I agree with your analysis pretty much.
Only bone to pick is the influence of Libertarian candidates. My personal opinion (borne out by some post election analysis that I can’t recall enough about to source) is that usually Libertarians draw equally from GOP and Rats, so it’s usually a wash.
They do take some from the rats (unlike the Constitution party), single issue potheads mostly, and some wouldn’t vote at all, but I think it’s hard to argue they don’t take significantly more from us than from them, looking at the results bares that out in my opinion. Their ideology is closer to ours than to the rats, I never hear of fed up rat voters thinking about voting Libertarian this year. Those of them on the Internet are mostly Ron Paul worshipers.
That is an interesting opinion and I cant at hand find any statistics or specific arguments to refute it.
Many libertarian voters are those who decided they wont support either progressives or so-cons telling them what they can or can't do in laws .
And they sure don't want any more wars.
Ironically and tragically they view FORCING individual states to marry two men as a win for freedom .
And where WTF are libertarians on the issue of states fining photographers thousands of dollars for refusing to photograph two guys weddings?