Sad to say, the best-qualified presidential candidate in the race, this year — Gary Johnson — pulled just a bit more than one million votes and around one percent of the vote. "Best qualified" I say, since a succesful and popular two-term governor strikes me as having a better resumé than a single-term governor or a half-term senator who put in a piss-poor performance in the White House. That said, Gary Johnson has pulled the most votes in raw numbers of any Libertarian presidential candidate and, as I drain a bottle of truly mediocre shiraz, just shy of the high-water 1.1 percentage of the vote won by Ed Clark in 1980.
As I check Google's election results (far more comprehensive than any offered by the traditional media, by the way), Johnson has 1,012,617 votes, and exactly one percent of the vote. That's in contrast to Barack Obama's 52,796,274 and 49.6 percent of the vote, and Mitt Romney's 52,197,635 and 49.0 percent of the vote.
You'll note that the victor, Mr. Obama, has so far won a plurality rather than a majority. If that holds, and we can attribute it even in part to Johnson's vote total, I'd say that's a victory of its own.
Update: Unfortunately, the plurality turned into a very slight majority overnight. Team Blue members rallied sufficient numbers around their chieftain to push him over 50%.
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