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Posted on 12/10/2006 10:04:01 PM PST by 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.
Are you serious? Sarbanes Oxley? Medicare reform? No Child Left Behind?
How would three more Senate seats fix these disasters? Shoot, President Bush couldn't even get a VOTE on social security reform. Pathetic. But that's right, keep blaming someone else. That's been working great for y'all the past few years.
There was lots more local activism when the dems were in control under the BJs in the late 90s early years of Bush.
Then we won...we became complacent and disappointed at the RINOS and now lots of us are licking our wounds. Then again the majority of Americans could care less. They are status quo types and don't bother to consider that most critical decisions affecting their lives are coming out of the judiciary and other social institutions - all non elected.
It's gonna get ugly soon and the activism you refer to will re-emerge.
Libertarian ping! To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here.
I'd count "Small Government Republicans" in this group too. I know one, he is very smart, LOVED Reagan, but was pissed at the largesse of the Republicans these days. He stayed home and didn't vote. I tried to convince him otherwise, but thats what he did...
This post is spot on. I am a stong libertarian but voted republican this election because of the lessor evil principle, but I understand the outrage libertarians feel. The expanded medicare pill program, the NCLB (what ever happened to eliminating the Department of Education), George Bush doing Americore ads, the Federal Government growing at 2-3 times inflation over the Bush term. Good riddence to Dennis Hastert. Under his leadership the Federal Government grew at 2-3 times inflation, earmarks exploded, tax cuts are not permenant, and the only time the House (and Congress) acted fast was to suck up to the Big Daddy government interests of the Religious Right. The republicans should be loosing libertarian support because they lied and ran as small goverment pols but did not act accordingly.
Here's a novel idea, why doesn't the GOP run a real conservative instead of McCain/Romney/Guilliani RINO's?
Nah... just blame it on the 1% of voters who still think having PRINCIPLES still means something...
Just a second, this thread was doing just fine up until now, and then you had to go and make the most obvious and truthful statement of all.
This is such a loser issue for social conservatives and by extension Republicans and the Democrats know it.
The fact of the matter is that the federal government funds all sorts of medical research - some pans out and some doesn't. It is very transparent that social conservatives picked out this one area of research for religious reasons although they claim otherwise.
If theocons oppose stem cell research just because they think it is not promising or "clinically proven" then why is this the only research area that they are making such a big fuss about?
If social conservatives really cared about stem cell research because it isn't promissing then they would have spoken up about lots of other research as well.
Ronald Reagan perfectly brought together social conservatives, fiscal libertarian Republicans, and pro-defense patriots.
Seems the GOP has forgotten how to do that.
Paging Mr. Newt. Are you available to assist us?
The article states that libertarians, in at least two cases, voted for Libertarian Party candidates by margins large enough to ensure Democratic victory. This assumes that the Republican Party is the natural home of libertarians, and if the candidate in Montana had not got nearly 3% of the state vote, most of those votes would have gone to Burns, the Republican.
It is hard to imagine a committed Libertarian 'punishing' the Republicans by voting Democratic. Less so by voting Libertarian, though the outcome of either is close to the same. (Donkeys in Charge.)
Do you actually know what the word "Marxist" means? Libertarians are the total opposite of Marxists.
It is funny how many prominent social conservatives throw out the world "Marxist" at the drop of a hat when the truth of the matter is that social conservatives are very compatible and open to Marxist ideas but the just don't realize it.
Good!
These threads are ludicrous. Conrad Burns campaigned all over Montana bragging about the pork he brings back from Washington and how valuable his seniority was to his voters. And people are surprised that Libertarians didn't support him?
Burns obviously knew there were more votes to be won on the left by bragging about pork than libertarian votes to be lost. And he almost won, so he was probably right. But it's ridiculous to blame the libertarians for not voting for someone whose views are antithetical to their own.
I did not leave the republican party. The republican party left me.
Their being a bunch of geldings didn't help either.
It's not social conservatism that lost the '08 election, as the left would have you believe. It was fiscal liberalism. "Compassionate Conservatism" is what the Democratic Party used to be. The Republican-controlled Congress have spent our money like they hate the stuff, and President Bush dutifully signed it all.
People with libertarian views, such as myself, have nothing but the highest respect and admiration for religious conservatives. I don't have any beef with prayer in schools, I am against abortions, and I think that if you want to do research on fetal stem cells you should do it on your dime. The WOT is the right thing to do insofar as the C-in-C has a coherent, actionable strategery for victory (which he doesn't).
For many, the choice between Republicans and Democrats is no longer any choice at all. When social convictions are not a voting issue, it all boils down who is going to limit government and preserve our freedoms. There are precious few Republicans who fit that description.
In the interest of full disclosure, I voted for George Allen and Eric Cantor on November 8th. If the GOP wants my vote in '08, they're going to have to earn it by fielding a strong small-government conservative. So far, neither McCain or Giuliani fit that description.
The message is not the messenger [Zogby]. 44%, or 24%, or 14%- it is a sufficiently significant block to address on merits.
Only by their utter ignorance of the actual state of stem cell science. Adult stem cells and human umbilical cord stem cells have demonstrated clinical utility in over 70 therapies the last time that I looked. Embryonic stem cells have only shown a reliable trait in growing teratomas, i.e. tumors. Embryonic stem cells not only have to overcome that problem, they also have to overcome the problem of immunologic rejection if they aren't perfectly matched. I don't recall an issue with so much emotional appeal supported by such an ill-informed electorate.
Republicans losing our Libertarian base? What will we do for pot now?
Libertarians are not conservatives. Having to pander to them also costs the GOP a huge number of social conservative votes in every election.
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