The Republicans’ reaction to their Election Day “thumping” has been dramatic and entertaining.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman are on their way out the door.
Karl Rove, who predicted a GOP victory to the bitter end, found himself thrown under the bus and a punch line after the election. “I obviously was working harder in the campaign than he was,” President Bush said of Rove half-jokingly last week.
And talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh surprisingly admitted that he had abandoned his conservative principles by shilling for these big-spending Republicans, but claimedhe’d no longer carry their water.
The GOP’s post-mortem also includes the realization that libertarians, a group they always assume will vote for them, cost them control of the United States Senate.
Montana’s incumbent Republican Sen. Conrad Burns lost to Democrat Jon Tester by more than 2,500 votes. Stan Jones, the Libertarian Party candidate, whose claim to fame is his Star Trek-like blue skin, earned 10,339 votes, four times the number of votes Burns needed to hold on.
Jones’ skin is permanently blue-gray because he drank too much colloidal silver thinking it would help prevent disease. Many pundits thought his presence in the Senate race was the perfect illustration of the complete irrelevance of third-party candidates in our two-party political system. Instead, he changed the outcome of the entire midterm elections. After all, it’s a completely different narrative if Republicans hold the Senate.
The GOP can consider blaming libertarians in Missouri, as well. Incumbent Sen. Jim Talent lost to Democrat Claire McCaskill by 45,000 votes, with Libertarian Frank Gilmour receiving more than 47,000 votes.
When a third-party candidate earns more votes than the difference between the two major parties, that candidate is generally labeled a “spoiler.” Built into that attitude is the presumption that, absent a third party choice, the voter would have given his support to a major party candidate.
Ralph Nader was widely derided for “spoiling” the election for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential race, based on the belief that a Green voter would have preferred a Democrat if a Green candidate had not been an option.
Senator-elect Jim Webb’s supporters surely would’ve blamed Green Party candidate Glenda Gail Parker — and her 26,000 votes — if he hadn’t edged out Sen. George Allen.
A similar belief about spoiling follows the Libertarian Party. The image of Republicansas the major party that stands for smaller government leads many to believe that a Libertarian vote really ought to have been a GOP vote.
In 2000, libertarians cost Republican Slade Gorton in Washington state a Senate seat and the GOP clear control of the U.S. Senate. And in 2002 libertarians prevented the GOP from picking up a U.S. Senate seat in South Dakota.
Such outcomes shouldn’t surprise them. The Republicans had a careless belief in their rightful sovereignty over the whole idea of limited government, dating back to the colorful anti-state rhetoric of past standard bearers Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. They have taken the libertarian vote for granted, and they have lost the Senate because of it.
The Libertarian Party itself is small, but Pew Research Center pegs 9 percent of voters as libertarians who “oppose government regulation in both the economic and the social spheres” and the American National Election Studies puts that number even higher, at 13 percent.
Republicans lost this bloc of voters with their $200 billion-plus war in Iraq; the biggest entitlement program (Medicare) expansion in a half-century; record government spending; a $247 billion budget deficit for fiscal 2006 alone; and a religious right agenda that meddles in Americans’ personal lives — see Terri Schiavo.
Republicans abandoned limited government so libertarians were happy to play spoilers and send them packing.
Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason magazine and author of the forthcoming book “Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement” (PublicAffairs).
