Many people rightfully think that the 2016 election cycle has been one of the worst in American history, and voters are reacting accordingly. Most commonly in the younger voter base, people are refusing to pick between what they consider “the lesser of two evils” and expanding their sights to include the two biggest third-party candidates: Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. In Johnson (as well as in Stein), voters are seeing a candidate that isn’t embroiled in an email scandal and hasn’t made headlines for all the wrong reasons almost every day. Disillusioned and angry at the establishment after eight years of gridlock and economic turmoil, they are jumping at the chance to elect a candidate who, for one thing, is an ardent fan of small government, and also not Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
It may seem like an admirable cause to fight big government and vote for one’s values instead of voting for one of the two major party options, but people who choose Johnson are ignoring the fact that he is unfit to lead the country. Johnson’s main claim to fame in recent months has been his embarrassing on-air blunders, which have drawn even more attention than his wildly unrealistic policies. Many people will remember his “Aleppo moment,” and another equally disconcerting gaffe in which he was asked to name his favorite foreign leader and could not think of a single one. It may be setting the bar too high to ask Johnson to interact with leaders of other countries and settle disputes diplomatically if he cannot name even one such leader that he respects, let alone stay up-to-date on major world issues.
Of course, every political candidate makes mistakes on the campaign trail, and to judge someone only on their botched interviews and non-answers would be selling them short. Still, Johnson seems to have almost no plan for implementing his policies, and his ideas for how he should run the country involve very little substance beyond simply blowing up big government. He has been open about his plan to torch major government departments, and when he was asked what he would get rid of, Johnson replied “Education, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for starters.” All three departments are integral parts of our country, and leaving education or infrastructure at the mercy of the private sector would be a horrible idea at best. A safe and reliable infrastructure and an education are rights, so to delegate them to large, private companies would risk denying people what should be naturally theirs, given the tendencies of corporate America to favor rich white people over poor minorities. Moreover, when Johnson says he would abolish three extremely important parts of the federal government, and finishes off his proposal with “for starters,” he sounds more like an anarchist ideologue than a rational presidential candidate.
Johnson’s small government approach to tax policy is just as unrealistic, and risks being unfair to the lower socioeconomic bracket. He advocates for abolishment of federal income tax, corporate tax, and the IRS, consolidating everything into one federal consumption tax. This would allow corporations to run wild and exploit whomever they want, finding loopholes in almost every part of an overly simplistic plan. Economic inequality is a serious problem in the United States. Turning American tax policy into a disjointed rummage sale and letting the swamp monster of big business strangle the federal government will only widen the world’s largest wealth gap and drive the stakes of a major national issue into the ground for the foreseeable future.
Finally, it is important to remember that a protest vote does the country no good when the protest candidate has no chance to win the election. Whether you think Clinton is more qualified than Trump, or vice-versa, a vote for Johnson is as good as a vote for the worse mainstream candidate. Some say that your vote doesn’t matter in an obvious blue state like New York, but every vote does indeed count, and one should be aware of what they’re really voting for before they cast their ballots on November 8. If Johnson’s embarrassing slip-ups and impractical policies aren’t enough to sway you, imagine the candidate that pushed you towards the third party in the first place giving their acceptance speech on election night. Clinton and Trump may not hit the bullseye, but Gary Johnson misses the target altogether.