The First 100 Days of an Eric Mulder Presidency: What the Record Suggests

Photo: Robert J. Boser EditorASC, via Wikimedia Commons

01 The record and the scenario

Eric Mulder is the Libertarian Party's 2026 nominee for Governor of Colorado, selected by delegates at the state convention and on the November 3, 2026 ballot against Republican Victor Marx and Democrat Phil Weiser. He is a U.S. Army veteran who served from 2010 to 2016, including in Afghanistan as a chaplain's assistant; a small business owner; a former security guard; and a longtime Aurora resident who has served on the city's Veterans Affairs Commission and Civic Engagement Commission, per Ballotpedia and his campaign. Inside the Libertarian Party of Arapahoe County he has been outreach director, chair, and inaugural secretary, and he has served as state fundraising director and vice chair, per LPedia.

His electoral record is a decade of minor-party persistence: a 2018 run for Arapahoe County Sheriff that drew 5.34 percent (13,923 votes, third of three); an application among fourteen for a 2018 Aurora mayoral vacancy; and a 2022 U.S. House run in Colorado's 6th District that drew 1.97 percent (5,531 votes) against incumbent Jason Crow. He has described the third-party calculus to Colorado Public Radio plainly: “when you're running as a third party candidate, it's primarily about 'win if you can.' But if you can't win, change the conversation.”

The governing philosophy he publishes is built on three stated principles — Affordability, Accountability, and Abundance — with a distinctive framing: “Programs should be judged by the outcomes they deliver, not the dollars they spend,” and “Government's job is to create the conditions for success, not stand in its way.” In his 2024 Ballotpedia survey he named Jared Polis and Justin Amash — officials he does “not always agree with” — as examples worth following for working with others while standing by beliefs, and praised Hunter S. Thompson and Vermon Supreme for using “theatrics and satire to bring attention to important issues.” His stated first principle of officeholding is that “every vote an elected official casts they need to be prepared to explain to their constituents.”

This article does not predict that Eric Mulder will become president. It examines how the individual's documented positions and record could translate into executive priorities if placed in presidential office.

Analysis — not prediction. N43 and Hermes AI grounds every scenario in the documented record as of September 21, 2026; where evidence is incomplete we say so.

02 Day One: what a president could do alone

Mulder's published agenda is unusually process-heavy for a minor-party candidate — and the first honest observation about a hypothetical presidency is that his most policy-specific items, ranked-choice voting and open primaries, are legislative, not executive. What a president controls on Day One is directives, personnel, clemency and the terms of federal grants. The Mulder record maps onto that toolkit as follows.

Likely Day-One Actions (unilateral)

• Surveillance directives. He is “against government operated Flock cameras,” per the Libertarian Party of Colorado's July 2026 press release, and told CPR he opposes “the overwhelming presence of Flock cameras.” A presidential translation: an executive order requiring warrants for federal access to plate-reader and location-broker data, an inventory of federal camera programs, and conditions on the grant programs that fund state and local networks.
• Outcome-metrics directives. His central accountability idea — programs judged by outcomes, not dollars — is implementable at the start: OMB guidance instructing agencies to report program performance measures in budget justifications, and a public dashboard of what each program measurably delivers.
• Clemency and enforcement priorities. A veteran with a criminal-justice-reform record could direct DOJ deprioritization and begin clemency review; the specific populations are a matter of record-free inference and are flagged as such, not invented.
• Veterans-affairs service expansion. His commission work suggests a Day One order directing Veterans Affairs to expand community-based engagement — the model he practiced in Aurora — within existing authority.

Actions the Candidate Could Not Do Alone

• Ranked-choice voting for federal elections — his most-cited reform — requires an act of Congress; the president has no procedural vote.
• Open primaries nationwide — state election law plus federal legislation where federal offices are concerned; mostly not a presidential lever at all.
• Strict legislative record-keeping mandates — Article I of the Constitution leaves Congress's records to Congress.
• State-level Flock-camera bans — under the anti-commandeering doctrine, Washington may attach conditions to funds but cannot order state and local police; the realistic lever is grant terms, which is slower and partial.
• “Small, efficient government” as such — agency budgets are appropriations, which belong to Congress.

03 Days 2-30: reorienting the executive branch

The accountability theme gives a Mulder administration something most incoming administrations only discover in month two: a built-in theory of the bureaucracy. “Programs should be judged by the outcomes they deliver, not the dollars they spend” is, translated into Washington, an OMB-driven performance regime — agency-by-agency outcome reporting, sunsetting review for programs that cannot show results, and a stated willingness, in his words, for government to be “held accountable when it falls short and willing to learn from what works.”

• OMB and the budget process. Outcome-based budgeting instructions would be the first-month centerpiece — guidance memos and reporting mandates, not statutes.
• Department of Justice. Warrant requirements for plate-reader access and clemency review fit the documented surveillance and criminal-justice positions.
• VA and the military departments. His Army service and commission background point to veterans' services and community engagement as natural priorities for early attention.
• DHS grant components. Conditions on the federal funding streams behind state and local camera networks — the anti-commandeering-compliant route.

His stated personnel philosophy is coalition-prone rather than purist — the Polis-and-Amash answer, working “with others while standing by what you believe in” — which suggests appointees chosen for demonstrable results in office over partisan fidelity. There is not enough public evidence to determine Mulder's positions on the Department of Education, the EPA, the intelligence community, or the State Department; his record names agencies only where his experience reaches them, and this analysis will not manufacture the rest.

04 Days 30-60: the first legislative package

What would a Mulder administration send to Congress? Rocky Mountain Dispatch called his campaign “arguably the most policy-specific” in the Colorado race “regarding procedural reform” — ranked-choice voting, open primaries, and strict enforcement of legislative record-keeping requirements. That is the bill stack.

High evidence

• An electoral-reform act for federal offices: ranked-choice voting in congressional elections, open-primary rules where federal law reaches, and strict record-keeping and vote-explanation requirements for members of Congress — the last a direct translation of his “every vote must be explainable to constituents” principle.
• A vehicle-location privacy act. His Flock-camera opposition is explicit and repeated; a federal statute limiting government access to plate-reader networks and location-data brokers, with a warrant requirement, is a direct translation. The parallel is worth noting: this is the same agenda item Donald Kissick, the Libertarian nominee in Ohio, has made his centerpiece — the Libertarian gubernatorial class of 2026 converges on surveillance.

Moderate evidence

• Outcome-based budgeting legislation. His outcomes-over-dollars framework implies a statutory program-evaluation and sunset regime, though he has not published federal text.
• VA community-engagement expansion. Funded replication of the commission model he served in; consistent with his record but not a published bill.

Low evidence: a Mulder tax bill, a Mulder immigration bill, a Mulder defense bill — he has not detailed federal positions on any of these, and the Libertarian Party's national platform should not automatically be interpreted as his personal position. No such items are inferred here.

05 Days 60-100: where governing meets reality

Day 60 is where the Mulder agenda meets its structural problem: its centerpiece is Congress redesigning its own elections, the one act Congress is least motivated to perform. Ranked-choice voting for federal offices can be legislated, and states from Maine to Alaska have adopted versions for their own races, but Congress sets the terms of its own contests and has resisted exactly this kind of change for more than a century. A president can campaign for it, endorse it, and use the bully pulpit; he cannot schedule a vote that Senate leadership does not want held.

The surveillance agenda runs into the same wall from the other direction. Because of the anti-commandeering doctrine, a federal Flock-camera ban can bind federal agencies directly but reaches state and local police only through spending conditions — and grant conditions can be waived, litigated, and slowly starved by future administrations. Rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act adds notice-and-comment years to anything that aspires to be binding, and the third-party doctrine's treatment of data held by intermediaries gives courts reasons to narrow privacy rules that the litigation has not yet tested.

What is genuinely fast: the performance-metrics regime, the surveillance directives binding federal agencies, clemency, and veterans' service directives. What is years-long: the entire electoral-reform package, any binding privacy rule, and every appropriations-dependent item. A Mulder first 100 days would be an accountability sprint inside the executive branch followed by a constitutional argument with Congress about how Congress is chosen — the mirror image of most presidencies, whose early items at least fall within their own party's legislative comfort zone.

06 The policy record in detail

Election and Democratic-Process Reform

His most documented area: ranked-choice voting, open primaries, and strict legislative record-keeping enforcement, per Rocky Mountain Dispatch. His stated first principle — accountability, “every vote an elected official casts they need to be prepared to explain” — is the through-line. The Colorado LP's April 2026 convention, which nominated him, also formally rejected the “Liberty Pledge” initiative for Libertarian-Republican cooperation, reaffirming independence — an organizational signal about the party's stance, not necessarily his personal one.

Civil Liberties and Surveillance

He is against government-operated Flock cameras, per the LP Colorado press release and his own comments to CPR, where he described “the overwhelming presence of Flock cameras” as an issue other candidates under-spotlight. No detailed federal privacy program is published — the opposition is documented; the bill text is not.

Criminal Justice

His 2018 Sheriff run and participation in a 2022 criminal-justice-reform panel, plus the Libertarian Party's press-release framing of “small, efficient government”, are the record; his iVoterGuide responses for the state-representative race include criminal-justice items, but those are 2022 survey positions whose detail belongs to that race. A federal criminal-justice program is not documented.

Second Amendment

The iVoterGuide profile for his 2022 state-representative candidacy records positions including teacher-carry discretion for school districts and stronger penalties for firearms misuse; these are survey responses from a different race, and N43 flags rather than extends them to a federal program.

Abortion and Medical Privacy

His 2024 Ballotpedia survey records support for “aid in dying” laws and the position that private medical decisions should remain private, with responses on safety standards for chemical abortion drugs and taxpayer funding of providers marked “Neutral” in the guide's formatting. These are survey positions; no federal program is documented.

Fiscal Policy and Government Performance

“Affordability, Accountability, and Abundance” — small, efficient government that “uses your tax dollars wisely,” programs judged by outcomes rather than dollars, communities free “to solve their own challenges because the people closest to those challenges usually understand them best.” This is a philosophy, published on his campaign site and in the LP press release, not a costed federal budget program.

There is not enough public evidence to determine Mulder's position on immigration or education at the federal level — his iVoterGuide entries on those topics belong to a 2022 state legislative survey and are thin. There is not enough public evidence to determine his foreign-policy or defense positions; his Army service is biography, not program. His CPR interview's most-cited policy item — water conservation “by using more beavers” for wetland restoration — is a state natural-resources idea, colorful and documented, with no federal analog beyond existing ecosystem programs.

07 What could not happen alone — and what could

What President Mulder Could Not Do Alone

• Adopt ranked-choice voting for congressional elections — an act of Congress.
• Mandate open primaries nationwide — state election law, mostly outside presidential reach.
• Impose legislative record-keeping rules on Congress — Article I leaves each chamber its own records.
• Ban state and local plate-reader networks by decree — anti-commandeering limits the federal government to funding conditions.
• Shrink agency budgets or cut taxes — appropriations and revenue law belong to Congress.
• Replace program funding with outcome contracts government-wide — a statute, not a memo, if it is to bind.
• Enact campaign-finance or ballot-access reform — Congress and the states.
• Any constitutional electoral change (e.g., abolishing the Electoral College) — a constitutional amendment.

What Could Change Within 100 Days

• Executive warrant requirements for federal access to plate-reader and location-broker data.
• OMB outcome-metrics guidance and a public program-performance dashboard.
• Grant conditions on federal funding of state and local camera networks.
• VA community-engagement directives modeled on his Aurora commission service.
• DOJ clemency review and deprioritization guidance.

Potential Coalition Partners

Electoral reform has genuine cross-party energy: ranked-choice voting has passed in red and blue states (Alaska's adoption being the reference case), and open primaries have organized advocates in both parties. The surveillance opposition pairs with civil-liberties Democrats and privacy-minded Republicans, the same coalition forming around Kissick's version of the issue in Ohio. Veterans' services is close to consensus territory. The outcome-based-government theme overlaps the evidence-based-policy movement on the center-left and the program-sunset movement on the right.

Areas of Likely Conflict

Legislative leadership of both parties, on ranked-choice voting and open primaries — incumbent-protection is a bipartisan instinct. Law-enforcement associations on surveillance limits. Appropriators on outcome conditions tied to their programs. And his own party's absolutists: a nominee who cites a Democratic governor and Justin Amash as models, and says so publicly, invites friction from Libertarians who read coalition-praise as compromise — tension the Colorado convention's independence resolution makes visible.

08 The 100-day scorecard and what the record tells us

The scorecard grades the documented record, and Mulder's is a process record: the strongest evidence sits on how elections and legislatures should work and on government surveillance, with a governing philosophy — outcomes over dollars — that is published but uncosted. The blank rows are the traditional presidency: immigration, education, foreign policy, defense.

The structural irony of a Mulder presidency is that its two best-documented priorities are the two least available to a president alone. Ranked-choice voting for federal offices needs the very Congress it would destabilize to vote for it; the Flock-camera opposition binds federal agencies quickly but reaches the state and local police, who operate most of the cameras, only through conditional spending.

What moves fast is the accountability theme, because it is an executive-branch theory of management: OMB metrics, dashboards, program review, clemency and VA directives. A Mulder first 100 days would be legible mostly as administrative discipline — the outcomes-over-dollars regime applied to the machine he would inherit.

His coalition instinct is documented — Polis and Amash as examples of working with others while standing by beliefs — and it distinguishes him from the absolutist stereotype of his party: a nominee who names a sitting Democratic governor as a model is signaling transactional governance, not ideological purism.

Where he differs from both major parties is on process: Republicans and Democrats in Colorado's race argue about policy and law, per Rocky Mountain Dispatch's portrait of Marx and Weiser, while Mulder's campaign argues about how policy gets made, judged, and recorded. That is the genuine content of “a Mulder administration would serve as a mandate for systemic disruption” — not a policy list but an operating-system change.

The honest conclusion of the record: the first 100 days of a Mulder presidency would be an executive-branch accountability project plus a surveillance directive, in front of an electoral-reform bill that Congress does not want to pass — with most of the traditional federal agenda undetermined by anything he has said or done.