Rare News Desk
Republican Ed Gillespie will not be the next senator from Virginia. He lost to incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Warner by about 0.77 percentage points.
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Libertarian Robert Sarvis, widely regarded as a spoiler in Virginia’s 2013 gubernatorial election as well, received 2.45 percent of the vote.
“It seems only fitting that we Democrats stop licking our bruises long enough to say thanks to Mr. Sarvis,” a Virginia Democrat wrote in a Washington Post letter to the editor.
North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis did manage to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan. But Libertarian Sean Haugh’s 3.75 percent of the vote was more than double Tillis’ margin of victory.
And former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson told Newsmax he was planning to run for president again in 2016 to provide a real libertarian alternative to… Rand Paul.
The liberty movement, made up of constitutional conservatives and small-l libertarians, is trying to figure out how best to insert liberty and limited government into the mainstream political debate.
Sometimes these liberty-minded activists have tactical differences over how best to accomplish this goal. One argument is over whether it is better to vote for an ideologically pure third party or gain a foothold in the much bigger and more powerful Republican Party.
The extent to which Libertarian Party candidates actually spoil elections for Republicans is in dispute. But the truth is not every big-government Republican actually deserves libertarian—or for that matter, conservative—votes.
Yet the most influential libertarians, the ones who have won elections and had an impact on public policy or the national political debate, have frequently been Republicans like Ron Paul.
On Tuesday, several such Republicans didn’t just win a high enough percentage of the vote to spoil and election. They attained the vote totals necessary to win one.
Justin Amash and Thomas Massie were reelected by landslide margins, for example. Libertarian-friendly Republican Dan Bongino is still waiting to see if he won a House seat in a Democratic-leaning Maryland congressional district where the election so close uncounted absentee ballots could make the difference.
The dilemma is that while many Republicans don’t deserve libertarian votes, it is difficult to work effectively within the Republican Party if you frequently withhold support from GOP candidates.
That’s not true for your average voter, who can constructively act as a liberty swing vote by casting their ballots for good Republicans while voting third-party against bad ones. But it is true for activists and politicians.
That’s why Rand Paul campaigned for so many Republican candidates this fall, including some who weren’t ideal.
Even Ron Paul has endorsed Republicans like Don Young and Ralph Hall who weren’t exactly libertarians.
It makes sense for the Libertarian Party to actively recruit candidates in urban areas where there are few Republicans.
One year Massachusetts Republicans failed to field a candidate to run against John Kerry. A Libertarian ran against him instead and got nearly 20 percent of the vote.
There are also plenty of Republicans in competitive races who deserve to have a Libertarian candidate running against them.
Rand Paul isn’t one of them.
In his Newsmax interview, Johnson predictably went after Paul on “the whole social issue thing.”
“Look, libertarians are flaming liberals when it comes to social issues, when it comes to civil liberties,” Johnson said.
This is reminiscent of a statement by Ed Clark, the last Libertarian Party presidential candidate to sniff 1 percent of the vote, that libertarianism was “low-tax liberalism.”
But Amash and both Pauls are pro-life. So are Judge Andrew Napolitano and Thomas Woods.
Johnson himself sometimes aligned with pro-life groups in New Mexico when he was governor.
There are plenty of “flaming liberals” who aren’t very good on civil liberties, including some presidents of the United States I could name.
And what of the flaming liberals who want to coerce religious people into paying for contraception and abortifacients, or those who would have the state fine photographers who decline to work weddings that contradict their beliefs?
Some libertarians’ inclination to spoil even a Rand Paul Republican candidacy goes beyond politics. It’s a debate between Clark’s vision of libertarianism as low-tax and the view held by the winning candidate in that presidential election that libertarianism is the “heart and soul” of conservatism.
That’s a philosophical debate for another time. The practical politics, however, are simple.
As a Republican, Johnson was twice elected governor of New Mexico. As a Libertarian, success is defined as getting 1 percent of the vote.
To borrow a phrase from Occupy Wall Street, Rand Paul isn’t the candidate of the 1 percent.
