Perhaps the one race that garnered the most attention in this week’s off-year election was the gubernatorial race in Kentucky. Incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin faced off against Democratic challenger and outgoing Attorney General Andy Beshear. Libertarian candidate John Hicks was in the mix as well, and the final results proved more hairsplitting than likely anyone could have imagined.
When all was said and done, Beshear narrowly pulled out in front of Bevin and secured victory. While there is still a vote recanvass taking place, which Bevin called for, it is highly likely that Kentucky will soon have a new governor sworn into office.
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Trump ally, trails Democratic rival Andy Beshear in reelection bid https://t.co/gLzgdbIleE
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) November 6, 2019
Inevitably, Republicans in Kentucky and across the country started to point fingers at Libertarians who voted for John Hicks as the reason for their election night upset. John Gizzi of Newsmax outright says as much in his post-election recap of the governor’s race. And go to the comments section of any right-of-center publication and you’ll find many of the same sentiments. At first glance, blaming third-party voters seem like a perfectly reasonable view to take.
After all, the vote difference between Bevin and Beshear was only a little over 4,000 votes. That’s a razor-thin margin in a statewide race. Meanwhile, Libertarian John Hicks received over 20,000 votes, which would have more than secured the race for Bevin if they all voted for him rather than Hicks.
However, this is an incredibly shallow way to view the election results and does not paint the whole picture of what happened in Kentucky. There is no reason to believe that everyone who voted for Hicks would have voted for Bevin if Hicks hadn’t run.
Traditionally, Libertarian candidates pull about equally from both Republicans and Democrats. In addition, many Libertarians will opt to not vote at all if not provided with a solid candidate, and there is no reason to believe that wouldn’t have happened in this case.
More importantly, however, the results of the election seems to indicate that it wasn’t Libertarian voters who spoiled the election for Bevin but rather Republican voters. To the chagrin of Democrats who were looking at this race as an indicator for 2020, it was not the massive victory that they are acting like it was. Completely down the ballot, Republicans won every other statewide race by a considerable margin.
Allison Ball, Republican candidate and incumbent for state treasurer, was the biggest winner of the election, defeating her Democratic opponent by over 300,000 votes. The Kentucky secretary of state race was the closest outside of the gubernatorial race. Republican candidate Michael Adams still won by over 60,000 votes.
This otherwise massive victory for the GOP on Tuesday night indicates that Republican voters chose to vote for a straight GOP ticket on Election Day, except when it came to the governor’s race. With that, just enough flipped parties to hand the race to Beshear. Even though the Kentucky Libertarian Party may want to take credit for upsetting the election for Bevin, it is clear that his failure to appeal to Republican voters had a far greater impact on him losing the race.
Both Republicans and Democrats like to blame third-party candidates for “spoiling” elections. For example, Hillary Clinton is still complaining about Green Party candidate Jill Stein supposedly ruining the election for her in 2016, even going so far as to call her a “Russian asset” for helping President Trump win.
Yet blaming a third party for a loss is just an easy way to shift the responsibility for a candidate’s poor performance. Bevin was an incredibly divisive figure across the state, and ultimately, every candidate is responsible for his or her own campaign.
It’s not a third-party voter’s “fault” someone loses an election, because no candidate is entitled to anyone’s vote. Each candidate must earn every vote they receive. Rather than trying to shift responsibility to a third party for their poor performance, Republicans should attempt to understand why people felt compelled to vote for another candidate in the first place.
Caleb Franz is a libertarian writer, executive director of The MilLiberty Initiative, and the host of the MilLiberty podcast.
