The Libertarian Party of Georgia has nominated Chase Oliver, the party’s 2024 presidential nominee, to run for governor in 2026. Georgia Libertarians also endorsed candidates for several other statewide offices appearing on the upcoming ballot.
In a January 17 update over social media, the Libertarian Party of Georgia said its members formally nominated Oliver during the organization’s 2026 state convention. Delegates met over the weekend for the event, themed “Rebels Over Rulers,” with the business portion taking place on Saturday. That same day, the party also held its regularly scheduled even-year leadership elections and selected state delegates for the 2026 Libertarian National Convention, with Georgia receiving 31 available seats this year.
Independent Political Report has reached out to Oliver for comment regarding his gubernatorial campaign and the issues he plans to prioritize. This article will be updated when a response is received.
Oliver was most recently the Libertarian Party’s 2024 presidential nominee, alongside Mike ter Maat as his running mate. The ticket received 650,126 votes nationwide, including 20,684 votes in Georgia. Prior to his presidential run, Oliver was the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate in 2022, running against Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker. He was also the Libertarian nominee in the 2020 special election for Georgia’s 5th Congressional District.
In addition to Oliver, the party also announced several other statewide nominations, with Allen Buckley running for U.S. Senate and Ted Metz running for Georgia Secretary of State. It did not indicate whether it plans to field a candidate for lieutenant governor, which is elected separately from the gubernatorial race.
The party has also endorsed Andrew Underwood in his bid for the special election in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, which it publicized on social media several days ahead of the convention.
The petition requirement for the Libertarian Party of Georgia to regain the level of recognized party status they had requires 72,680 valid signatures. The independent candidate petition in Georgia for Governor requires 72,083 valid signatures. Tge deadline for both petitions is July 14th. Georgia passed an easier ballot access requirement a few years ago but it only applies to presidential candidates. If the Libertarian Party of Georgia was able to do one of these petitions it would make sense to do the minor party recognition status petition (which would only allow them to place statewide candidates on the ballot, there are seperate petitions for district office and county and city office candidates), but reality is that the party is nowhere near in the shape to realistically do this. The cost of obtaining ballot access has increased a lot in recent years due to inflation and due to the on average increased difficulty level of gathering petitions (which has occurred across the entire country and is due to a variety of factors). Competition between other political parties, candidates and ballot issue committees conducting petition drives also drives up prices, and we are currently in the busy part of the petition cycle (the busy cycle started this past fall), and it will only get busier for the rest of this election cycle. Georgia allows a year or longer to gather petition signatures (at least for the party status petition, I am not sure about the independent candidate petition). I heard that the LP of GA has had a volunteer petition signature gathering effort going for several months but they do not have many signatures. If they had been able to get paid petition circulators going there a year or more prior to the deadline, and supplemented this with a bigger volunteer effort, they could have saved a significant amount of money. Given that we are in the busy petition cycle now the cost of getting experienced paid petition circulators to go to Georgia to work has risen. They could try hiring people with no experience but the problem with this is that it is very difficult to find people who will do the job properly and who will be reliable and who will not quit, and this also would not be cheap. The old expression, “Good help is hard to find,” rings true here, as does the old expression, “You get what you pay for,” in terms of quality if one thinks they can hire all inexperienced people and pay them a lower rate than what it would cost to hire experienced people.
Obtaining ballot access in Georgia would be very expensive, so unless one or more wealthy donors steps forward with some very big donations I do not see it happening.
Contra Winger, given the 2024 presidential nomination, isn’t the big question whether or not Georgia Mises Mice are big enough to launch their own independent candidate or else endorse the Republican nominee?
LPGA is already working on that fundraising and petitioning; they started immediately after their convention ended.
Best wishes to the Libertarian Party of Georgia and Chase Oliver!
Congratulations Chase!
Now, the big question is whether the campaign can raise enough money to do the statewide petition to get the party back on the ballot.