GOP Is Losing Its Libertarian Voters

HUMAN EVENTS ^ | Dec 08, 2006 | David Boaz and David Kirby

[neverdem]

Libertarian Party candidates may have cost Senators Jim Talent (R.-Mo.) and Conrad Burns (R.-Mont.) their seats, tipping the Senate to Democratic control.

In Montana, the Libertarian candidate got more than 10,000 votes, or 3%, while Democrat Jon Tester edged Burns by fewer than 3,000 votes. In Missouri, Claire McCaskill defeated Talent by 41,000 votes, a bit less than the 47,000 Libertarian votes.

This isn’t the first time Republicans have had to worry about losing votes to Libertarian Party candidates. Senators Harry Reid (Nev.), Maria Cantwell (Wash.), and Tim Johnson (S.D.) all won races in which Libertarian candidates got more votes than their winning margin.

But a narrow focus on the Libertarian Party significantly underestimates the role libertarian voters played in 2006. Most voters who hold libertarian views don’t vote for the Libertarian Party. Libertarian voters likely cost Republicans the House and the Senate—also dealing blows to Republican candidates in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

In our study, “The Libertarian Vote,” we analyzed 16 years of polling data and found that libertarians constituted 13% of the electorate in 2004. Because libertarians are better educated and more likely to vote, they were 15% of actual voters.

Libertarians are broadly defined as people who favor less government in both economic and personal issues. They might be summed up as “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” voters.

In the past, our research shows, most libertarians voted Republican—72% for George W. Bush in 2000, for instance, with only 20 percent for Al Gore, and 70% for Republican congressional candidates in 2002. But in 2004, presumably turned off by war, wiretapping, and welfare-state spending sprees, they shifted sharply toward the Democrats. John F. Kerry got 38% of the libertarian vote. That was a dramatic swing that Republican strategists should have noticed. But somehow the libertarian vote has remained hidden in plain sight.

This year we commissioned a nationwide post-election survey of 1013 voters from Zogby International. We again found that 15 percent of the voters held libertarian views. We also found a further swing of libertarians away from Republican candidates. In 2006, libertarians voted 59% to 36% for Republican congressional candidates—a 24-point swing from the 2002 mid-term election. To put this in perspective, front-page stories since the election have reported the dramatic 7-point shift of white conservative evangelicals away from the Republicans. The libertarian vote is about the same size as the religious right vote measured in exit polls, and it is subject to swings more than three times as large.

Based on the turnout in 2004, Bush’s margin over Kerry dropped by 4.8 million votes among libertarians. Had he held his libertarian supporters, he would have won a smashing reelection rather than squeaking by in Ohio.

President Bush and the congressional Republicans left no libertarian button unpushed in the past six years: soaring spending, expansion of entitlements, federalization of education, cracking down on state medical marijuana initiatives, Sarbanes-Oxley, gay marriage bans, stem cell research restrictions, wiretapping, incarcerating U.S. citizens without a lawyer, unprecedented executive powers, and of course an unnecessary and apparently futile war. The striking thing may be that after all that, Democrats still looked worse to a majority of libertarians.

Because libertarians tend to be younger and better educated than the average voter, they’re not going away. They’re an appealing target for Democrats, but they are essential to future Republican successes. Republicans can win the South without libertarians. But this was the year that New Hampshire and the Mountain West turned purple if not blue, and libertarians played a big role there. New Hampshire may be the most libertarian state in the country; this year both the state’s Republican congressmen lost.

Meanwhile, in the Goldwateresque, “leave us alone” Mountain West, Republicans not only lost the Montana Senate seat; they also lost the governorship of Colorado, two House seats in Arizona, and one in Colorado. They had close calls in the Arizona Senate race and House races in Idaho, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Dick Cheney’s Wyoming. In libertarian Nevada, the Republican candidate for governor won less than a majority against a Democrat who promised to keep the government out of guns, abortion, and gay marriage. Arizona also became the first state to vote down a state constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman.

Presidential candidates might note that even in Iowa libertarians helped vote out a Republican congressman who championed the Internet gambling ban.

If Republicans can’t win New Hampshire and the Mountain West, they can’t win a national majority. And they can’t win those states without libertarian votes. They’re going to need to stop scaring libertarian, centrist, and independent voters with their social-conservative obsessions and become once again the party of fiscal responsibility. In a Newsweek poll just before the election, 47% of respondents said they trusted the Democrats more on “federal spending and the deficit,” compared to just 31% who trusted the Republicans. That’s not Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party.

One more bit from our post-election Zogby poll: We asked voters if they considered themselves “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” A whopping 59% said they did. When we added to the question “also known as libertarian,” 44% still claimed that description. That’s too many voters for any party to ignore.

Rep. Barbara Cubin (R.-Wyo.) told her Libertarian challenger after a debate, “If you weren’t sitting in that [wheel]chair, I’d slap you.” It took 10 days to certify her re-election, perhaps because that Libertarian took more than 7,000 votes. A better strategy for her and other Republicans would be to try to woo libertarians back.

[Darkwolf377]

Personally, I would vote Libertarian before I'd vote for McCain.

Hillary's banking on it.

[Darkwolf377]

Why you would attack a Libertarian voter for not voting for the Republican party is unclear.

They took away votes that would have prevented the Democrats from taking over Congress in a time of war--how much clearer can one be?

[Darkwolf377]

As Libertarian for well over 30 years, I have been abandoned by the GOP, not the other way around.

How can a party that isn't the Libertarian party--and doesn't share the values of the Libertarian party, thank God-- "abandon" the voters of another political persuasion?

[Brilliant]

Very true. I still haven't figured out what the difference between Hillary and McCain is. Maybe that Hillary won't be able to get anything done if she's elected.

[Darkwolf377]

Well put.

Whatever happened to Republicans and Conservatives who thought social engineering--from the right OR from the left--should NOT be one of the functions of government?

I guess we're all screaming about how evil Big Brother is when it's the ACLU types who are wearing his mask. When it's the religious right, suddenly it's good government to tell individuals how to live their lives.

[Darkwolf377]

Very true. I still haven't figured out what the difference between Hillary and McCain is. Maybe that Hillary won't be able to get anything done if she's elected.

Yeah, a President Hillary will get NOTHING done with a Democrat, Pelosi/Reid-led Congress on hand.

[oldfart]

"Considering that a majority of Americans probably consider themselves fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and a "whopping 44%" of that number consider themselves Libertarian makes zero sense--show me where ANY Libertarian candidate has pulled in numbers that would indicate a voting bloc of that size anywhere in the USA."

Until people (and not just Libertarians) actually start voting their conscience rather than voting for 'a winner,' Republicrats will continue to run the show. The continual drumbeat of "a vote for the third-party is a vote for the Democrats" actually furthers a system that is purported to be made up of two parties but which is rapidly merging into one.
Several people here have already pointed out that Republicans have become so fiscally irresponsible that the Democrats actually look better in that respect. I imagine we will be treated to a Democratic government for a few years. Perhaps that is what is needed to make the Libertarians wake up and actually vote for Libertarians rather than "waste" their votes on RINOs.

[Brilliant]

There isn't a chance in hell I'm voting for McCain, even if Hillary or Obama are the Dem nominees. Heck, it could be Hillary/Obama, and I'd still not vote for McCain.

[beyond the sea]

Stand up, do something other than gripe and moan on the internet. Have you actually helped a conservative cause? LOL! And if this is what Free Republic's become, a bitch and moan session, then I suppose my time is done here. Frankly, I can join any chat site and get the same results.

I hear you.

For years, I have been thinking of these political shows on tv with their little round table political discussions with the "influential political writers" around the table, and all the political musing on so many variant websites, to me I really have been seeing them as a strange but humorous form of masturbation.

It's funny to me and I swear that this is true, when I see those round table sessions such as on Tim Russert's "Meet The Depressed", I really almost visualize all those participants at the table with their hands down under the table, "pleasing themselves ". All the talk serves to just make the participants feel better...... and darned if it doesn't.

Along those lines most of this political chat here and elsewhere seems to me to be about the same thing. And, as America's political scene morphs as the years go by, and Congress becomes with each day a club of like-minded, spineless cowards, I see most of these political ruminations as a large waste of time and often are just pure posturing.

It would be very funny if it weren't so pathetic.

p.s. I appreciate the Congressional numbers you produced here ..... thank you very much.

****

[Jim Noble]

I used to be a libertarian.

Obviously, 44%, or 4% for that matter, is a gross exaggeration.

But voters for whom their personal and family Liberty is the #1 issue - now that's another matter.

The 1994 landslide pulled in all sorts of what I now call "liberty voters" - who, having seen Waco, Ruby Ridge, and HillaryCare became convinced that they were about to lose something important.

The modern GOP congressional majority became contemptuous of liberty voters and their interests.

But there cannot BE a GOP majority without liberty voters, and they have come to hate the Dobsonites.

This Humpty-Dumpty has gotten badly broken up.

Fortunately, the cure is at hand - more Hillary.

[Jim Noble]

But do the "social conservatives" even care.

No, I don't think they do.

They imagine that they can form a working majority alone.

I think that's because they don't get out much.

[FreedomPoster]

So forget Libertarians, and libertarians, for just a minute.

What do you think about the huge increase in non-military spending during the last six years? Do you think middle-of-the-road swing voters see any hypocrisy in all the pork involved in that, and are turned off by that, especially when compared with GOP "small government" (empty, of late) rhetoric?

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

It is a shame that the libertarian movement has been hijacked by people who seem primarily interested in drug legalization at the expense of every other issue.

The druggies, like the sex perverts, can only perpetuate an ever increasing market for their filth by molesting the minds and bodies of the young ones.

Recreational drug use has been chemical warfare waged against the young people of this country since the 1960s...

[EBH]

I agree with you. I don't buy what this article is trying to sell. They state in on point that the 'libertarian' is an educated voter. In speaking with folks that are libertarian I have found that they simply undervote. In other words they went to the polls and voted on the issues, not the candidates.

[Lurker]

Recreational drug use has been chemical warfare waged against the young people of this country since the 1960s...

Piffle.

L

[Darkwolf377]

What do you think about the huge increase in non-military spending during the last six years? Do you think middle-of-the-road swing voters see any hypocrisy in all the pork involved in that, and are turned off by that, especially when compared with GOP "small government" (empty, of late) rhetoric?

Why is it that so many Libertarians start such questions by telling everyone to forget Libertarianism, so that after the question is answered they can say "Ah ha, so the answer is Libertarianism!"

Libertarianism is the political policy of those who live on paper, not reality.

[Darkwolf377]

Well put on all points.

The GOP has bnankrupted itself by becoming what, it should be obvious to anyone with a brain, EVERY politician becomes in DC--a politician who uses pork as a means to get re-elected.

[oldfart]

You didn't answer his question.

[Darkwolf377]

Again, Hillary is banking on it. You can deny you're helping elect her all you want, but you're professing exactly the line that puts a smile on her evil face.

[Lurker]

But I don't believe Libertarians really care about smaller government

You may not believe it about Libertarians, but that's irrelevant.

The Republicans have already proved they don't care about smaller government.

L