Jo Jorgensen

Jo Jorgensen (born May 1, 1957) is an American libertarian political activist and academic.

Jorgensen was born on May 1, 1957, in Libertyville, Illinois, and raised in neighboring Grayslake.

She is an alumna of Grayslake Central High School.

Her grandparents were Danish immigrants.

Jorgensen received a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology at Baylor University in 1979 and a master's degree in business administration at Southern Methodist University in 1980.

This was the Libertarian Party's best performance since 1980.

Jorgensen first ran for office in the 1992 United States House of Representatives election.

She ran as a Libertarian to represent SC-04, in northwest South Carolina, against incumbent Democrat Liz J. Patterson and Republican challenger Bob Inglis.

Jorgensen placed third with 2.2% of the total vote.

She was previously the party's nominee for vice president in the 1996 election, as Harry Browne's running mate.

She is a full-time lecturer of psychology at Clemson University.

Before the 1996 United States presidential election, the Libertarian Party nominated Jorgensen for vice president, as Harry Browne's running mate.

She was nominated on the first ballot with 92% of the vote.

She participated in a vice-presidential debate televised nationwide by C-SPAN on October 22, along with Herbert Titus of the Taxpayers Party and Mike Tompkins of the Natural Law Party.

Browne and Jorgensen, who were on the ballot in all 50 states and D.C., received 485,759 votes, finishing in fifth place with 0.5% of the popular vote.

She began her career at IBM working with computer systems, leaving to become part owner and President of Digitech, Inc. She received a Ph.D. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Clemson University in 2002.

She has taught full-time at Clemson since 2006.

The same day, Jorgensen's supporters repurposed Hillary Clinton's unofficial 2016 campaign slogan, "I'm With Her".

The slogan trended on Twitter that night and made national headlines.

She registered minimal support in opinion polling.

On August 13, 2019, Jorgensen filed with the FEC to run for the Libertarian presidential nomination in the 2020 election.

She formally launched her campaign at the November 2, 2019, Libertarian Party of South Carolina convention before participating in the South Carolina Libertarian presidential debate the same day.

In the non-binding Libertarian primaries, Jorgensen was second in the cumulative popular vote, winning two of the 12 primaries.

Jorgensen was the Libertarian Party's nominee for president of the United States in the 2020 election, in which she finished third in the popular vote with about 1.9 million votes, 1.2% of the national total.

On May 23, 2020, Jorgensen became the Libertarian presidential nominee, making her the first woman to be the Libertarian nominee and the only female 2020 presidential candidate with ballot access to over 270 electoral votes.

Spike Cohen, a mostly unknown figure in mainstream politics, was nominated for vice president.

Jorgensen released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees in September 2020 in response to the vacancy on the Court created by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death.

Jorgensen received more than 1.8 million votes in the general election, about 1.2% of the national total.

After the election, several media outlets speculated that Jorgensen's candidacy resulted in vote splitting significant enough to be decisive in Democrat Joe Biden's victory over Republican Donald Trump, pointing to Jorgensen's vote share being higher than Biden's margin of victory over Trump in multiple battleground states.

While many pundits claimed that Trump would have won had she not run, others believed that many Jorgensen voters would have abstained from voting, as opposed to voting for Trump.

Jorgensen supports a free-market healthcare system financed by individual spending accounts that could keep any savings, which she believes would increase healthcare providers' incentive to compete by meeting consumer demand for low-cost services.

She opposes single-payer healthcare, calling it "disastrous".

Jorgensen supports replacing Social Security with individual retirement accounts.

In the final debate of the 2020 primaries, candidate Jacob Hornberger accused Jorgensen of "support[ing] the welfare state through Social Security and Medicare".

In response, she called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme".

She then expressed the desire to allow people to opt out of the program on her first day in office, while emphasizing the constitutional inability of a president to unilaterally end the program without Congress's support, as well as the need for the government to fulfill existing Social Security obligations.

Under Jorgensen's plan, those who opt out would put 6.2% of their payroll taxes in individual retirement accounts and receive prorated Social Security benefits for existing contributions as zero-coupon bonds for retirement.

Jorgensen opposes federal civil asset forfeiture and qualified immunity.

She opposes the war on drugs and supports abolishing drug laws, promising to pardon all nonviolent drug offenders.

She has urged the demilitarization of police.