Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson probably won’t get the 11% of the national popular vote that a recent Monmouth University Poll trial heat shows him getting against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But he’ll almost certainly smash the record for vote share earned by any Libertarian Party candidates for president. That record is 1.06% and was set in 1980 by the ticket of Atlantic Richfield Co. lawyer Ed Clark and David H. Koch (yes, that David H. Koch) as his running mate. Clark had drawn 5.46% as the party’s candidate for governor of California two years earlier, when tax-cutting fever made its first prominent political appearance in the form of the Proposition 13 ballot measure. The publicity-shy Koch was on the ticket as the money man. As Jane Mayer points out in her recent book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, the loophole opened by the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo campaign finance decision meant that as a candidate Koch “could lavish as much of his personal fortune as
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