and he can see him bringing balance to the Oval Office.
“Hyper-partisans will find things to dislike about his politics — being out and gay, supporting trans rights, supporting the Second Amendment, what have you,” he said. “In an era when the tensions are so heightened that people are talking about a second Civil War, electing someone like Chase who can be seen as being from the middle — even though it’s the radical middle — could be a national pause.
“Both sides can realize maybe there’s more than two camps here, and this is a nuanced situation.”