Liberty MavenBob Barr Is Polling Better Than You Think: A Historic Opportunity For Libertarians
July 9th, 2008 12:14 pm | by Marc Gallagher | Published in Bob Barr, Election, John McCain, Libertarianism, Liberty, Maven Commentary, Obama, Politics, Polling | 6 Responses
A very nicely designed state by state electoral polling map is available on Zogby.com. It shows how the 4 main candidates for President are polling in most states along with some short commentary. What is most interesting is that Barr is polling extremely well in many states. This type of polling is the most relevant. It is certainly much more relevant than any national poll. National polling is not used to decide who wins the office of President. National polling merely shows which direction voters are leaning overall.
State by state polling represent, in my view, a much more accurate picture of the actual election possibilities. Bob Barr is getting 5% or more in a majority of the states with numbers listed. This includes 10% in New Hampshire and 9% in Nevada which is not surprising since both states are considered libertarian leaning. Also interesting are states like McCain’s home state of Arizona where Obama leads by a slim margin and Barr is showing at 7%. The numbers for Arizona could suggest that McCain indeed is “spoiling” Arizona for McCain to the benefit of Barack Obama. One would think McCain would be victorious in his own state, but I guess not, perhaps thanks to Bob Barr.
The main goal at this point is to get these polling numbers to go up so that Barr is comfortably above 10% nationally since national polls are used to determine participation in debates. The September New Orleans debate has rules that a candidate must be polling higher than 10% in at least 3 widely recognized national polls in order to participate. This is an achievable goal for Bob Barr and it would be a wonderful media opportunity to increase membership in the Libertarian Party.
These state by state numbers should be extremely encouraging to all Libertarians because they suggest Bob Barr will comfortably receive more votes than any previous Libertarian candidate for President. Argue in the margins about his voting record and his transformation, but in the long run his candidacy puts the Libertarian Party on the track towards electoral viability in 2008 and beyond.
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July 9th, 2008 at 2:25 pm (#)
Barr may or may not be spoiling. This poll from North Carolina shows Barr taking equally from registered Dems and Repubs. It is, admittedly, a fairly small sampling.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_CD8_708.pdf
July 9th, 2008 at 3:48 pm (#)
This 6% is nonsense, if history is any guide. The LP has not gotten more than .05% of the vote in any general election, save the 1980, when Ed Clarke had the money to put on national tv some short informercials.
The LP members, just like all the rest of the thrid party crowd, will sell out to one of the lesser of the two evils. The idea is not to waste a vote on the loser third party candidate and to try to ward off the victory fo the other greater evil.
And in all of those past elections, the same rhetoric came from the LP and its allies about the crucial importance of the election, the opportunity for a real change, that the LP alone represented true principles and etc.
And in all of this, no LP member, as a Libertarian Party member, not as a Republican or Democrat, has ever gotten a seat in Congress or in most State legislatures. A party that has its elected members on school boards, water districts and the small city councils and nothing much else is not a growing and vital political enterprise but rather a failed business.
But part of the LP’s problem is its own internal politics. Brian Wilson–no not the member of the Beachboys–the libertarian talkshow host, noted the raucous nonsense that passes for politics and decision making within the LP. It’s bad enough that the LP has to fight off big money, big media, big politics and the rest, but it makes it much worse, fatally worse, whenever it indulges in the kind of idiotic behavior shown most recently at the national convention.
But, again, if history is any guide, the LP has never learned.
Here’s the point: Ron Paul, the sometimes libertarian, says he cherishes the Constitution, that he’d bring it back, wrest it away from those who have strayed from it. But the Constitution is a bundle of compromises. It would be wise for the LP to compromise, indeed, that was how that sacred document came to be, and is also why it creates so many vexing problems–but the only way to get enough votes to have anyone elected is to compromise. There are simply not enough, and never will be enough, libertarians to make things happen.
July 9th, 2008 at 4:58 pm (#)
RBurnett it’s difficult to disagree with most of what you say except your opening sentence:
“This 6% is nonsense, if history is any guide.”
If history is any guide then Obama would not be the Democratic nominee for President.
I couldn’t agree more with your assessment that the LP needs to compromise, but I currently have more optimism for the actual Libertarian vote totals than I’ve ever had before.
-Marc
July 9th, 2008 at 9:45 pm (#)
Mark:
Yes, history isn’t an infallible guide, not even a good guide on some things.The campaign of 2008 had the God Uncertainty playing with everyone. But there are some factors that made it more uncertain than before; if nothing else, the candidacies of Obama and Clinton alone were unprecedented. And we have had previous elections with some amazing things, such as the Perot candidacy of 1992, the Bush-Gore trauma of 2000, and the supposed great opprtunity in 1988 when there was no incumbet running also. In all of these, the LP again netted less than one half of one percent of the general vote.
As to the LP, there’s one last thing to note, that of the internal dispute over whether or not to actually be a political party, where the business is to get party members elected to Congress and the State legislatures.
There’s the purists, who regard politics, the “State” amd all that as evil and corrupting. There’s the pragmatists who think it may be a good thing to actually get some Lp representatives in Congress and the State legislatures so that the LP programs (or non-programs, such as the repeal of the New Deal stuff and the ending of the drug war) may be enacted, As I indicated before, if the LP wants to get anyhting done, then the purists will have to come down from Mt Olympus and take a look around at how real people live and think, to include having to put up with the fact that a lot of them think badly, even the homeschooled set.
For the sake of honesty on my part, I am no libertarian–my reading of several of the so-called statists, such as Machiavelli, Plato, Thomas Aquinas and Adam Smith, to name a few, and my expereinces with J Q Public has informed me that the libertarian thinking on many issues is, well, incomplete. Indeed, St Augustine’s City of God, in his discussion of the City of Man, puts paid to much libertarian thinking on the rather deceptively simple ground of basic human relations. But that’s another discussion for another time.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:50 pm (#)
Yeah, Marc, its good to see this kind of information on the polls – but I would also inject a dose of reality as well.
Harry Browne polled much better than he actually did in the general election. Browne was getting a lot of airplay on the internet, and doing decently in polls (although not as well as Barr is). Still, Browne ended up far lower than those following the polls predicted. Browne was more pure libertarian, and IMO, better than Barr. Having said that, Barr’s name recognition should help.
Either way, RBurnett is right in that (in the 12 years since I became a Libertarian) there’s been a lot of infighting. By nature, libertarians are less likely to compromise and the purists get put off easily. OTOH, that’ll doom the LP candidates to < 1% of the vote. Barr seems like a great way to get beyond that. The purists may shun him (which I think is a mistake), but he can draw from other circles.
Here’s sharing your optimism – but realizing that the polls are optimistic.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:12 pm (#)
[...] happening with the election. This map even has some commentary included with the latest info. As noted by Liberty Maven: Bob Barr is getting 5% or more in a majority of the states with numbers listed. He is up to 10% in [...]