The Libertarian Party chose one of its own as its presidential nominee on Sunday night, capping a grueling day of elimination voting and a boisterous four-day event, where both Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unsuccessfully sought to court the group’s backing.
The nominee, Chase Oliver — an openly gay former Democrat who in 2022 forced a runoff in a race for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia — beat out nine other candidates at the party’s national convention in Washington, including Kennedy.
Kennedy, who was a late addition to the official list of potential nominees on Sunday morning, was eliminated in the first round of voting Sunday afternoon, with 19 votes — just 2% of the total. Trump, who was not an official candidate, received six write-in votes in the first round.
The party took more than seven hours, and seven rounds of elimination voting, to get a presidential nominee — and even then the party nearly ended up without any candidate at all, as more than one-third of the final voters cast ballots for “none of the above.”
In his acceptance speech late Sunday night, Oliver, 38 — who has described himself as “armed and gay” — pledged to unify the party along its common principles and to expand its reach around the U.S. “We can set the world free in our lifetimes,” he said, adding that he would help bring to an end the “genocide in Gaza,” would get rid of the Federal Reserve and would “stop the thieving” of taxation.
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