Gary Johnson 2016 presidential campaign
Gary Johnson received 4,489,233 total votes and 3.27% of the national vote, coming third in the nation and setting a record for the Libertarian Party's best ever electoral result in the process. In terms of the Libertarian Party's electoral history, he bested Ed Clark's previous record-setting 1.06% percent of the total vote in the 1980 presidential election, as well as his own record-setting 1,275,923 votes in the 2012 presidential election. His share of the national vote was also the highest for a third-party candidate since Ross Perot's 8.4% showing in the 1996 presidential election. The highest percentage of votes received by Johnson was in New Mexico (where he was governor from 1995-2003), where he received 9.3%.
1980 United States presidential election
The Clark–Koch ticket received 921,128 votes (1.1% of the total nationwide). This was the highest overall number of votes earned by a Libertarian candidate until the 2012 election, when Gary Johnson and James P. Gray became the first Libertarian ticket to earn more than a million votes, albeit with a lower overall vote percentage than Clark–Koch. It remained the highest percentage of popular votes a Libertarian Party candidate received in a presidential race until Johnson and William Weld became the first Libertarian ticket to receive more than 3 percent of the popular vote in 2016. His strongest support was in Alaska, where he came in third place with 11.7% of the vote, finishing ahead of independent candidate John Anderson and receiving almost half as many votes as Jimmy Carter.