Tag Archives: libertarian spoilers

Which Party Are Libertarian Party Candidates Drawing From? You’ll Be Surprised To Know Which One It Is

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Conventional wisdom holds that Libertarian Party candidates draw votes away from Republican candidates. However, some exit polling from Tuesday’s midterms shows that wisdom may not be true.

Reason‘s Brian Doherty looked at the exit polling in North Carolina and Virginia and found that it’s not necessarily true.

It isn’t common for Democrats to accuse Libertarians of “spoiling” elections for them, but a look at NBC News exit polls show that Haugh voters indeed came more from people who consider themselves “moderate” (5 percent of self-identified moderates went Haugh) and even “liberal” (4 percent of liberals voted for Haugh) than from conservatives (only 2 percent of whom voted for Haugh). Those were the only three choices for self-identification.

Only 1 percent each of self-identified Democrats or Republicans voted Haugh, while 9 percent of Independents did. (Those again were the only choices.) (Independents otherwise went 49-42 for Tillis over Hagan.)

In other exit poll results, Haugh’s portion of the vote fell pretty steadily as age groups got older—he got 9 percent of the 18-24 vote, and only 2 percent of the 50-and-over crowd.

Haugh did strongest among white women in race/gender breakdowns, with 5 percent of that crowd, and only 1 percent of black men or black woman—and no polled number of Latino men or women.

Other interesting Haugh exit poll results: His overall man/woman breakdown was the same, 4 percent of each in the exit poll. Haugh’s numbers got progressively smaller as voter income got bigger—he earned 6 percent of the under-$30K vote but only 1 percent of the over-$200K vote. Libertarians aren’t just for plutocrats.

As Doherty points out in an earlier piece, Sean Haugh, the Libertarian candidate in North Carolina, ran as a left-libertarian who was generally opposed to cutting social services. As for Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian candidate in Virginia, Doherty believes that Sarvis may have cost Ed Gillespie the Senate race. However, Sarvis e-mailed Doherty and says otherwise:

One can’t assume the 3 percent Rs would be voting [Gillespie] in my absence—it’s quite likely these R voters would have joined the 7 percent of Rs voting for Warner. Polls throughout the race showed Warner enjoying double-digit support among Rs, and a fair number of Rs told us they can’t stomach voting for [Gillespie]. A lot of business-type Republicans consider Warner acceptable, so probably many Rs who really disliked [Gillespie] voted for me because I was preferable to Warner, but would otherwise have voted Warner not Gillespie. So those R Sarvis voters were “taken” from Warner not Gillespie.

Similar thing happened last year, with pretty high certainty. A poll in September showed that *among Sarvis supporters*, 60+ percent had a favorable opinion of Gov. McDonnell, but 70+ percent had an UN-favorable view of Cuccinelli. So I was a vessel for moderate, R-leaning, anti-Cuccinelli voters who preferred voting for me to voting for MacAuliffe, i.e., I “took” moderate R votes from MacAuliffe.

Moreover, my share of the Independent vote clearly skewed younger, so from voters not inclined to vote D than R.

I agree with Sarvis’s analysis of his own voters, that they’re moderate and left-leaning. Sean Davis at The Federalist analyzed the 2013 Virginia Governor’s race that Sarvis brought up in his e-mail to Doherty and found that Sarvis may have actually helped Democrats in that race. As Ben Dominich, also at The Federalist points out, Sarvis ran on some progressive-leaning positions on economics in the 2013 race. I’m sure Sarvis simply held on to some of these 2013 voters.

Back to the 2014 race, Davis tweeted this about Sarvis and Virginia:

This is the culmination of a progressive shift within the libertarian movement that is gaining traction, particularly within the Libertarian Party. Many so-called “second wave libertarians” and “millennial libertarians” are trying to merge progressivism and libertarianism to form a left-libertarian fusion of sorts. Also, most conservative-leaning libertarians and “conservatarians” (who are still the vast majority in the liberty movement) have already rejoined or never left the Republican Party.

So the party that needs to worry about the Libertarian Party, most of the time, are the Democrats, especially as the LP continues to shift towards the left.

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.

Vote Libertarian, Because Not All Politicians Are Smart, But All Politicians Can Count

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Thus proclaims Arvin Vohra, Vice Chair of the Libertarian National Committee and a candidate for Maryland’s fourth congressional district. Vohra and I are in agreement that the only effective way to tell politicians they must shrink the size and scope of government is to vote for libertarian candidates (“small l” intended).

Not voting at all accomplishes nothing more than making one’s opinions irrelevant to the people who hold political power. Voting for the “less bad” of the two contenders is guaranteed to continue the policies of the last two administrations.

In contrast, consistently voting only for libertarian candidates pulls the two major parties toward more libertarian positions. That, standing alone, is reason to vote libertarian.

We know the strategy works because it is working! Twenty-five years ago, mainstream journalists rarely mentioned libertarians. Now, not a day goes by that the word is not featured in the headlines of big-name publications or crossing the lips of mainstream commentators.

Google the words “libertarian moment,” and witness how shrilly both the left and the right deny that one is occurring.

Their foot-stamping to the contrary, Republicans are fundraising for openly gay candidates. Donors are pressing the party to stay out of marriage altogether. Republican candidates are campaigning to make birth control available over the counter. The first U.S. Senator has come out in favor of marijuana legalization.

Thanks for these shifts goes in some degree to the people who consistently prove their motivation to visit the polls, while simultaneously refusing to cast votes for statist candidates in either party. More people today identify as independents than either Republicans or Democrats. Fifty-nine percent of voters self-identify as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” Even under conservative estimates, 15% of voters can be treated as consistently “libertarian” in their positions.

Libertarians (“small l”) have become a swing-voting block as powerful as the religious right.

The best use of that power is to end the conspiracy of false choice and emotional partisanship that operates to keep the two-party oligarchy in power.

The Republocrats have given us federalized schools; a morass of unfunded entitlements and dependency; wild inflation in the cost of education and healthcare; the Drug War, the highest incarceration rate in the world, militarized police, and asset forfeitures; welfare and cronyism for corporations, agribusiness and green energy; a national debt in the trillions; the surveillance state and the erosion of the fourth amendment; expensive, immoral, ineffective and deadly interventions overseas; and restrictions on political speech.

If the foregoing is not convincing enough, consider the following. When Republicans are in power, Democrats support balanced budgets, oppose unfunded spending and resist increases to the debt ceiling. As then-senator Barack Obama said in 2006:

This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and States of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees; robbing our families and our chil- dren of critical investments in edu- cation and health care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on.

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Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘‘the buck stops here.’’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

When the Republicans are in power, they simply trade positions. Republicans complain about spending and Democrats oppose balanced budgets.

Or consider this example from Robert Sarvis, Virginia’s libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate:

In 2008, when Republicans were the ones supporting the Export-Import Bank, candidate Barack Obama called it little more than corporate cronyism, but in 2014, it was Democrats lining up to support it. Virginia’s Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine introduced the reauthorization bill, and President Obama signed it.

Republicans are keeping the bank going until 2015 when they can figure out who is is in power, so they know which position to take.

How anyone keeps falling for this shtick is beyond me.

Spoilerism is a feature of third party voting, not a glitch. It communicates to mainstream politicians that we’re here, we vote, and if they want to beat their opponent, they need us to do it. The libertarian moment is nigh. Stay the course.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.