Koch was the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential candidate in the 1980 presidential election, sharing the party ticket with presidential candidate Ed Clark. The Clark–Koch ticket promised to abolish Social Security, the Federal Reserve Board, welfare, minimum-wage laws, corporate taxes, all price supports and subsidies for agriculture and business, and U.S. Federal agencies including the SEC, EPA, ICC, FTC, OSHA, FBI, CIA, and DOE.Rinker Buck, "How Those Libertarians Pay the Bills" , New York magazine, November 3, 1980 The ticket received 921,128 votes, 1% of the total nationwide vote, the Libertarian Party national ticket's best showing until 2016 in terms of percentage and its best showing in terms of raw votes until the 2012 presidential election, although that number was surpassed again in 2016.James T. Bennett, Not Invited to the Party: How the Demopublicans Have Rigged the System and Left Independents Out in the Cold , Springer, 2009, p. 167, . "Compared to what [the Libertarians had] gotten before," Charles said, "and where we were as a movement or as a political/ideological point of view, that was pretty remarkable, to get 1 percent of the vote."
