Back to the Drawing Board — In
Massachusetts, Libertarians were looking for a major showing in the race for
governor.
Libertarians had a well-known candidate in the person of Carla Howell, who had
gotten eleven percent of the vote against Ted Kennedy in the last election,
thanks in part to the GOP's nominating a candidate so lame that the party
actually repudiated him.
And the Howell campaign had an original and plausible strategy. Knowing that
it would be difficult to raise funds and issues on Howell's behalf because of the
heat generated by the major party candidates in this race, Howell's campaign
manager came up with a novel strategy: Howell would head an effort to abolish the
state's income tax and gain publicity from appearing as its spokesperson both in
news coverage and advertising.
It sounded like a plausible strategy. But it was a colossal failure: Howell
took barely one percent of the vote. — R.W. Bradford
Meanwhile, at Party Headquarters . . .
— For the past several years, the national Libertarian Party has
focused the party's slim resources on activities other than winning elections. In
this election year, for example, the national party spent $54,600 on political
campaigns, less than three percent of its budget. And about 65% of the funds it
spent on campaigns was used to purchase a handful of advertisements opposing
Republican Bob Barr in the GOP primary in Georgia. (LP national political
director Ron Crickenberger took credit for helping to defeat Barr, though this
seems extremely unlikely: Barr lost by more than a 2 to 1 margin and the LP's ad
budget was tiny in comparison to the millions spent by the candidates and their
partisans.)
Rather than winning elections, or even doing well in them, the national party
has spent its efforts on items that it can use to help it raise funds: publicity
stunts like the attack ads against Barr and recruiting large numbers of
candidates for elections for which there is no hope of victory by any definition.
This year, the party made a huge deal of the fact that it had 219 candidates for
the House of Representatives, more than any other fringe party has ever had, and
beefed up its list of "victories" by recruiting candidates to run for extremely
low-level non-partisan offices which would otherwise go uncontested.
This is not really surprising: the national LP is run by staffers whose
interests do not necessarily involve winning elections or affecting policy. They
need a constant flow of cash to pay their salaries, to give them "performance"
bonuses, and to pay for their perks of office. Until recently, the party's
National Committee has provided no effective oversight.
The new National Committee and the national chair elected at the convention in
July seem to be trying to get the staff under control. It's a big job, and all
men of goodwill wish them well. Unfortunately, the chair and the committee seem
disinclined to level with the general membership, if the way the party reported
the resignation of National Director Steve Dasbach is any indication. After
forcing Dasbach to resign, the National Committee allowed the LP News to bury the
story on page three and omit any mention of the reasons for Dasbach's leaving,
not even mentioning that Dasbach was told to "pack his bags." I suspect the
leadership is reluctant to inform the membership of the extent of the problems
for fear that it would hurt fundraising. Others have suggested a simpler
explanation: LP News is still edited by Bill Winter, a part of the entrenched
bureaucracy, who cannot be fired because the party owes him so much money for
unused vacation and sick leave, thanks to Winter's negotiating an extraordinarily
generous contract with Dasbach, without the knowledge or approval of the national
chair or the National Committee. — R.W. Bradford
No Libertarian Spoilers This Year —
One of the most common "insights" that pundits have offered about the election is
that LP campaigns cost the GOP several important contests. Articles and op-eds
making this arguement have appeared everywhere from the New York Times to The
Weekly Standard, and even appear in this issue of Liberty.
The most widely cited race in which the LP allegedly cost the GOP an important
election was the contest for the senate seat in South Dakota, where Libertarian
Kurt Evans got 3,071 votes in an election that Democrat incumbent Tim Johnson won
by just 527 votes. If 1,800, or 58.6%, of those votes went to GOP candidate John
Thune, leaving just 1,271 for the Democrat, Thune would have won. And since
Libertarian views are generally closer to those of Republicans than Democrats, if
Evans hadn't been on the ballot, it's likely that more than 58.6% of those who
voted for him would have voted for the Democrat incumbent.
This argument sounds plausible, but it has some serious flaws. For one thing,
there is considerable evidence that about half the vote that LP candidates get in
three-way races comes from people who for one reason or another are inclined to
vote against both major party candidates. There is no evidence that these people
favor the Libertarian political program or that they would be more inclined to
vote for a Republican than for a Democrat or (likeliest of all) for no candidate
at all. There is substantial evidence that about half the voters who choose the
LP nominees wouldn't vote at all if the LP candidate were not on the ballot,
leaving only half the votes up for grabs by the major parties.
But this was not a typical election. Evans had withdrawn from the race and
endorsed Thune, thereby encouraging voters who were ideologically motivated to
switch their votes in the same way. These voters, obviously are not part of the
3,071 votes for the LP candidate, leaving a higher proportion of anti-major party
voters among those who ultimately voted for Thune.
If Evans' withdrawal took a quarter of his supporters to the GOP and half his
original voters were anti-major party, that would leave just 1,152 votes up for
grabs. Of these, Thune would have had to win 840, or 73%. This is a very high
percentage; past experience indicates that Republicans get about 66% of votes
that would otherwise go to the LP if voters are denied an opportunity to vote
Libertarian.
Applying this same analytic method to the other seven races in which the LP
candidate's vote total exceeded the margin of victory, reveals that the LP didn't
affect the outcome of a single race. — R.W. Bradford
