In a follow-up to their recent study, David Boaz and Dave Kirby have an article at TCS Daily looking at how voters with broadly libertarian views punched their ballots in the midterms. And what they found was a pretty dramatic swing: Libertarians were still mostly supporting Republicans over Democrats, by 59-36 percent. But then, they were voting GOP at a rate of 70 percent in the 2002 midterms, so that’s actually a significant gain for Dems. I imagine they’ve probably been neglected as a swing group because they’ve been sufficiently consistent in their support for Republicans over decades of “fusionism” that it was easy to underestimate how thin that commitment actually was.
On the other hand, I think a few eyebrows ought to arch at this part:
One more bit from our post-election Zogby poll: We asked voters if they considered themselves “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” A whopping 59 percent said they did. When we added to the question “also known as libertarian,” 44 percent still claimed that description. That’s too many voters for any party to ignore.
Even on the loosest possible definition of “libertarian,” we just know there’s no way in hell the term describes 44 percent of voters. So… what’s going on there? What is this picking up?
3 responses so far ↓
1 Barry // Dec 12, 2006 at 6:53 pm
‘Fiscally conservative and socially liberal’ is a feel-good position to take for a lot of people. Until it actually comes time to, you know, do it.
2 Travis // Dec 13, 2006 at 2:02 am
My explanation for this weirdness:
Most of these people don’t know what a libertarian is, but they know that they think conservatives are assholes and liberals are bad with money, and if thats what a libertarian thinks, then thats what they are.
If you asked them if they were fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as a Zoroasterian, a large minority would still say yes.
3 Eric the .5b // Dec 13, 2006 at 11:37 am
That 15% difference probably consisted of the people who had some idea of what “libertarian” meant.