MANCHESTER, N.H. — The presidential nominee for the nation’s third-largest political party will be on the ballot when Granite Staters cast their votes Tuesday, but instead of supporting his candidacy, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire is publicly insulting him.
In a vulgar post from its official account on X last month, the party questioned nominee Chase R. Oliver’s comprehension of libertarianism, called him a “leftist” infiltrator, and disparaged him with a homophobic slur.
Such incendiary rhetoric has become standard for the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire. A different post on X last month said anyone who murders Vice President Kamala D. Harris “would be an American hero.”
The bombast and smears reflect a power struggle between old-school Libertarians and the party’s ascendant far-right wing both within New Hampshire and at the national level, as factions clash over what libertarianism should mean. On a scale not seen before, prominent Libertarian Party leaders are allying with the MAGA movement this election season and actively supporting former president Donald J. Trump.
Although the presidential race in New Hampshire, where independents comprise the state’s largest voting bloc, is tighter than in any other New England state, political observers generally don’t expect Libertarians to determine who wins the “Live Free Or Die” state’s four Electoral College votes.
In 2016, when Trump lost New Hampshire by 0.4 percentage points, the Libertarian ticket carried 4.1 percent of the state’s presidential vote. But in 2020, when Trump lost New Hampshire by 7.3 points, the Libertarian ticket carried just 1.6 percent. This year, most polls show Harris leading Trump in the state by 4 points or more.
Still, the Libertarian quarreling illustrates how political dynamics have kept evolving amid Trump’s third bid for the White House.
Oliver said the state party’s online activity mars the public image of an organization whose core principles are peaceful.
“It’s a damn shame that the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire allows that to be their representative on social media, where so many people can maybe get their first glimpse of libertarianism,” Oliver said. “It certainly turns people away.”
Oliver has already made a political name for himself in his home state of Georgia, a presidential battleground, where he secured enough votes in the 2022 race for US Senate to prompt a runoff between the Democratic and Republican candidates.
Oliver will appear on the ballot Tuesday in all seven battleground states, where polling indicates Harris and Trump are locked in tight contests.
Oliver, 39, who fully came out as gay at about 16 years old, said he was first introduced to the Libertarian Party in 2010 at an LGBTQ Pride event in Atlanta, where John Monds, the Georgia party’s gubernatorial nominee, asked him what was most important to him as a voter.
Oliver told Monds how he had been an antiwar Democrat disappointed by President Barack Obama’s failure to uphold his promises to end wars and close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp — and he said Monds replied, “Welcome home.”
But these days, the message from some Libertarians seems to be one of exclusion rather than inclusion.
While consternation over the New Hampshire party’s social media activity has been ongoing for three years, the present chaos is broader, as leaders of the Libertarian National Committee feud openly ahead of the election.
Angela E. McArdle, the committee’s elected chair, welcomed Trump to speak at the group’s convention in May. Afterward, she endorsed Oliver’s candidacy while donning a red clown nose and called on Libertarians to back Oliver in blue states to “pull votes from the left” and help Trump deliver on libertarian priorities.
In June, the New Hampshire party rejected Oliver’s candidacy and said it wouldn’t offer him any formal support.
That’s not to say Libertarian support for Trump in New Hampshire is universal.
Nicholas J. Sarwark, 45, an attorney who chaired the Libertarian National Committee from 2014 until 2020 and now lives in Manchester, N.H., called Trump “a unique and somewhat malignant force” and said he’s “cautiously optimistic” that Harris will defeat Trump at the ballot box. Sarwark said he plans to vote for Oliver, not Harris.
“I’m still a Libertarian,” he said. “The fact that a bunch of people who aren’t Libertarians have taken over the party and called themselves Libertarians does not mean that I change who I am.”
Sarwark said the roots of the Libertarian Party’s schism can be traced back at least to 2017, when white supremacists who marched at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., chanted “blood and soil” and other neo-Nazi slogans.
Sarwark and fellow leaders responded at the time by condemning racism and bigotry as conflicting with the Libertarian Party’s principles. They pushed back directly against a speech in which Jeff Deist — the then-president of the Mises Institute, an Alabama-based think tank that advocates “a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order” — argued that the “blood and soil” concept is compatible with libertarianism.
Amid the ensuing conflict, Michael Heise of Pennsylvania formed the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus, which prefers a more radical approach than the party took in 2016, when former GOP governors Gary E. Johnson of New Mexico and William F. Weld of Massachusetts served as the Libertarian presidential and vice presidential nominees.
Mises Caucus Chairman Aaron Harris credited McArdle for leading a 2024 convention in which Libertarians notched several wins, including promises from Trump to name at least one libertarian to his cabinet and to free Ross W. Ulbricht, creator of the dark web’s Silk Road site, from prison.
Aaron Harris wrote to caucus members in June that the Libertarian Party was, for the first time in its history, “an actual force in national politics — despite having a no-name candidate who will likely do great harm to our brand.”
One of the loudest Mises Caucus-affiliated voices in New Hampshire is that of Jeremy Kauffman, 40, whose social media activity has provoked ire with caustic commentary on race, gender, and more.
Kauffman recently defended Deist’s 2017 “blood and soil” speech, said he will vote for Trump, and called Oliver “a gay race communist.”
Kauffman contends winning elections isn’t the Libertarian Party’s purpose. Rather, the party exists to control what “libertarian” means, he explained on X, calling for right-wing libertarians to prevent left-wing libertarians from controlling public perception.
Kauffman has openly called for “less democracy” and encouraged those who share his views to adopt public policies and interpersonal practices that make New Hampshire inhospitable to Democrats, leftists, families with transgender children, and others. He has called for libertarians to become “the ruling class” in New Hampshire.
“It is us, and only us, who are fit to have any political or cultural authority in New Hampshire,” he wrote. “We are the moral ones, and those who disagree must either change, conform, or leave.”
Oliver said Kauffman’s promotion of inhospitality is “completely stupid.”
Sarwark, the former LNC chair, called Kauffman’s ideas “pretty fascist.”
Kauffman did not respond to requests for comment.
Ryan Bloodworth, interim chair of the LPNH executive committee, did not answer questions concerning the party’s communications.
Justin F. O’Donnell, 35, who served as Kauffman’s campaign manager in 2022, said the Libertarian party is in the midst of “an identity crisis.”
O’Donnell said he spoke with regular people while collecting signatures this summer to put Libertarian candidates on the ballot and realized how much resentment there is toward the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire over its messaging.
O’Donnell, who plans to vote for Oliver, said Libertarians should persuade people to join them, not drive groups they dislike away.
“We’re the ones who are supposed to be the good neighbors who show that our policies work and can improve people’s lives, not make it so uncomfortable that people flee,” he said.
Amanda Gokee of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Steven Porter can be reached at steven.porter@globe.com. Follow him @reporterporter.