Ballot evidence suggests Ron Paul planning to run as third party candidate

Mitt Romney will not be on the ballot in Washington State, if a lawsuit from the Libertarian party succeeds. Citing a legal technicality which disqualifies the republican party from being considered a “major party” due to its failure to get a senate candidate on the ballot in 2010, libertarians appear to have the law on their side which would disqualify the republican party from being able to place its candidate on state ballots in November. That would remove Romney from the ballot, which would still allow his supporters to write in his name but would likely suppress the number of votes he would receive. Such ballot shenanigans are nothing new, as the republican party is working to rig voting hours in Ohio so that only percents which traditionally vote republican can show up early. But this isn’t Obama or the democratic party trying to get Romney removed from Washington ballots. It’s the libertarian party, which is far more closely allied with the republican party. In fact, while Ron Paul routinely runs for president as a republican candidate, he’s a libertarian who simply prefers to try to change the republican party from within (or prefers the greater spotlight provided by a major party) rather than trying to run as a third party candidate. Except now the libertarian party is attempting to suppress the Romney vote, even though most libertarians would rather see a republican win than a democrat if it were a two-man race. The bizarre yet very real explanation, then, is that Ron Paul is indeed planning to run as a third party candidate…

In past presidential elections, after Ron Paul failed to win the republican nomination, he stepped aside entirely. But 2012 may be different in that Mitt Romney is behind in every national poll and continues to fall, even as his brewing tax scandal threatens to implode his entire campaign. The best evidence of Romney’s lack of momentum is that when he chose ultra-conservative hero Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate, it made no positive impact on the polls whatsoever – a historical rarity which suggests he’s out of gas. This may have given Ron Paul second thoughts about running as a third candidate after all, and the sudden libertarian attempt to get Romney removed from the ballot may be the strongest clue yet…

There’s little chance that Ron Paul would win, as he’s a radical whose policies include cutting all off nearly government services and in fact scrapping several core government agencies in an extremist plan which falls somewhere between Romney’s rich-only policies and pure anarchy. But he does have a pack of enthusiastic supporters (most of whom have confused him for being a harmless old uncle type are completely clueless as to what he stands for) who would vote for him for president in a heartbeat, and most of whom would be changing their vote from Romney to Ron Paul in the process. This would create a scenario which would increase Obama’s chances of winning, similar to when conservative Ross Perot ran as a third candidate in 1992 and took votes away from republican George Bush which helped democrat Bill Clinton to win. So the matter comes down to whether Ron Paul would be willing to cost Romney any chance of winning, for the sake of getting his own name out there and picking up ten or fifteen percent of the vote which he may believe could raise his profile enough to help him perhaps pick up the republican nomination in 2016. Then again, if Ron Paul and the libertarian party believe that Romney has already lost this election, then he may see no harm in running as a third party candidate. And getting Romney removed from the ballot in an entire state would be a great way to help Ron Paul’s chances of making a beachhead. As difficult to believe that Ron Paul would indeed run as a third candidate against the republican nominee, the only other explanation is that Ron Paul’s libertarian party is trying to get Romney removed from the ballot for no reason other than to ensure that Obama gets reelected.