Most of us were focused on who finished first and who finished second, but if you look a little farther down the results list for Tuesday’s presidential race, a surprising name pops up surprisingly quickly. Roseanne Barr, who ran as the nominee of the California-based Peace and Freedom Party, managed to place sixth, winning more than 48,000 votes.* She first announced her candidacy in 2011 on The Tonight Show, stating that she was “totally serious” and wanted to “represent the tax payers.”
While one of Barr’s main positions—ending the Federal Reserve—did not make much headway this week, two other features of her platform did quite well: She advocated for the legalization of marijuana and the expansion of marriage equality. The comedian’s running mate was Cindy Sheehan, an anti-war activist whose son was killed in the Iraq War (and who, in 2005, camped outside of George W. Bush’s Texas ranch in protest).
Barr finished well behind Jill Stein and Gary Johnson (both of whom got votes from Slate staffers this week), but managed to beat out Rocky Anderson, the former Salt Lake City Mayor, by almost 15,000 votes. And she doesn’t seem too upset that she didn’t win. She’s wished President Obama congratulations, and hinted that we may not have seen the last of her as a candidate, appending her congratulatory tweet with a hashtag: #barr2016.
* This post originally stated that Barr placed fifth, as has been reported in the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed, among other places. In fact, she finished sixth, behind Virgil Goode.
