Posted: 16 Nov 2012 05:14 AM PST
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.
