This Guy Just Threw the Senate Election Into Chaos From His Basement
Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s election party totally slapped. The DJ played “Da Butt” and drinks flowed in a ritzy downtown Atlanta hotel with a lobby so futuristic it looked like a set from Star Wars.
But it soon became clear there would be no winner in the Georgia Senate race. Both Warnock and his GOP rival, former football star Herschel Walker, fell short of the 50 percent threshold necessary to avoid a December runoff.
I was hanging out at Warnock’s elaborate election night party when I realized I’d been missing an important part of the story: I wanted to hear from the guy who helped make a runoff necessary. That would be Chase Oliver, the 37-year-old Libertarian candidate who locked up 2 percent of the vote.
So I reached out to Oliver to see if he had a moment to explain himself. He invited me to come over the next morning.
He turned out to be a former punk-rocker from the Atlanta suburbs who likes to call himself “armed and gay.” He ran a DIY, dirt-cheap campaign out of his basement, and it may have just thrown the Senate election, and control of the entire chamber, into chaos for a month. He loves science fiction and fantasy, and he hates America’s two-party duopoly. Now, he wants to get involved in the runoff as an activist, and try to get the mainstream candidates to address libertarian issues.
Oliver secured over 80,000 votes in a race where the front-runners are separated by about 20,000. That means if his backers all picked one side, they might even be able to swing the runoff, too.
Vice News, 10/11/22