Skip to main content

Another myth bites the dust: Libertarians take votes from the GOP

Public Policy Polling's latest data on the North Carolina races indicates what I have long been contending: true Libertarian candidates will take votes from both Democrats and Republicans who value freedom-related issues:

-60% of voters who support Michael Munger for Governor support Barack Obama for President with 19% going for Bob Barr and just 14% for John McCain. A plurality also support Kay Hagan (40%), with 36% going to Christopher Cole and 19% to Elizabeth Dole. So in this case his supporters are pretty clearly taking support from Bev Perdue. This could be a product of liberals antagonized by Perdue's stands on offshore drilling and community college attendance for illegal immigrants going over to Munger until Perdue gives them a reason to vote for her.

-Among those supporting Christopher Cole for Senate it is basically a dead heat between John McCain and Barack Obama. 39% of them go for McCain, 34% of them go for Obama, and 19% support Bob Barr. For Governor 44% support Pat McCrory, 30% for Munger, and 23% for Perdue.

-Bob Barr's supporters are also going Libertarian for US Senate- 41% support Cole, 28% support Hagan, and 25% support Dole. For Governor it's almost a three way tie, with 36% going for McCrory, 33% for Munger, and 27% for Perdue.

The bottom line? It looks the Libertarians are taking roughly equal numbers of voters from Republicans and Democrats, and if there is any lean toward them taking from Republicans it's a small one.


This goes back to the post down below where I piggybacked from Tom Knapp, and it is an example of what Libertarians need to do if they are going to be a factor in American politics.

[Thanks to Chris Cole for pointing me to this]
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...
26 comments
Read more