Posted on 12/14/2006 8:37:44 PM PST by neverdem
The Republicans handed libertarian votes--and the elections--over to the Democrats.
At the Democrats’ official election night party in Washington, D.C., all eyes were on Florida—for about 10 seconds. At 8 p.m. network exit polls confirmed that Rep. Katherine Harris, for this crowd the arch-villain of the 2000 election, was lopsidedly losing her bid for a Senate seat. The partygoers cheered the news. Then they turned their attention to races that carried at least a whiff of suspense.
They shouldn’t have dismissed Florida so quickly. Less than two years earlier, the Sunshine State had shown the first symptoms of the malady that would defeat the GOP in races from California to New Hampshire. Republicans had convinced themselves that socially conservative “values voters” were the key to maintaining and extending their power. It was in Florida that the strategy started to crumble, reminding any politician who cared to listen that a lot of voters just want the government to leave them alone.
The town of Pinellas Park, not far from Harris’ old House district, contains the hospice where Terri Schiavo died. The battle between the brain-damaged woman’s parents, who wanted to keep her on life support, and her husband, who wanted to remove it, had bubbled up into Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature before. But in March 2005, emboldened by the GOP’s 2004 victories, Tom DeLay’s House and Bill Frist’s Senate elbowed into the controversy. President Bush broke off a stint in Crawford, Texas, to sign emergency legislation to keep the feeding tube attached.
It was one of the worst political miscalculations of the decade. Immediately after the Schiavo push, approval numbers for Bush and his party started to plummet. Polls showed not just Democrats but Republicans and independents opposed to the Schiavo intervention. Republicans responded by assuming the polls were wrong. The country had re-elected them, hadn’t it? Of course voters were foursquare behind the idea of legislatively re-attaching a feeding tube to a brain-dead woman.
The president’s ratings reeled into the 40s, then the 30s, and never really recovered. The numbers for the GOP Congress fell even further. And on election night, voters turned out the most socially conservative Congress in decades while taking a two-by-four to socially conservative initiatives in the states. A ban on all abortions was defeated in South Dakota. Missouri legalized stem cell research. And while seven states passed gay marriage bans, Arizona became the first state ever to reject one. In most of the states where the bans did pass—South Carolina and Idaho being the exceptions—voters elected Democrats to major statewide offices anyway. The ballyhooed effect of gay marriage bans on conservative turnout, credited by some for George W. Bush’s 2004 victory in Ohio, fell utterly flat.
These defeats wouldn’t have come as a surprise if not for the consensus, minted hours after the 2004 polls closed, that Republicans were building a permanent majority on the backs of conservative evangelicals. The TV networks’ exit poll showed 22 percent of voters naming “moral values” as the key to their ballots. In the hands of a Republican caucus defined by the born-again Tom DeLay in the House and the big-government conservative Rick Santorum in the Senate, this was a mandate; it encouraged them to indulge their invasiveness on privacy and other civil liberties issues. The party didn’t just support national ID cards and warrantless wiretaps. With impunity, it campaigned against Democrats for opposing those measures.
Early in the 2006 cycle, Democrats spotted the opening they’d been given. They recruited candidates for every Republican seat in districts that had voted for John Kerry over George W. Bush, and they started to criticize the conduct, and sometimes the very fact, of the Iraq war. They got multiple adrenaline boosts from the GOP’s scandals, starting with the corruption allegations against DeLay, which the leadership took pains to overlook until he was actually indicted. They maintained leads as the incumbents cupped their hands over their eyes and ears and refused to consider any shifts in their approach to Iraq.
That strategy ended on November 7, with the defeat of many hot-button ballot measures and with heavy losses in House, Senate, and state races. The liberal Northeast was scrubbed almost clean of Republicans: From Pennsylvania through Maine, the Democrats picked up nine or 10 House seats. (At press time, one race in Connecticut was going to a recount.) And the rout continued in the Midwest and the Plains. Four years earlier Kansas had elected an ultra-conservative attorney general named Phill Kline, who used the power of his office to snoop into the medical records of patients at abortion clinics. He was crushed, 58 percent to 42 percent, by a Republican who switched parties to challenge him. And while Kline went down, Republicans lost an eastern Kansas House seat in a district that had voted for Bush over Kerry by 20 points.
There were lessons in the races the Republicans did win too. In the Mountain West, Republican candidates had their margins slashed dramatically. Idaho’s 1st District, which gave Bush 70 percent of its vote, handed only 50 percent to a doctrinaire conservative. Wyoming’s sole House seat gave its Republican incumbent a win by less than 1 percentage point. In state after state, Republican support plunged.
“The libertarian West,” Hotline Editor Chuck Todd wrote in a post-election column, “is a region that is more up for grabs than it should be. And it’s because the Republican Party has grown more religious and more pro-government, which turns off these ‘leave me alone,’ small-government libertarian Republicans.”
The decline isn’t entirely the Republicans’ fault. They just created an opening for their opponents to exploit. The Democrats in the libertarian West, tenderized by the wipeouts of the 1990s, reassessed their positions on the Second Amendment, public land, and taxes, and reintroduced themselves to voters. In the Bush years, they gave stronger support to civil liberties than most of their Republican competitors. At one Montana debate, GOP Sen. Conrad Burns lambasted Democrat Jon Tester for wanting to “weaken” the PATRIOT Act. Tester shot back that he didn’t want to weaken it: “I want to repeal it.” Tester won the election.
Of course, the PATRIOT Act isn’t a “social issue.” That’s part of the point. The Bush-Rove iteration of the Republican Party, with its tight focus on social issues and its coordination with religious groups to turn out votes, fell dramatically short with an electorate for whom other subjects had more salience. In future elections, that skeptical segment of the country will only grow larger. The libertarian states of Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada are growing as the Deep South and the Rust Belt stagnate. And young professionals in Republican killing fields like Virginia and Ohio are getting more socially liberal, not less.
Election-night spinners tried to argue that the new congressional class consists of “conservative Democrats.” But while the newly elected Democrats include several relatively libertarian supporters of the Second Amendment, even their most conservative members, such as Pennsylvania’s senator-elect Bob Casey Jr., support the morning-after pill and some stem cell research.
The GOP’s fundamentalist myopia, combined with its sorry record on spending and corruption, has made Grover Norquist’s “Leave Us Alone Coalition” a bloc that’s up for grabs. In Norquist’s formulation, the coalition includes “taxpayers who want the government to reduce the tax burden, property owners, farmers, and homeowners who want their property rights respected.” Voters like these are now willing to entertain alternatives to a Southern-dominated, religious GOP.
They proved that in Pennsylvania, where Casey felled Rick Santorum—the only senator who actually flew down to Florida to join the Pinellas Park circus—in an 18-point landslide. On Election Day, the Philadelphia Inquirer found a voter willing to explain why Santorum lost. “I don’t know what happened to him,” said Roby Lentz, a Republican. “He quit representing me when he showed up at Terri Schiavo’s bedside.”
David Weigel (dweigel@reason.com) is an assistant editor of Reason.
It's mentioned twice.
"Early in the 2006 cycle, Democrats spotted the opening they’d been given. They recruited candidates for every Republican seat in districts that had voted for John Kerry over George W. Bush, and they started to criticize the conduct, and sometimes the very fact, of the Iraq war."
"They maintained leads as the incumbents cupped their hands over their eyes and ears and refused to consider any shifts in their approach to Iraq."
Use the edit function in your toolbar. Click on Find. Type in Iraq, then click on Find Next.
See comment# 122, like the rocket. Iraq was mentioned twice.
I guess I should have used quotation marks. It was a quote from that link, the last line of that article.
Later read/pingout.
I don't understand what you mean. Don't confuse small 'l' libertarians, about 10 - 15 percent of the electorate, with those who are registered with and vote for the Libertarian Party, probably less than 2 percent.
The Republican Party has had a pro-life plank since 1980, but mainstream libertarians and conservatives have remained united because there is so much more we agree on than disagree. Nothing happened in the last two years to change that equation.
Cultural conservatives were as unhappy as libertarians about the last Congress, because the fact is it didn't do much of anything for any conservative constituency.
I thought he was showing part of it was. I thought his main point was just counting on the base of social conservatives, as Rove seems to have assumed, along with appealing to Latinos with amnesty, will get more than 50 percent. I've seen credible analyses attributing frustration with Iraq, scandals, drunken sailor spending, hesitancy on border security and defacto amnesty all combined to make the loss. Check the link in comment# 112.
That, I will buy into.
I hope whatever new Iraq policy Bush is cooking up right now works, or we could really get clobbered in 2008.
Your analysis suggests that swing voters are libertarians. I don't think that's true in any sense in which I understand the term libertarian. I have always understood that term to mean a principled opposition to government interference in personal decisions, except where absolutely necessary.
The folks who swing vote may share some common ground with libertarians on some issues; but I don't believe it is based on principle.
Take the abortion issue, for example. It's my belief that most of the swing support for abortion comes from women who want to keep it open as an option when they get pregnant. It's not any principled opposition to gvt interference. It's wanting to be able to make a particular convenience-based decision about lifestyle on a particular issue and not to have to feel any shame or guilt about that decision. This lack of libertarian predilection is highlighted by the fact that these same voters, swing women, strongly tend to support nanny-state-type interventions by the government.
Frankly, the number of principled small-government libertarians who are NOT also social conservatives is very small. And most of them post here on Free Republic (gross overexaggeration alert for polemic purposes alert :). That group was NOT the swing vote in this election. It isn't big enough to swing anything. There is virtually NO consituency in this country for smaller government in this country outside of social conservatives and think tanks.
Instead, the swing voters were folks who correctly perceived that something has gone wrong in Washington over the past several years but incorrectly concluded that giving Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Murtha, and Charlie Rangel control over our foreign and domestic policy was the way to fix it. Some of them were scared by all the crazy rhetoric about Christians emanating from the media. Some of them didn't like Iraq and bought into the media drumbeat of failure. Some were annoyed at our congress' drunken spending spree. Most of the swingers I talk to, and it's quite a few, really don't spend much time thinking about or trying to understand what's actually going on in politics. They just wanted things to be different and voted that way. They are not libertarians, large or small 'l' and it greatly confuses the discussion to characterize the issue that way.
LibertarianSchmoe wrote: "There are plenty of things that I think are immoral that I don't think should be criminalized."
I agree with all of that, and I bet many social conservatives would join me. Remember, we didn't start the government's war on morality by using the courts to hammer our perspective on everyone else. I, for one, would absolutely love the chance to resolve these types of issues at the local and state level.
Take gay marriage. We didn't create that fight! Yes, some social conservatives want a Constitutional ban, but they are only reacting to an attack by the leftists. Why? We know it's only a matter of time before the courts force ALL states to approve of gay marriage under the full faith and credit clause. We either react to the attack or we'll have our choice taken away.
It's not like we hate gays, despite what the MSM reports. I have no problem with those who say homosexuality is OK as long as they respect my right to say it's sinful. Unfortunately, it won't be long before my right to free speech will be made a hate crime (or at least, that's where it looks like things are heading).
Another good one is abortion. I have no problem with allowing the states to decide, but that choice was taken away by a liberal court a long time ago. Again, we conservatives are only trying to return the issue to the states. Like I've said all throughout this thread. We (libertarians and social cons) are natural allies!
neverdem wrote: "I guess I should have used quotation marks. It was a quote from that link, the last line of that article."
I just thought it was a funny quote. As you know, everyone is a partisan. It's our natural state. What I really enjoy is the Democrat definition of bipartisan. That means we do whatever they want. LOL!
colorado tanker wrote: "Cultural conservatives were as unhappy as libertarians about the last Congress, because the fact is it didn't do much of anything for any conservative constituency."
You got that right! Everyone keeps trying to dissect the election, but our loss wasn't due to any one issue or political faction. The reasons why people voted are probably as diverse as the number of voters. Frankly, our majority didn't deliver what it promised. Combine that with an unpopular war and the MSM cheerleading for the other side, and it's amazing we didn't lose more. Nevertheless, I highly doubt the Terri Schiavo incident, by itself, drove away any significant number of libertarian voters. Hopefully we can unify and go forward in 2008 as one team.
Exactly, the only thing that impresses is winning the battle. There are many libs out there that think that impeachment is like Nixon. Clinton was proof that although you may be impeached, you do not have to leave office. Republicans went to Nixon and asked him to step down. He did. All good Republicans do, Democrats do not. People know a half assed attempt to that of true conviction. If the Republicans stick it to values voters, they will have a long time coming, if we get the chance, to be in control again. Dems know this and they are using it to win. It may be a sham, but Republicans chop their nose off to spite their face and the Dems use it against them. We all get on here and insult one another. Just keep it up and the other side, who will not defend us as a nation, will continue to take control. Is it so hard to be for the right to life? Hillary will pretend it isn't too hard, that is, to the right audience.
Agreed!
Yes. Socialists like yourself tend to bring up such arguments whenever anyone suggests cutting the size of their darling government programs and Republican socialists still suck!
Absolutely. If you need to get a good quality product for a reasonable price you're extremely unlikely to get it from a government monopoly.
The links in comment# 1 say that small 'l' libertarians are 10 - 15 percent.
That's the swing voters. But it's really made up of groups like soccer moms, who waffle back and forth between parties depending on whether they feel more scared of muslims or those scary Christians on election day or whether the issue de jour is the sacrament of abortion or state provided childcare or whatever. There are other swing groups but soccer moms are one of the biggies.
You can call these folks "libertarians" if you like. But except for a tiny portion of them, they have as much in common with Frederick Hayek as does Crusty the Clown. They are for big gvt when it suits them and for being left alone when it suits them. More than anything else, they don't want to think about politics and they think its mean when politicians say bad things about each other. Doesn't sound much like a coherent political philosophy to me.
And although I don't agree with some aspects of libertarianism, one thing folks I call libertarians have in common is at least a good try at having a coherent political philosophy.
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