With libertarian candidates we lose 2 to 4% of the vote against the socialist in addition to the percentage we lose to fraud. Now they appear to be working in conjunction with the democrats.
The token libertarian on the Seattle Times said he almost voted for a self-proclaimed socialist for mayor because she represented an alternative to mainstream Seattle liberalism. But she almost won her race (and still might, after all votes are counted), so how far out of the Seattle mainstream was she? With “libertarians” voting for socialists, who needs liberals?
Not only do we lose 2-4% but look at the people who were defeated by Libertarians. Namely Mia Love, Allen West, Vernon Parker, Jesse Kelly, Rehberg in Montana, Mourdock in Indiana. Some how it is only the real conservatives that seem to lose because of the Libertarians and their friends the Constitutionalists.
If they start pulling more of the Democrat vote, maybe that won’t be a bad thing.
You cannot lose what isn’t yours in the first place. You must woo and win the libertarian and independent voters. To do that, you really do need to think and act more like Ron Paul than Mitt Romney or (gag) Juan McLame. We independents do not OWE you our votes. To get mine, you had best be offering me a PROVEN limited/small government candidate who believes, as I do, that I am grown and fully capable of deciding what to ingest, who to hang out with and how to spend my own money. You must realize that the ownership of my body and life is NOT the affair of government by any stretch of anybody’s imagination. It is between me and my God. You must realize that limiting government to its Constitutional size and duties is an idea that flies VERY well with me.
But most alleged “conservatives” on FR these days are NOT limited government types, only statists who want to control DIFFERENT areas of my life than the other brand of statists. That is why you will wind up NEVER getting either my vote or the votes of the younger folks who think as I do.
Why vote for socialism-lite when the real deal is in the Rat column?
“With libertarian candidates we lose 2 to 4% of the vote against the socialist “
That’s actually wrong. The notion that Republican candidates are losing votes to Libertarian ones is patently false. The majority of the Libertarians are younger and most like to vote Dem. So, in fact, the Dems are losing voters to Libertarian candidates.
I know people think Republicans and Libertarians are closely related so any vote for a Libertarians must have come from a Republican voter, but that isn’t true at all. Most of the Libertarian voters I have talked to have been from the Democrat side.
Exactly so. I heard Dennis Prager discuss this last week, and he was of roughly the same opinion. Specifically, he said that there are 2 ways to skin the cat of statism: one is by winning elections against statists, and then rolling back their policies; the second is to convince people that statism is morally and practically wrong. Prager went to great lengths to indicate that he loved libertarianism as an idea, as a means of persuasion, but that he also viewed the Libertarian Party (and others of similar views with different names) as unwittig pawns of the statists, the candidates who were (in his opinion) driven more by ego than by a desire to defeat collectivism and statism.
I concur. No Libertarian has ever won a major election. OTOH, many libertarians have, running under the banner of the Republican Party...Rand Paul and Ron Paul being 2 well-known examples. Damn, we've actually got a libertarian (not Libertarian) Senator - one who gets a pretty good amount of face time to convince people to vote against statism and collectivism...and he's not alone!
In no way do I impugn the motives of those who are libertarian in outlook or philosophy (as mentioned, I'm basically one of you) - but to advocate a 3rd party to advance such ideas is, IMHO, a self-defeating exercise. Me, I'm a libertarian at heart, but I understand that to really affect policy you have to, you know, ACTUALLY WIN ELECTIONS! Going down with guns blazing is still going down. Splitting votes of people that are 80%+ like-minded is sheer stupidity, and the best example of that was Teddy Roosevelt running against Taft in 1912. Together they garnered