Monday, November 12, 2012

Post-election: Third party votes

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, received 0.9% of the vote nationally, and 2-3.5% in some of the more libertarian states (source here). That isn't anywhere close to all the Ron Paul supporters who swore that they wouldn't vote for Mitt. What happened to them?

This commentator thinks a lot didn't vote for anyone for president. That sounds believable to me, and I don't have time at this point to research it. I invite others to fill in the gaps.

Image: deadlinelive.info


3 comments:

  1. Gary Johnson's 1% is 150% better than what Bob Barr got in 2008. This is the first time the libertarian party has surpassed one million votes and it almost equals the percentage earned in 1980, when a Koch brother was the VP candidate and wrote checks for advertising.

    Johnson probably benefited from hard core Ron Paul voters, although it sounds like some also wrote-in Paul's name.

    Paul also has less die-hard supporters that may have voted for Obama or Mitt. Then there are Paul voters who couldn’t be bothered and just stayed home.

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  2. We'll have to see in the next election cycle how important libertarians are to the GOP. The GOP is foreign territory to me, so I'm making no predictions.

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  3. It seems like Rand Paul will run in 2016, so I guess we'll see.

    I think there's also a good chance that civil libertarians will make a move to reclaim the Democratic party, although I'm not sure who their standard bearer would be.

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