Libertarian Take on the 2026 Election

I had planned to argue that, in this election, libertarians should back Democrats for every federal race unless the Democrat is a Democratic Socialist (DSA) or the Republican candidate is one of the very rare lawmakers who oppose most or all of Trump’s harmful policies. Yet Dan Shapiro, a libertarian political thinker, beat me to the punch with a thoughtful essay on the Bleeding Heart Libertarians Substack. I largely share his core points, but I’ll add a handful of notes and cautions after quoting several key excerpts from Dan’s piece. Before diving deeper, I should mention that I generally lean toward choosing the lesser evil among viable contenders. Consequently, unlike Dan, I don’t typically vote for third-party candidates, even in calmer political climates. If you reject voting for the lesser evil as a principle, we’re disagreeing on more than this election. Still, I’d invite you to read my defense of that approach, where I argue you might even back the dreaded Queen Cersei over the far worse Sauron if that’s the only reasonable choice available.

I don’t expect this post or Dan’s to flip the outcome of the vote. They likely won’t. But they may still be useful for grappling with the major issues shaping our current political moment.

Here is a passage from Dan’s write-up:

For most of my voting life I supported the Libertarian Party when they pushed classical liberal/libertarian policies. Now, those who care about liberty and a free society—however they label themselves—should cast ballots for Democrats unless the candidate is a Democratic Socialist….

There’s been so much wrongdoing and misconduct in the Trump era that cataloging it all is tiring, but preserving “the land of the free and the home of the brave” requires focusing on the essentials. I provide links when the points I raise aren’t common knowledge or might be controversial.

Breaking the norm of a peaceful transfer of political power

January 6: Trump was the only major presidential candidate in recent memory to refuse to concede defeat. He told a crowd to “fight like hell,” and the mob stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results. The House impeached him for “incitement of insurrection,” and 57 senators, including seven Republicans, voted to convict—well short of the two-thirds threshold. After his campaign of deception and pressure on election officials failed to alter the results, he later pardoned the perpetrators of the violence.

Undermining the rule of law, eroding due process, endorsing torture

ICE: masked, secret police who abduct people and ship them to brutal facilities—where they face beatings, sexual abuse, and torture; to the Central African Republic amid a brutal civil war with severe rights violations; to Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” where many detainees were kept in cramped cages; and to Fort Bliss, Texas, where guards subjected detainees to assault and cruel treatment. There have been no meaningful consequences for this; indeed, Trump has claimed they enjoy “immunity.”

Not only were deportations conducted without notifying families or lawyers, but ICE also erased those they seized from databases, making it nearly impossible for attorneys and relatives to locate them.

ICE and CBP have forced people into cars, dragged them out, and crashed into homes without warrants. They have killed, wounded, and assaulted protesters and monitors—Alex Pretti and Renee Good among the more widely reported cases—but countless others have occurred.

There is now “expedited removal” for anyone undocumented, which eliminates court hearings. (And this is despite the fact that immigration judges belong to, and are not independent of, the executive branch.) In fact, Trump fired any immigration judge who disagreed with him or who seemed too deportation-friendly, replacing the Board of Immigration Appeals, which has denied most appeals for deportation orders.

The administration also rolled back TPS (temporary protected status) for immigrants fleeing violence and is returning them to countries the State Department already regards as unsafe—e.g., Haiti.

ICE detained immigrant parents after they dropped their children off at school, and even apprehended kids and toddlers, using them as bait—like in the Liam Conejo Ramos incident….

Disregarding the ban on using the military for policing

 

Trump dispatched Marines to Los Angeles and National Guard units to Chicago and Washington, D.C., breaching a core norm since the Founding and violating Posse Comitatus, the law restricting military policing.

Attacks on free speech and on the right to assemble

The Trump administration and FCC leadership targeted talk shows and networks for dissenting viewpoints.

As noted, ICE killed, injured, and assaulted protesters and ICE watchers.

The administration went after people for their political opinions and for publishing op-eds. A Rochester resident, David Streever, sent a critical email to the ICE director, and five months later federal agents tracked his movements and shadowed his New York City hotel as he returned from an overseas trip….

There is much more, including explanations of why most Democrats (aside from a few DSA adherents) are far less harmful than the Trump-era GOP, despite significant flaws of their own. I have also written about the misdeeds of the DSA, arguing they are comparable in danger to MAGA nationalist Republicans. Beyond the potential harm individual DSA members might cause if elected, it is wise to minimize their presence to reduce the risk of socialists overtaking the Democratic Party, just as MAGA nationalists have captured the GOP.

Here are a few additions to Dan’s case.

First, it is crucial to grasp the immense scale of Trump’s harmful and unjust immigration and trade policies. When setting priorities, the magnitude of an issue matters greatly. Even under typical administrations, immigration restrictions curtail the economic freedoms and civil liberties of American citizens (not to mention those affected immigrants). Trump’s sweeping expansion of exclusion and mass deportation worsened this dramatically. The liberty and welfare of millions hang in the balance.

Trump’s trade policies aim to impose tariff levels not seen since the Great Depression, posing a grave danger to the rule of law. Here too, we’re talking about vast consequences for the freedom and well-being of millions. Judicial review can, and has, constrained these abuses (tariffs more than immigration). Yet Congress can still act to rein in these powers, including limiting funding to ICE and other agencies complicit in wrongdoing. Congressional Democrats also plan to curtail executive tariff authority. That may not succeed while Trump remains in office, but it can lay groundwork for future progress.

Dan raises the question of whether non-DSA Democrats might be worse than the Trump-era GOP on economic liberty. This becomes straightforward when you recognize that immigration restrictions and tariffs are violations of economic liberty as well. Given their scale, Trump’s actions in this area overwhelmingly surpass the real economic policy flaws of non-DSA Democrats. And then there’s his government stake in multiple private firms—a move none of the most left-wing recent Democratic presidents attempted. It’s a stark illustration of how MAGA-style nationalists pursue economic policies with frightening similarities to socialist aims.

It’s also worth noting that a Democratic Senate could block Trump’s egregious executive and judicial nominees. I don’t want to see more Pete Hegseths or RFK Jr.-type picks. In Trump’s first term, there were some decent judicial nominees; in the second, they have been mostly lacking (Emil Bove stands out as a particularly egregious example). From a libertarian lens, I’d prefer a more typical liberal nominee for the next Supreme Court vacancy (despite their flaws) than the kind of right-wing pick Trump II is likely to appoint. Such a nominee would, at least, be less inclined to tolerate executive overreach and to trample civil liberties, and to bulldoze constitutional limits on MAGA nationalist policies, such as federalism and checks and balances. There may be no vacancies, of course. But there will be lower court openings, and those matter as well.

Lastly, I’m more hawkish than the average libertarian and believe it’s critical to counter Trump’s efforts to undermine the Western alliance and to coddle dictators who commit mass atrocities, like Vladimir Putin, and to a lesser extent, Xi Jinping. Protecting liberty globally matters, not only within a single nation, because the two are deeply linked. The Democrats (excluding a few extreme-left members) oppose this trend and could wield Congress to help check it.

In these and other respects, a Democratic-led Congress wouldn’t be able to fully halt Trump’s abuses. The executive branch has amassed too much power, often through constitutionally dubious means. But controlling nominations and budgetary power can restrain the executive to a margin, and voting against Trump’s excesses can lower the odds that future presidents imitate them.

I do have a few caveats to add to Dan’s otherwise persuasive points:

First, Dan doesn’t distinguish between federal races and state or local ones. I do. Winning federal contests is essential for pushing back against Trump’s harmful program. At the state and local levels, different priorities prevail, and Republicans often outperform Democrats on core issues like housing, state taxes, and local economic regulation. Which party fares better on these state and local concerns will vary by state. For instance, red-state Republicans tend to be more permissive on housing deregulation than blue-state Republicans, who frequently back exclusionary zoning against reform efforts. Therefore, voting Republican in some local races may be sensible, while in others it would not be.

Second, when considering the DSA issue, there can be tough questions about how to treat Democratic candidates who aren’t actual DSA members but are closely aligned with them. Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed is a notable example. He denies being a socialist, yet aligns closely with socialists like Bernie Sanders and Hasan Piker, who has praised mass murderers like Mao Zedong.

In this piece, I won’t try to settle every candidate’s race. My stance is simply that if you’re trying to determine whether a non-DSA member is truly a socialist, two telling signs are 1) whether they favor government control over much or all of the economy and 2) whether they praise socialist dictators abroad, such as Mao or Castro. If either answer is yes, that strongly suggests they might be socialists, and voting for them should be reserved for opposing the worst Republicans.

Similarly, there is a parallel calculation when identifying the few Republicans who have opposed Trump’s worst policies. Key indicators include whether they challenged his tariffs, opposed mass deportations, resisted deference to Vladimir Putin, and defended civil liberties. Unfortunately, such Republicans who consistently oppose all or most of these matters are increasingly rare, though there has been some recent uptick in GOP criticism of tariffs and Russia-related policies.

Finally, as Dan would agree, backing Democratic candidates does not require endorsement of every Democratic action, nor does it preclude criticizing Democrats when they falter or err.

Elsewhere, I have argued that libertarians, in today’s political climate, should seek collaboration with “abundance liberals.” But alliances are not identical to full agreement. The Democratic Party itself contains factions far worse than the abundance-left, and we should keep that nuance in mind while acknowledging that, in this moment, the Republicans are far worse.