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.
The republicans had control of the house, senate, and white house. What more could you want? Geez. I'm so tired of the excuses people make for the repubs turning into big-government nanny-staters the last several years.
And....according to the some of the hyper anti-Libertarians here, so powerful that they singlehandedly cost the GOP the last election.
AMEN
The candidate who best qualifies for that distinction is Chuck Hagel (pro-gun, anti-McCain Feingold, right on Iraq, and pro-tax cut) but I suspect that conservatives are so wedded to nation building and Wilsonianism that they will never give him a second look.
The candidate who best qualifies for that distinction is Chuck Hagel (pro-gun, anti-McCain Feingold, right on Iraq, and pro-tax cut) but I suspect that conservatives are so wedded to nation building and Wilsonianism that they will never give him a second look.
The candidate who best qualifies for that distinction is Chuck Hagel (pro-gun, anti-McCain Feingold, right on Iraq, and pro-tax cut) but I suspect that conservatives are so wedded to nation building and Wilsonianism that they will never give him a second look.
The fact that Libertarians cause the anti-liberal vote to split, helping to elect Democrats to the U.S. Senate isn't news. In 1992, the first time Diane Feinstein ran for the U.S. Senate, she won with about 47% of the vote. The Libertarian got about 5%, and the Green Party candidate got about 3%. In 1996, in a special election, to replace Sen. Packwood, of Oregon, then-Congressman Ron Wyden won with 49% of the vote. The Republican, Gordon Smith, got 48%. The Libertarian got 2%, and the American Independent Party (like the Constitution Party) candidate received 1%.
Why does this usually happen in the West? In the rest of the country, voters who dislike the democrat U.S. Senate candidates usually unite against the Democrat well.
Please do tell us how the GOP has pandered to the libertarian voters in every election.
bump
"Libertarians don't vote for Libertarians?"
Well, libertarians don't vote for Libertarians.
The Libertarian party is a bunch of whack-a-doodles.
But, yeah, nanny state measures like Frist's anti-Internet gambling, the ephedra ban, and the coddling of Insurance companies, etc. very nearly kept me home. (I voted, but my usual to-the-legal limit campaign donations dwindled to near zero and will stay that way until actual conservatives start running again.)
It's not close to the same, it's exactly the same outcome.
Right, the Libertarians are abandoning the Republican Party, in favor of the Democratic Socialists, because they are younger and better educated. Give me a break. Zogby will have to come up with a better explanation than that.
Just as I hit the post button, I thought of a possible explanation for the Zogby opinion that the younger, better educated Libertarians are favoring the Democratic (Socialists).
What Zogby means is that these younger voters have spent more time in the unionized public school system and institutions of higher education, and are thus more thoroughly indoctrinated into the anti-capitalist economic theories, but they still retain libertarian label because they support gay marriage and oppose the war on drugs.
I really hate to point out the obvious, but did you ever consider that it might be "You" who is misreading the tea leaves????
Eh?
I never would have guessed. Can't they make a common cause?
Having to pander to them also costs the GOP a huge number of social conservative votes in every election.
How were libertarians ever pandered to? It wasn't by making the No Child Left Behind law, Medicare Part D, Campaign Finance Reform, an obscene number of earmarks or GWB's promise to renew an Assault Weapons Ban, whatever that was. What are you smoking?
Then get used to being a minority party.
Here's the fact: It was the majourity of the voters who rejected the Republicans. If a party does not appeal to the majourity of the voters it will not succeed.
The Pubbies should quit bitching about the libertarians, and the Libertarians, and fix their own house. There's too much information out there these days (as the MSM is beginning to find out), and the voters aren't so fast to buy into campaign lies from career politicians who mouth the right slogans and buzzwords every two years, yet vote in an entirely differnet manner when in office..
Never happen. The sad fact of the matter is that the so-called "Religious Right" are actually Democrats at heart, and I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. They're staunchly values conservatives, but fiscally moderate-to-liberal. Their party abandoned them as the political center is continually redefined to the left, just as the Republican party has abandoned small-government conservatives who are more socially moderate.
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