Skip to main content

The first thoughts the morning after . . .

I stayed up way too late last night, and I have a doctor's appointment, so this will be brief, to be fleshed out later.

First, congratulations to President Obama, Governor Markell et al:  it was a hell of a good night for the Democratic Party on almost every level.

Second, I am more than pleased with the Libertarian performance on Election Day, both nationally and within Delaware.

Details later, but here's the headline:  the votes are not quite all counted, but Gary Johnson is over 1.1 million votes as I write.  In raw numbers that blows away the prior high vote total for a Libertarian presidential candidate, and when the final percentages are figured out it should equal if not surpass the percentage total (the old record is 1.06%; he's over 1% by some at this moment unguessable fraction).  He actually got over 1% in about 18 states, over 2% in another 6 or 7, and over 3% (if Alaska holds) in two.  His lowest performance was 0.5% in several states, but those were mostly big states in which he nonetheless piled up tens of thousands of votes.

In Delaware, Johnson shattered the old Libertarian presidential total, just like David Eisenhour shattered the old statewide Libertarian total.  Numerous candidates (whom I will detail this afternoon) broke 3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 votes.  In local elections we had candidates break 1,000 and others break 10%.

More Libertarian votes were cast in Delaware this year than have ever been cast before.  It is small, I know, but it defines an existing base to build upon.

Finally, the GOP is giving its death rattle in Delaware.  Mitt Romney was the only statewide GOP candidate to break 40%, and he did that by the skin of his teeth.  The new norm for the statewide GOP vote is the high 30s.  I'd like to say that Libertarian candidates were spoilers, but frankly the Republicans could not keep any races close enough to be spoiled.  Moderate Republicans and fiscally conservative Democrats need to realize that the next major party in Delaware is going to be the Libertarian Party, if we continue to build it.  In other words, I view yesterday's vote as a floor rather than a ceiling.

More later.

Comments

And one said…
When in head-to-head races, the local Delaware Green Party candidates beat the Libertarian candidates (representative and governor).
Anonymous said…
This is no surprise. Given the number of Liberals in this state, it's understandable that you would get 4-5K of farther left progressive socialist whack jobs in that big a bunch,,,,

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?