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.
I certainly acknowledge that the Republican failure to limit government is a problem. But I think most Republicans in office do WANT to limit government. If there had been a larger majority in the Senate and a more secure majority in the House, it might have happened. Much of the problem stemmed from two things: Fear of losing our majority (cuts ARE unpopular) and inability to overcome filibusters in the Senate. In politics, you have to play on a team, and you have to be patient. Also, it is extremely "unintelligent" to allow the worse party to win just because the less-bad party isn't very good. It's only justified if the less-bad party is fairly certain to shape up after it loses. And that doesn't necessarily happen.
Neither this thread which mentioned about 15%, IIRC, nor this link is talking about the big 'L' Libertarian Party which will rarely be anything other than a spoiler. We're talking about one seventh of the electorate, small 'l' libertarians. Without the dems actively threatening some gun control BS, which they didn't say a peep this time, they can be the swing vote.
Libertarianism in One Country - On the Brink and beyond.
"According to Brink Lindsey, only 13 percent of Americans currently lean libertarian."
There are at least as many (I'd guess more) secular big-government types in the GOP as there are big-government social conservatives.
Heck, how many FReepers are supporting Giuliani, an authoritarian big-government type of the worst sort, and pretty much the antithesis of the "liberty voter?"
I'd have to agree with you there--there is a libertarian thrust in true Republican politics; the Libertarian PARTY is like a bunch of high school civics class geeks creating a design for how the world should work.
Yeah--the voters are so outraged by fiscal liberalism that they put a bunch of fiscal liberals in power.
The self-pity of those who have helped bring the democrats this glorious victory continues to astonish.
Where, exactly, did I say there's a "two party system requirement in the COnstitution"?
I'll wait.
Also, please show me where in the Constitution that the two dominant parties in the nation will be the Democrat and Republican parties. I'll wait.
Whenever someone around here mentions a simple REALITY, the "third-party" drumbeaters always rush to silly false arguments.
There is no such requirement; I never said there was. But if one looks at history--not the Constitution--one finds there are always TWO sides battling for dominance. When there are multiple parties, they are variations of those two parties, and many other, smaller groups which are irrelevant.
If you want to bitch about "RINO's" (please show me where in the Constitution it says that the Republican party is the party of religious conservatives. I'll wait.), then I hope you enjoy a future where 20% of the electorate gets a "real" party--I can't wait to see how happy you are when that day comes. Oh, and kiss the solidity of the US political system--and our dominance in finance and world affairs--goodbye, as the US is seen to have the stability of a Third World nation.
What kind of ridiculousness did I excuse in Washington?
Obviously a lot of people need to learn the difference between reality and a government's design.
Yeah--and you can blame either the symptom or the disease. Meanwhile, the disease marches merrily on.
Yes, but like Liberals, they FEEEEL good because they FELT something; Libertarians feel superior because they come up with these silly plans that will never happen.
Like a liberal I know who drives two gas guzzlers and works for a large corporation, while I gave up my car and walk and use public transportation, and at the time was working in a homeless shelter--I was still evil because I vote Republican, while she hated George W. Bush. When I pointed out that she talks like a liberal while she lived like her caricature of a Republican, our friendship ended.
OK, so they toss out the fiscal liberals and put a bunch of fiscal liberals in power--and that's a "symptom"?
Sounds more like you've come up with a convenient theory that doesn't hold water.
People bitch about fiscal liberalism, except for their own pet projects. They vote for those who spend lots of money on the things they want, and against those who do otherwise. That's about the extent of most people's fighting the disease of fiscal liberalism.
"Sounds more like you've come up with a convenient theory that doesn't hold water."
That sounds a little like, "Vote for the Nazis because they aren't Communists."
Not really. I don't think they have enough in common with the GOP mainstream thinking to be a reliable part of the GOP alliance. While libertarian numbers are growing, they haven't done a good job in marketing their ideas, and their philosophical nature, some of it admirable, makes compromise unrealistic with either major political party.
They really have no natural home with the GOP or with the Dems. That's not to say that someday they won't, but I think for now they are best on their own until they win the debate of ideas and get many, many more converts. Until then, they tend to be the smartest person in the room, who hasn't actually accomplished much of anything.
They have a good rap, though.
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