Don’t miss the latest from David Kirby and me on the libertarian vote. In Cato Policy Report (pdf; less attractive HTML version here) we report the results of our Zogby International poll of 2006 voters.
In the Zogby survey, 15 percent of voters gave libertarian answers to our three questions. And those libertarian-leaning voters showed the same shift away from Republican candidates that we had identified in the 2004 election. Clearly, “two more years of war, wiretapping, and welfare-state social spending” had not brought back any of the wandering libertarians.
We did some new tests in the Zogby survey. We asked voters to identify themselves ideologically. Full results are in the article, but most respondents whom we identified as libertarian described themselves as “conservative” (41 percent) or “moderate” (31 percent). Only 9 percent called themselves “libertarian.”
But … when we asked half the respondents, “Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal?” we were quite surprised that fully 59 percent said yes. And when we asked the other half of the sample, “Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian?” we knew the number would go down. But it only went down to 44 percent. So 44 percent of American voters are willing to label themselves as “libertarian” if it’s defined as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.”
We point out to Republican strategists:
After the 2000 election Karl Rove was convinced that 4 million Christian evangelicals had stayed home, and he was determined to get them to the polls in 2004. By our calculations, Republicans carried the libertarian vote by 5.5 million votes in the off-year election of 2002 and by only 2.9 million votes in 2006. That’s a swing of 2.6 million libertarian voters. Remember, it takes two new base voters to replace one swing voter who switches from one party to the other. Rove and his colleagues should have been watching out for the libertarian vote as well.
But wait, there’s more!
Since that article was written, David Kirby (whose number-crunching skills prove that you can actually learn something useful at the Kennedy School of Government) has analyzed newly released data from the American National Election Studies, the gold standard of public opinion research. ANES’s 2006 survey once again found that 16 percent of voters held libertarian values. And David found the following shifts from the 2002 midterm elections:
How Libertarians Voted
House 2002 2006
D candidate 23 46
R candidate 70 54
In other words, among libertarians, the margin for Republican House candidates dropped from 47 to 8 points, a 39-point swing. (Note: ANES asked the question a slightly different way, so that votes for third-party or independent candidates were not recorded in 2006. Libertarian voters seem to vote for alternative candidates at a higher rate than other voters.)
Turning to the upper chamber,
Senate 2002 2006
D candidate 15 48
R candidate 74 52
Among libertarians, the margin for Republican Senate candidates dropped from 59 to 4 points, a 54-point swing.
As we noted in the Cato Policy Report article, “To put this in perspective, front-page stories since the election have reported the dramatic 7‑point shift of white conservative evangelicals away from the Republicans. The libertarian vote is about the same size as the religious right vote measured in exit polls, and it is subject to swings more than three times as large.”
We reiterate our advice above to Karl Rove, and invite Democratic strategists to look carefully at the gift that Republicans are offering them.
