.Posted on 02/11/2016 10:47:13 AM PST by Persephone Kore
The Gallup Poll has a new estimate of the number of libertarians in the American electorate. In their 2015 Governance survey they find that 27 percent of respondents can be characterized as libertarians, the highest number it has ever found. The latest results also make libertarians the largest group in the electorate, as compared to 26 percent conservative, 23 percent liberal, and 15 percent populist.
For more than a dozen years now, the Gallup Poll has been using two questions to categorize respondents by ideology:
Combining the responses to those two questions, Gallup found the ideological breakdown of the public shown below. With these two broad questions, Gallup consistently finds about 20 percent of respondents to be libertarian, and the number has been rising.
Two years ago David Kirby found that libertarians made up an even larger portion of the Republican party.
So why isn't all this supposed libertarian sentiment being reflected in candidates and elections? There have been plenty of analyses in the past week, including my own, about why Rand Paul didn't attract this potentially large bloc of libertarian voters. Maybe people don't see issues as equally salient; some libertarians may wish that Republicans weren't so socially reactionary, but still vote Republican on the basis of economic issues. Some, as Lionel Shriver writes in the New York Times, feel "forced to vote Democratic because the Republican social agenda is retrograde, if not lunatic — at the cost of unwillingly endorsing cumbersome high-tax solutions to this country's problems."
For now I just want to note that there are indeed a lot of voters who don't fit neatly into the red and blue boxes. The word "libertarian" isn't well known, so pollsters don't find many people claiming to be libertarian. And usually they don't ask. But a large portion of Americans hold generally libertarian views — views that might be described as fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
David Brooks wrote recently that the swing voters in 2016 will be people who don't think big government is the path to economic growth and don't know why a presidential candidate would open his campaign at Jerry Falwell's university. Those are the voters who push American politics in a libertarian direction. David Bier and Daniel Bier wrote last summer about how many policy issues show a libertarian trend over the past 30 years. Find a colorful chart illustrating their findings here.
Politics is often frustrating for libertarians, never more so than during this presidential election when the leading presidential candidates seem to be a protectionist nationalist with a penchant for insult, a self-proclaimed socialist, and a woman who proudly calls herself a "government junkie." But polls show libertarian instincts in the electorate, just waiting for candidates who can speak to them.
Read more about the libertarian vote in our original study or in our 2012 ebook.
Indeed. I expect that Cruz will continue to court libertarian Republicans, and that most of the votes that Rand Paul would have gotten in the primaries will end up going to Cruz.
Zero or near zero interest rates since the 90s have caused savings to dwindle and retirees to spen out all of their principle and then have to go on welfare assistance.
The government does zero to survive the interest payments on the national debt.
I agree. Also to prop up the stock market, because what politician or Fed chairman wants the stock market to decline on their watch? It's bad for their careers.
In addition, more voters are net debtors than net savers, so there's a strong constituency for low interest rates.
These policies are harmful in the long term—eventually the SHTF. As you say, we're already dealing with the effects of discouraging saving (and encouraging debt), as well as suffering under the burden of burgeoning national debt. The country is fooled into thinking that debt is tolerable because interest rates are so low. And, in addition to the looming economic problems of excessive national debt, that debt supports huge spending levels, which in turn have enabled massive growth in government and government power.
Good point. It's true that we've moved very far to the Left socially, but economically our "left" is on the same page that some self-proclaimed conservatives once were. Nixon was considered "right of center," Obama is by today's standards well to the left of center, and yet Obama's statist intrusions into the economy are hardly more extensive than Nixon's were (Nixon also tried to push something similar to Obamacare, incidentally). The main difference is the probably correct perception that Nixon was a misguided and flawed but patriotic man while Obama hates America. However, Obama's hatred manifests itself mostly through his support of black radicals, not through attempts to nationalize the economy. Another case in point: much of the deregulation (repeal of Glass-Steagal, etc) that Bernie Sanders rails against happened under Clinton, not under a Republican President.
For better or for worse, what this means in practice is that very few voters really are concerned about economic policy, and so instead base their allegiances on how they feel about abortion or pot shops (which of course leaves out people like myself who oppose Roe v. Wade but who think that the war on drugs, particularly the criminalization of marijuana is a stupidity on par with Prohibition).
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