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.
libertarians are sick of big spending liberals... aka the GOP
I am an atheist... I just don't agree with cultural Marxism like a lot of the liberal-tarian phonies...
A greater number of "atheists" and "pagans" adopt the same hackneyed tenets of a false Judaic-Christian ideal (golden calf). They also subscribe to the Judaic fetishism of "sin," but will fight to their death in denial of it. Most of them are so wrapped up in their own polemics that they have become nothing more than pathetic anti-Christians with the same false hypocritical philosophy. They just slap a new label on it hoping nobody will notice
Having been born and grown up in the thucking USSR, I'd say that I have seen the marxists [I mean the real ones, and not the figments of your imagination] in all shapes, sizes and colors.
You never went to Berkeley or Santa Cruz?
You have made it obvious your are linguistically challenged with reading English...
You must not... cultural Marxism is no different than economic Marxism... they both lead to the same result...
"I must have missed that"
While my response was intentional hyperbole, Social Conservative movement brought us wonderful experiments like Prohibition and the resulting explosion of federal law enforcement and facilities to enforce it, which have long out-lasted Prohibition itself.
'....ending up living in a van...down by the river' /SNL humour
Intelligent people don't stop supporting a party because some members of a party aren't nice to them. Think about what you're saying here. It just makes your fellow Losertarians look foolish.
Judicial nominations, bud. Big stuff, in case you hadn't noticed.
If you don't understand how the Senate works, I'm not going to waste time with you.
There is no such thing as cultural marxism. All marxism is sociological [i.e. behavioral - towards other people], in whatever guise it comes. For example, our clintons are marxists [or rather, commies] even if they do not know it, for they walk through life as commie nomenclaturists - "laws are for thee, but not for me, I'm from the master race!". Thanks for confirming my diagnosis, not that it needed confirmation.
Please tell me how libertarian minded people are in favor or economic or cultural Marxism? Libertarians are very much individualists and not collectivists.
Respectfully, it does seem that you do not know what the term Marxism really means. I don't blame you though, because many of the Freeper oldtimers are confused by the term as well.
Somehow, the term 'Marxist' has been confused by social conservatives to mean any way of thinking that is contrary to setting up a theocracy.
>>small "L" libertatians
Winning elections is about creating coalitions. Without the libertarians (fiscal conservative, social liberal), the Republicans will not win. That doesn't mean that the Republicans have to nominate libertarian candidates, just nominate someone who doesn't scare off the libertarian voters.
Here in Republican bedrock country, Kansas, we are seeing this play out. This past election cycle, we lost two good men, Phill Kline, state AG, and Jim Ryun, 2nd district Congressman because the libertarian vote went to the Democrat candidates (both defections from the Republican Party). Our Lt. Gov. (who ran with Kathleen Sebelius) is also a Republican defection. I'm concerned that similar dynamics might play out on the national scene as the libertarian vote aligns with the Democrat party more often than not.
Where did you get that? Libertarians are in favor of the People having the liberty to do what they wish until it starts interfering with someone else's rights or liberties.
Unfortunatey, busy bodies (both socialists and social conservatives) hate the fact that someone, somewhere might be having a good time so they want to use police power of the state to push through their social engineering ideas.
You're confusing libertarians with members of the Libertarian party - they aren't the same thing.
Small "L" libertarians are a huge voting block in both the Republican and Democratic parties, though more so in the Republican party.
With just the social conservative vote (which a decent size still goes to the Dems), the GOP might get about 30% of the general vote - so the question is, do the social conservatives want to be politically relevant or not?
Please don't. I have no time for people willing to excuse anything a legislooter does as long as there is an (R) by its name.
I haven't read this entire thread, but after reading the first page, I can already tell that a lot of people don't get it. Sorry but this article is accurate, and a significant portion of libertarian voters as defined by this article voted Democrat in the last election.
But, but, why would libertarians vote for the party of even bigger government?! Well, think about it. As definied by the article, libertarians are voters who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. The Republican Congress for the past several years has placed a huge emphasis on socially conservative wedge issues while also being fiscally irresponsible. So why the hell should these libertarians vote Republican? They probably saw the Democrats as being more palatable on social issues while thinking that nothing could be worse than the existing Congress when it came to fiscal responsibility.
While I'd consider myself more of a fiscal conservative/social moderate and don't know if I'd be considered a libertarian as defined by this article, I can definitely sympathize with them. Will the upcoming Democratic Congress be better than the previous Republican one? Of course not. But the Republican Party better learn that there's more to their potential constituency than James Dobson and his followers.
I don't "excuse anything."
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