Justin Amash Says He Won't Run For President
Credit: Getty Images
May 16, 2020

This is probably good news for Joe Biden, as Libertarians do have pockets of support in some states, one of which is Michigan. If presidential elections were decided rationally by popular vote it wouldn't matter, but with the eccentricities of the Electoral College it could have mattered a lot more than it should.

Source: Washington Post

Rep. Justin Amash, the Michigan congressman who left the Republican Party last year, said on Twitter that he will not run for president this year after saying last month that he would seek the Libertarian Party’s nomination.

“After much reflection, I’ve concluded that circumstances don’t lend themselves to my success as a candidate for president this year, and therefore I will not be a candidate,” he tweeted.

Amash said that the polarization in the country, as well as the challenges to campaigning posed by the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing, meant it was not the right year for a successful third-party bid.

Amash, 40, was elected in the 2010 tea party wave and grew increasingly distant from Republicans as the decade went on, fending off a primary challenge from a business-backed conservative in 2014. He was deeply critical of Trump’s 2016 campaign, and even more critical of what the GOP did with control of the legislative and executive branches.

Amash then went into a long series of tweets spelling out the reasons for his decision, which nobody really gives a damn about, just so long as he's not trying to gum up the works and help Trump with a second term.

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