Analyzing Chase Oliver 2022 Senate Results
May give us a glimpse into where his 2024 support will come from
Following Chase Oliver’s Presidential nomination victory at the Libertarian National Convention, Chair Angela McArdle announced she supports Oliver in blue states to help Trump defeat Biden.
Without getting into ethical considerations and potential fiduciary violations of a national party Chair de facto supporting a nominee of another party, I wanted to test McArdle’s belief that Trump will take a majority of support from Joe Biden.
I examined the CBS News exit polling in Oliver’s 2022 campaign for the U.S. Senate where he threw the Georgia Senate race into a runoff election by keeping the Democrats and Republicans from receiving a majority of the vote.
Key Findings:
Chase did best among male voters
Chase did best among voters under the age of 40
Chase did best among college-educated voters.
Independent men and women were more likely to vote for Chase than Democrats or Republicans were
Here is where I question McArdle’s analysis or perhaps lack thereof:
Not only did Oliver gain the most support among Republicans over Democrats, but in the election for Georgia Governor (held on the same day), Oliver took more votes from the supporters of the Republican Governor.
The same thing happened in the Secretary of State’s race where Oliver took more votes from supporters of Republican Brad Raffensperger than he did the Democrat.
What might give McArdle’s analysis some credibility is that the margin in the general election and the runoff did increase in favor of the Democrat from 0.9% to 2.8%. It is possible that Independent voters favoring Chase went to the Democrat.
I don’t find that to be a compelling case as there were other candidates on the ballot increasing Republican turnout in the general election that were not on the runoff ballot (See big victories for Raffenperger and Kemp above).
Chase received 2.1% in the general election and the Democrat won with 2.8% in the runoff election. There were also 394,000 fewer votes in the runoff than the general. Oliver received 81,000 votes in the general.
The general election and the runoff were very different elections.
So will Chase hurt Joe Biden or Donald Trump more? I don’t think we can for certain conclude either way. I specifically sought after exit polling as polling data for third-party candidates is historically unreliable.
Based on Chase’s support among first-time and Independent voters, I would say that much of his support will come from people who won’t vote for Trump or Biden.
He does appear to hurt the Republicans with their base the most, but where will the independent swing state voters lean this year? Will it be similar to Georgia?
A national party chair, who doesn’t set or control strategy for the campaign, trying to assert that Chase will take more votes from one candidate or another is a stretch.
And I can’t close without saying, if your strategy is to help Trump you would probably want to target swing states and not safe blue Biden states. Unless she believes Chase could do well enough to cause solid blue states to flip.