Skip to main content

Polling shows room for Libertarian vote to grow in New Hampshire

I blogged yesterday about the 7% support that Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson enjoys in New Hampshire.  It is important to note that 65% of the voters know nothing about him.  The support he has comes primarily from moderates and those who list themselves as Very Conservative.  His support among liberals is noticeably lower.

New Hampshire:  One place where Gary
Johnson's "Live Free" slogan should
definitely resonate.
Today's Public Policy Polling follow-up in New Hampshire suggests that there is significant room for Johnson to grow that liberal support.  PPP found that two of Johnson's signature issues are rapidly rising in popularity:

-Support for gay marriage in New Hampshire continues to be on the rise. 57% of voters think it should be legal to 35% who think it should be illegal. That represents a six point increase in support for gay marriage compared to last July when we found support at 51/38. Democrats (85% support) and Republicans (just 21% support) are pretty far apart on this issue but as we're finding more and more independents (61% support) are a lot closer to the Democrats than the Republicans on it. 85% of voters support some form of legal recognition for gay couples in the form of either marriage or civil unions, including 69% of Republicans.
-65% of voters support legalizing medical marijuana to 24% opposed. That includes more than 70% of Democrats and independents and even a plurality of GOP voters (46/43).
Given that most people now believe that President Obama's abrupt conversion on marriage equality was a cynical political maneuver (as compared to Governor Johnson's long-held position), and that neither Obama nor Romney has anything planned for marijuana except continuing prosecution and persecution, this would appear to be fertile ground for Libertarians.

If you're in New Hampshire and interested in helping out the Gary Johnson 2012 campaign, visit the New Hampshire for Gary Johnson 2012 Facebook page and get involved.  You can also contact campaign officials direct via the Gary Johnson 2012 website.

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