United Liberty
Libertarianism and The Center
Mon, 11/10/2008 - 11:56am | posted by Paige Michael-Shetley
Libertarians constantly face the preeminent struggle to form and implement strategies to gain political relevance. The party has never achieved a result better than 1% on a Presidential Election. Adding to our frustration is the failure of the Libertarian Party to capitalize on the opportunity Ron Paul’s groundbreaking Republican Primary campaign, which gained new ground for the libertarian philosophy in terms of visibility. Bob Barr’s campaign failed to crack 500,000 votes in an election cycle in which Ron Paul earned more than 1 million votes in Republican primaries and caucuses.
The question often arises to libertarians: “Should we target our appeal to the left or the right?” Indeed, this appears to be one of many fundamental differences between the two most prominent Libertarian campaigns for the Presidential nomination, those of Bob Barr and Mary Ruwart. Congressman Barr campaign made very apparent his goal to target disaffected conservative and Republican voters. He introduced Ron Paul at CPAC, and he appeared on Fox News numerous times (perhaps more than on any other news network). Wayne Allyn Root, Congressman Barr’s Vice Presidential Nominee, similarly argued for reaching out to the right. Dr. Ruwart, on the other hand, argued for targeting the left. Congressman Barr won the nomination and unsuccessfully followed through on his campaign’s strategy. (Although many blame “Presser-gate” for his demise.)
The truth is that both approaches are fundamentally flawed for two intuitive reasons. Firstly, it is naturally quite difficult to convince a substantial number of voters who are registered with a particular party to vote against the nominee of said party. Party registration indicates party loyalty and tends to engender consistency in voting for party candidates. Observing the exit polls from the 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections, Republicans and Democrats each seem to vote for-and-against their party’s Presidential nominee consistently within the range of 90-10, respectively. These voters are much more susceptible to the infamous “wasted vote” argument made against voting for third party candidates and are more inherently willing to vote for the “lesser of two evils.”
Secondly, the labels “liberal” and “conservative” form the current orthodoxy of ideological choices in our political system. Republican and Democratic voters ascribe to the assumption of a bi-polar political system presenting a choice between big-government economic policies and small-government social/cultural policies on one hand, and small-government economic policies and big-government social/cultural policies on the other. These voters comfortably participate in this orthodoxy; many of them are simply not ready to break from it and consider unorthodox worldviews such as libertarianism.
The left-right paradigm characterizing our political system will not change anytime soon, whether we like it or not. As such, we libertarians have to find a way to operate within it if we wish to grow our ranks and prominence and eventually win elections. Fortunately, we have a fantastic opportunity to do so right smack dab in the middle of the paradigm.
Literally.
A simple look at in exit polls from the election years above, in addition to those in the 1992 election, reveals that the “center” has long been the kingmaker in American electoral politics. Observe that:
- Clinton earned 49% of the self-identified “Moderate” vote in 1992, compared with Bush carrying 27% of this bloc.
- 57% of the Moderate vote went to Clinton in 1996, compared to the 33% earned by Dole.
- Gore won 52% of the Moderate vote in 2000, compared to 44% earned by Bush 43 that year.
- Kerry won 54% of the Moderate vote in 2004, compared to 45% won by Bush 43.
- This year, Obama won a whopping 60% of the Moderate vote, compared to McCain’s 39%.
These trends among Moderate voters generally held among self-identified registered Independents. The only years out of these in which the winner of the Independent and Moderate votes did not win the Presidential election are in the two years in which Bush won. Remember, though, that Gore did win the popular vote in 2000, one of two election years in American history in which the popular vote winner did not win the electoral vote. There’s also a possibility that a miscount of votes in one state swung the election to Bush.
2004 saw a special circumstance negating the impact of moderates, namely the significant increase in turnout of conservative votes. The GOP executed an extremely strong GOTV (get out the vote) program targeted toward socially conservative voters, especially in swing-states like Ohio and Missouri where same-sex marriage referendums were on the ballot. Indeed, the 2004 exit polls saw a full ten-point shift in the composition of the electorate from those holding a “Moderate” ideology to those holding a “conservative” ideology.
One only need observe the impact that Moderates have by looking at the 11-point shift from 2004 in favor of Obama this year. Obama’s stake of Moderates equals 26% of the total popular vote, a two-point increase over Kerry’s performance in 2004. Furthermore, McCain’s percentage of Moderate votes composes 17% of the popular vote, a 3-point reduction from Bush’s tally in 2004. This represents a full five-point shift of the whole electorate toward the Democrats from 2004 explained fully by the trend among Moderate votes.
Furthermore, it’s quite clear from data that notable third-party candidates perform best among Moderate and Independent voters. Perot had his best showing among Moderate voters in his campaigns, earning 24% of the Moderate vote (compared to 22% of the Conservative vote and 18% of the Liberal vote) and 9% of the Moderate vote (compared to 8% of the Conservative vote and 7% of the Liberal vote) in 1992 and 1996, respectively. While it doesn’t appear as though he performed significantly better among Moderates than among Conservatives and Liberals, he certainly did among self-identified Independents than among Republicans and Democrats. Perot earned 33% of the Independent vote in 1992- the second highest showing among this group- and he won 17% in 1996. He earned 21% of Republicans and 15% of Democrats in 1992, and he notched 6% of Republicans and 5% of Democrats in 1996.
Nader’s performance among Moderates in 2000 was… well, better than his performance among Conservatives. But his performance among Independents was clearly better than that among Republicans or Democrats, as he won 6% of the Independent vote compared with 2% of the Democratic vote and 1% of the Republican vote. Buchanan also notched his only appoximately non-zero tally among Independents, earning 1% of their votes.
From the perspective of advancing electorally, it’s quite clear from the data that we have a need to perform well among Moderates/Independents (to whom I will refer as “Centrists” from point on), who make up a significant proportion of American voters. But there is an intrinsic quality among this group that potentially make libertarianism quite appealing to them, and that is their shared value of independence. Centrists think about issues independently from the entrenched left and right poles of the political debate, just as libertarians do. Indeed, many moderates classify themselves as “fiscally conservative, socially liberal,” which is an often expedient way of describing libertarian views.
Current empirical evidence suggests compatibility between Centrists and libertarians. An August Zogby poll found that 69% of self-identified Independents believed that Barr should be included in the debates between Obama and McCain, compared with 52% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans who shared that view. What’s interesting about this figure is that 59% of Independents answered that Nader should be included in the debates, an amount 10 percentage points lower than those who believed that Barr should be included. This is well above the margin-of-error in the poll, which was 1.7%. One could conclude based on this data that Independents know Nader and his leftist views, which they hear from Democrats; while they see libertarianism as a new perspective from which they want to hear more.
Indeed, John Zogby himself comments on such an accord in his new book, “The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream,” He cites observations from his polling of similarities in characteristics between libertarians and moderates. One example is found in responses to the question, “Who is the funniest comedian?” Libertarians and moderates both primarily chose Bill Cosby, while liberals and progressives chose Richard Pryor, and conservatives chose Red Skelton. Zogby speculates libertarians may appreciate Cosby because he significantly emphasizes the value of self-responsibility. He goes on to commment:
Libertarians and moderates are not so far apart in core beliefs… Together, they could be a vital new political force waiting to happen, one that shuns both the God talk of the religious right and the let-government-solve-it mentality of the traditional left.
Zogby has a sterling record as a pollster and a commentator on political developments, and his analysis in this case is spot on. Libertarians and moderates both reject the ideological orthodoxies of the Democrats and Republicans, and we share the common value of independence. We make not strange bedfellows, but harmonious ones. If we are to advance electorally, libertarians must not only become a part of the new center, but we must take leadership of it.
This will be a common theme of my posts in the future, as I explore the topic in more detail.
Great article and analysis. The first part reminds me of an old Native American proverb: “If you chase two rabbits, you will loose them both.”
“In this free nation we do not choose to be ruled, we elect to be governed.”
— Barry Goldwater
There’s a fundamental flaw in your premise, that of equating left=Democrat and right=Republican.
The premise of Dr. Ruwart’s campaign was to reach left, true, but not necessarily to Democrats. Her expansion plan to the independent left was by design to get the LP’s public perception back to the center where it belongs, and past history has shown that it does work. Barr, OTOH, was targeting disaffected Republicans, not necessarily to the right. He blew it with the C4L stunt, undoubtedly, and his strategy of trying to draw disaffected Republicans who were still overdosed on the red Kool-Aid (and still are!) was a mistake because the time was not yet right for that effort. It probably won’t be until 2012 or 2016 if at all—the GOP hasn’t died enough yet combined with the DP hasn’t gone too socialist yet.
The correct strategy for all LP candidates is to look at the incumbent in the spectrum, then stake the opposite spot in the center (off center to the right or left, but still in the center) and then hammer the incumbent on their record using populist libertarian rhetoric. In open seats, stake the center and stay there. Then couch the LP message in populist rhetoric. It works. In 2002 I managed Jeff McQueen’s CO-Senate-11 race, the open seat that decided control of the state Senate. The D and R spent over $1M each on a $35K seat because of the control factor. We spent $50, $35 of which was the filing fee. They played to their bases and engaged in negative campaigning against each other, ignoring Jeff. Jeff got into the local debates and delivered a centrist Everyman populist libertarian message and got good air time on the local radio and TV from those debates. At one point in a debate the other two were literally yelling across Jeff (who was seated in the center, by design, part from political positioning, and part to keep the other two from killing each other), who sat there calmly, then in a break for air, he quietly asked to get back to the issues. He won that debate on that delivery alone. The race was decided by less than a half percent. Jeff got 9.1%, the most of any 3-way race in that cycle nationwide. And we did it all with only 3 weeks left in the cycle. Had we started earlier, we could have pulled 15-20% easy and possibly made an upset.
My point is that while the stats say X, the problem is that we tend to look too much at stats to dictate tactics. Those tactics should be dictated by the target demographics more than past voting stats, and that each race is different and needs to be tailored as such.
These are very good points. I would offer a case to back this up, which involves my parents, who tend to think of themselves these days as “moderates”. Both of them campaigned door-to-door for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and generally supported Republican presidential candidates in subsequent elections through 1988 (though I believe my father voted for Independent candidate John Schmitz in 1972). Over the years, most particularly because of the direction of thing under the influence of the religious right, they have backed away from the “conservative” label. Now it is also the issue of foreign policy and the war in Iraq that has reinforced this. Fiscal irresponsibility hasn’t helped, either.
In 1992 they broke with their traditions by voting for Ross Perot, mainly over disgust with the huge budget deficits that continued during the first Bush administration (as well as tax increases). They may have voted the same way in 1996 when Perot ran again. In 2000, my mother voted for Nader, and in 2004 I recall her saying she didn’t vote at all in the presidential election (although she thinks she may have voted again for Nader). This year, my parents both voted for Ron Paul in the primary, but then, for the first time, cast their votes for a Democratic presidential candidate by voting Obama in the general election. It was essentially meant as a rejection of 8 years of Bush and “Republican rule”. Nevertheless, they are both very open to third party candidates and believe they should be included in debates and on ballots.
A significant part of the political center will be persuaded particularly by appeals to stop the excessive influence of major corporate interests over Washington and the two-party system. Ron Paul and B.J. Lawson both spoke eloquently to this, as did also Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel. Ralph Nader has been particularly outspoken about this, and both Chuck Baldwin and Cynthia McKinney did fairly well speaking to this (though both of them had limited appeal to the right and left, respectively). Bob Barr missed an opportunity by using a mostly “conservative” style of rhetoric, which simply did not appeal to many independent voters, and made many libertarians wary.
One of the great virtues of the libertarian philosophy is that it rejects ideological polarities and actually serves to bring people together. This is one of the great lessons of the Ron Paul campaign, and I think we can look for ways to bring people together by showing how freedom is not ideological, left or right, but that it is at the front and center of what sets this Republic apart from others.
Great article, and great commentary. I suppose I consider myself somewhere in the “center” and the thing that keeps me interested in third parties (apart from spending my working day looking at their websites) is the appeal of something new. I think that the strength of a third party will indeed come from arguing positions from the middle of the political spectrum in that they need not target “liberals” or “conservatives” but rather stick to a platform of freedom-oriented solutions as opposed to rhetoric paid for by corporate interests or tax dollars.
EDIT - As an aside, one trend I saw liberty-minded candidates fall into this election cycle a little too often is overuse of “opposition” bullet points. It is a matter of fact that libertarians and Ron Paul Republicans oppose many things (bailouts, high taxation, etc.) but I think the message needs a little of a PR makeover. When a website or print card lists 10 things a candidate opposes and only a couple of “solutions” or things they are for, then the overall message feels too negative for the mainstream. At least in my humble opinion.
I’ve talked to alot of old fans of Bill Clinton, and alot of the stuff they brag about include the fact that Clinton balanced the budget and presided over relative peace (though that aspect is greatly exaggerated). He wasn’t a moralist and even got in alot of trouble for his sexual shenanigans. The aspects that many like about Clinton’s presidency are inherently libertarian.
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson
If the third parties were allowed in presidential debates as they should be, I assure you they would garner more than 30% of the electorate. Look at the success of Ross Perot.
People will respond to no income tax, abolish the IRS, printing dollars that are actually worth dollars and will be 20 years from now.
Ron Paul, he was black out by the media needed equal exposure in the press, nothing do with center, left, right or moderate. Whoever wrote Ron Paul’s literature should have been fired, in one mailing, vow to overturn Roe v Wade, criticize the teachers and bash the unions to no end. I’m a retired unionist, pro choice, and donated fifty dollars to the campaign. I was and I’m still mad. Yup, I voted Ron Paul and posted a sign on my property. For the lesser of two evils, why would you vote for any evil, I voted Bob Barr. From New Hampshire
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