Swing-Voting Libertarians
The usual left/right dichotomy ignores a large portion of American voters: those who reject conservative traditions and big-spending liberals alike.
For more than a decade now politicians and pundits have talked about a polarized electorate - red-state conservatives and blue-state liberals. Both parties focus on turning out their “base.”
Commentators often overlook evidence that millions of Americans don’t line up neatly in these red and blue boxes. Many of them are conservative on fiscal issues like tax and spending but moderate or liberal on “social issues” like abortion rights and gay marriage. (And some of course are liberal — that is, American-style welfare-state liberal — on economic issues and conservative on social issues.) You might say those voters want government out of their personal lives and out of their businesses.
The Gallup Poll finds that about 20 to 23 percent of Americans fall into the fiscally conservative, socially liberal - or libertarian - group. Using tighter criteria, David Kirby and I have found in a series of studies that about 15 percent of Americans can be classified as libertarian voters.
The libertarian voters have often given about 70 percent of their vote to Republican candidates, though they’ve shown more willingness than most Americans to vote for independent candidates such as John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. They preferred George W. Bush over Al Gore by 72 to 20 percent. But the election of 2004 saw a dramatic swing away from the Republicans, with libertarian support for Bush dropping from 72 to 59 percent, while support for the Democratic nominee almost doubled to 38 percent. Bush’s record on war, spending, entitlements, and social issues certainly pushed libertarians away.
That weakened support for Republicans lasted into the 2006 congressional elections. In a survey conducted for the Cato Institute by the Zogby firm, 59 percent of libertarians voted for Republican candidates for Congress, and 26 percent voted for Democrats.