1980 Presidential Campaign
In 1979 he won the Libertarian Party presidential nomination at the party's convention in Los Angeles, California. He published a book on his programs, entitled "A New Beginning". The book's introduction was by Eugene McCarthy. During the campaign, Clark positioned himself as a peace candidate and emphasized both large budget and tax cuts, as well as outreach to liberals and progressives unhappy with the resumption of Selective Service registration and the arms race with the Soviet Union. Clark was endorsed by the Peoria Journal Star of Peoria, Illinois.
When asked in a television interview to summarize libertarianism, Clark used the phrase "low-tax liberalism," causing some consternation among traditional libertarian theorists, most notably Murray Rothbard. Clark's running to the center marked the start of a split within the Libertarian Party between a moderate faction led by Ed Crane and a radical faction led by Rothbard that eventually came to a head in 1983, with the moderate faction walking out of the party convention after the nomination for the 1984 presidential race went to David Bergland.
Ed Clark's running mate in 1980 was David H. Koch of Koch Industries, who pledged part of his personal fortune to the campaign for the vice-presidential nomination, enabling the Clark/Koch ticket to largely self-fund and run national television advertising.
Clark received 921,128 votes (1.06% of the total nationwide); the highest number and percentage of popular votes a Libertarian Party candidate had ever received in a presidential race up to that point. His strongest support was in Alaska, where he came in third place with 11.66% of the vote, finishing ahead of independent candidate John Anderson and receiving almost half as many votes as Jimmy Carter. Clark's record for most votes won by a Libertarian presidential candidate stood for 32 years until it was broken by Gary Johnson in 2012. His Libertarian percentage record of 1.06% still stands, ranking ahead of Johnson's 0.97%.
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