What Tulsi Gabbard’s journey says about Democrats’ fringe voter problem

The first time Donald Trump captured the Republican presidential nomination, Tulsi Gabbard and the Libertarian Party agreed: He had to lose.

Gabbard, then a second-term Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, campaigned for Bernie Sanders until Hillary Clinton beat him; after that, she was reluctantly With Her. Libertarians nominated a ticket of two ex-Republicans, one of them who spent the campaign’s final week “vouching for Hillary Clinton.”

That won’t happen again. The LP, run since 2022 by the right-leaning Mises Caucus, announced on Wednesday that Trump would address its national nominating convention in D.C, an act of solidarity with a candidate who the deep state hates. Gabbard released “For Love of Country,” a plea for Americans to join her and quit the “Democrat Party,” which, among other sins, libeled and mistreated the Republican nominee.

“Voters saw through the lies about candidate Trump and elected him president in 2016,” Gabbard writes, “despite the Washington establishment’s efforts to destroy him in order to get the queen of warmongers, Hillary Clinton, into the White House.”

The ruptures in Joe Biden’s 2020 coalition — lagging Black support, protests over Israel’s war in Gaza — have given Trump the best start to a general election in any of his presidential campaigns. All year, he’s benefited from voter nostalgia about the pre-COVID economy, and Republican anger at the “lawfare” waged against him in courts.

Gabbard and the Libertarians are highlighting another Trump advantage — the migration of disgruntled, anti-establishment voters who don’t trust mainstream news outlets and don’t fit comfortably on the ideological spectrum. And while it’s difficult to tell how many votes they actually command, they’ve developed a thriving ecosystem to get their message out to like-minded individuals at the fringes of party politics — one that Trump’s orbit is very attuned to.

“If Libertarians join me and the Republican Party, where we have many Libertarian views, the election won’t even be close,” Trump told Semafor in a statement on Wednesday. On Thursday, after Trump delivered pizzas to a New York City Fire Department, Gabbard told Fox News that the GOP nominee was “with the people,” battling “weaponized” federal agencies that Democrats were using to hurt him.

Outside of Fox News, where Gabbard has been a paid contributor, her memoir has been pretty well ignored by mainstream media. Her evolution from conservative to progressive to conservative again was covered closely and skeptically; by the end of 2022, when she quit the Democratic Party and spoke at a Nashville rally to ban gender-affirming care for minors, Democrats clocked her as an opportunist with changeable beliefs.

Still, Gabbard is the most prominent figure in a Bernie 2016 diaspora with plenty of social media influence. The campaign to beat Hillary Clinton brought together some people whose issues — shrinking America’s foreign military footprint, freeing Julian Assange, demolishing neoliberalism — weren’t going to flourish in the Democratic Party. And while Sanders has continued to urge votes disaffected by the Biden administration to stay inside the Democratic tent to hold off Trump, many of these figures are happier setting fire to it. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and aggressive pro-labor and pro-industry policies haven’t changed that.

That includes Nick Brana, a 2016 Sanders delegate-hunter now working to get ballot access for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Jimmy Dore, a YouTuber with 1.3 million subscribers who went from spitting at Alex Jones to hosting him; and Jackson Hinkle, a pro-Russia and anti-Israel Gen Z influencer with 2.6 million followers on X. American support for Ukraine, which moved Gabbard to leave her old party for good, wasn’t an issue in 2016. It’s a unifying post-left issue now, making Biden’s defeat not just desirable but necessary for human survival, they argue, echoing Trump’s campaign trail boasts that he will stop “World War III.”

These ideas haven’t mattered much in state and congressional elections, where Democrats have done well since 2016. Gabbard campaigned for Republicans in some of those races, but her focus is national. She’s said she’d be “honored” to serve as Trump’s vice president, after “respectfully” declining an offer to run with Kennedy.

In “For Love of Country,” Gabbard doesn’t explicitly endorse Trump. She explains why he has to win. Democrats are “so terrified of our having the freedom to choose our next president — especially one who would have the courage to hold them accountable for their crimes — that they are willing to completely undermine our democracy.” Like Kennedy, and like the Libertarian Party, she characterizes Trump’s legal problems as maneuvers by Democrats to destroy their enemy.

“Look at President Trump, who’s facing over 300 years in prison because of Espionage Act charges, and the double standard that’s there,” Gabbard told PragerU in a promotional interview for the book. “Look at President Biden and Hillary Clinton, all these other people who have done the very same things that he is being accused of.”

A reader of her memoir, and a close listener to her media tour, might be perplexed about why Gabbard ever joined the Democrats. “It seemed to be an inclusive party that understood and appreciated the importance of upholding religious liberty, free expression, and welcoming people of different religions, beliefs, and views,” she writes, before recapping her father’s 2004 campaign for Congress as a Republican. She was outraged when Ed Case, the Democrat who easily beat Mike Gabbard, posed “offensive questions about his religion, beliefs, and practices.” She doesn’t say what those questions were; her father was the leader of the state’s campaign against same-sex marriage, opposed by what Gabbard, at the time, called “homosexual extremist supporters of Ed Case.”

That early positioning didn’t slow her rise to Congress, where D.C. Democrats were so impressed by her military service, youth, and charisma that they made her vice chair of the party. Gabbard used that prominence to oppose military strikes on Syria; in early 2016, she quit the DNC to endorse Sanders, campaigning with him in primary states and nominating him at the national convention. But in “For Love of Country,” Gabbard doesn’t mention the 2016 Sanders campaign at all, and in her media tour, she’s described her elevation by the party as a cynical move by elites who wanted to control her.

“All of these things very much fit the mold and the talking point of identity politics,” Gabbard told PragerU. “Alright: We’re gonna dangle all the trinkets in front of her and show her what this world could look like, if she wants to be a part of the team.”

To Democrats, the debate about Gabbard — whether she was an interloper, or the future of the progressive rebirth that began in 2016 — was settled in 2020. She sees it differently, arguing she ran a presidential campaign that, in her view, was undermined at key moments by lies and censors. Her campaign’s Google Ads buy gets suspended during the first primary debate; not a “mere coincidence,” but a sign that the company “interfered with our efforts to reach voters” (Google and a federal judge disagreed). Gabbard encounters a South Carolina Democrat who wonders if she’s “in league with Putin,” and “almost had tears in her eyes” when the candidate says that she loves America so much she enlisted to defend it.

By the time she leaves Congress, introducing a doomed message bill to “protect women’s sports,” Gabbard has nothing good to say about her party. She’s not entirely on the anti-war left, telling Fox that the protests breaking out on university quads are essentially “pro-Hamas.” She’s joined the ragtag coalition of free-thinkers who wish that Democrats were a little less paranoid and evil; they could have gone that way in 2016, but because they didn’t, they have to root for Trump.

“I’ve known many strong, tough people in my life, but I can’t think of a single one who could not only withstand these pressures without crumbling, but actually choose to keep fighting against the entire Washington establishment swamp,” Gabbard writes. “Do you think Joe Biden could handle this? I know Joe Biden and used to consider him a friend. He would crumble under just 5 percent of the pressure, stress, and attacks that Trump has endured.”

The LP’s decision to host Trump got enough blowback that the party’s national chair, Angela McArdle, recorded a video to explain and defend it. Not only would Trump bring attention to the party, and not only could Libertarians pressure him — it was selling “Free Assange” shirts with a Trump icon on them — but it needed to stand against efforts to disqualify him.

“When a person is kicked off the ballot for inciting an insurrection or being radical, it can hurt us, very dramatically,” McArdle explained. “When we see someone else potentially get kicked off the ballot for not agreeing with election results, complaining about the federal government, so on and so forth — that looks awfully close to some of the views that we have about the legitimacy of the federal government.” In an interview with podcaster and former Libertarian candidate Austin Petersen, McArdle added that Trump is “a much better person and president than Joe Biden.”

Gary Johnson, the LP’s presidential nominee in 2012 and 2016, told Semafor that he was fine with the Trump convention invite.

“The surprise is that he’s actually coming,” he said. “There’s some solidarity around what he’s facing. I’ve talked to all my accountant friends, and they have the same question: Where does $400 million in damages come from?”

• In The New York Times, Compact magazine co-founder Matthew Schmitz argues that Trump’s defiance in the face of investigations and indictments has given him the brand of an “outlaw hero, a figure of defiance with deep roots in American culture who exposes the injustices and hypocrisies of a corrupt system.”
• Some Trump allies are worried the anti-establishment vote could become a threat to his own chances if it coalesces around RFK Jr. Trump has personally attacked him in recent weeks, calling his campaign a “wasted protest vote,” while others in his orbit work to highlight the longtime Democrat’s more liberal stances.