Political News and Views

In at least nine Congressional districts Democrats won in the last election, the votes for Libertarian candidates more than made up for the difference. In other words, if Libertarians had enough sense to realize the road to their victory lies in changing the Republican Party from within, there would be fewer leftists in Congress.

And the Daily Kos loves every bit of it:

Race	Dem	Votes	GOP	Votes	Lib	Votes	(L) %	(D) – (R)	Margin
IN-Sen	Donnelly	1,268,407	Mourdock	1,126,832	Horning	146,453	5.8%	141,575	-4,878
MT-Sen	Tester	234,465	Rehberg	215,701	Cox	31,287	6.5%	18,764	-12,523
MT-Gov	Bullock	234,980	Hill	226,555	Vandevender	17,729	3.7%	8,425	-9,304
AZ-01	Kirkpatrick	117,422	Paton	109,508	Allen	14,450	6.0%	7,914	-6,536
AZ-09	Sinema	108,056	Parker	101,089	Gammill	14,361	6.4%	6,967	-7,394
MA-06	Tierney	179,603	Tisei	175,953	Fishman	16,668	4.5%	3,650	-13,018
MI-11	Curson	159,267	Bentivolio	151,740	Tatar	11,611	3.6%	7,527	-4,084
NH-01	Shea-Porter	171,356	Guinta	158,482	Kelly	14,968	4.3%	12,874	-2,094
UT-04	Matheson	108,275	Love	105,629	Vein	5,703	2.6%	2,646	-3,057

As we’ve perused last week’s election returns, we’d noticed a number of races where Libertarian candidates appear to have played spoiler for Republicans—certainly, more than we’re accustomed to. While we haven’t run a comparison with prior cycles, we’ve identified no fewer than nine contests in 2012 where the Libertarian received more votes than the difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates. What’s more, none of these involved the typical 1 or maybe 2 percent you ordinarily expect a Lib to garner: Looking at the three-way vote, all but one were over 3 percent, and three took 6 percent or more, with a high of 6.5 percent in the Montana Senate race. These definitely seem like unusually high figures.

So what’s going on here? I wouldn’t want to speculate too much based on this limited data set. But I could easily believe that a growing proportion of conservative-leaning voters are too disgusted with the GOP to pull the Republican lever, but who won’t vote for Democrats either, are choosing a third option and going Libertarian instead.

After what happened at the GOP convention this year, I get it.  They ran roughshod right over the Ron Paul supporters.

I’ll repeat myself: your road to victory lies in changing the Republican Party, not in a third party.

You can at least get a Republican Congressman to listen to your position.  There’s some consideration to your libertarian beliefs.

You’ll get none of that from a Democrat, regardless of your feeling of pride in your third party protest vote.