Philip: You're right about the libertarian divide on national
security, though in fairness to Boaz and Kirby they do cover this
in their paper (pdf):
Like other Americans, libertarians who worried most
about the threat of terrorism preferred Bush to Kerry. In 2004,
according to the ANES data, libertarians accounted for 13 percent
of the total adult population of the United States. Of those, half
told pollsters that "terrorism" was the most important issue in the
last four years. Others were widely split, citing the economy, the
war in Iraq, civil liberties,vor other issues as most important. Of
those libertarians who identified terrorism as the most important
issue in the last four years, 80 percent voted for George W. Bush,
while 20 percent voted for John Kerry. Of those who identified
anything else as the most important issue, 56 percent voted for
Kerry, and 39 percent voted for Bush.32 In other words,
libertarians for whom terrorism was the most important issue were
twice as likely to vote for Bush. If terrorism is not as critical a
decision point in upcoming elections, or if support for Bush's
handling of terrorism declines, then perhaps libertarians
frustrated with big-government Republicans will be less likely to
stick with them on national security grounds. ...
Anecdotal evidence from prominent libertarians confirms the
importance of the issue of terrorism in 2004. Libertarian-leaning
Louis Rossetto, who started Wired magazine, intended to
vote for Bush: "Bush may bewrong about everything else, but he is
right about the issue that matters most for my children's future:
stopping Islamic fascism." David Kopel of the Independence
Institute said: "This will be the first election in which I have
ever voted for a Republican for president. We're in a war in which
the survival of civilization is at stake, and Bush is the only
candidate who realizes the gravity of the danger we face and who is
determined to win World War IV," language echoed by Vermont
libertarian author and gadfly John McClaughry. Law professor Eugene
Volokh also cited the war on terrorism in his decision to vote
Republican.
(This is followed by a footnote citing
Reason's 2004
who-will-you-vote-for
symposium.)
An issue that Boaz and Kirby don't get into, oddly enough, is
what might be called the gridlock vote. There's a line in Table 13
of their paper noting that in a 2000 poll more than half of
libertarians expressed a preference for divided government. I'd bet
that that number has risen; certainly lots of libertarian who
supported Kerry in 2004 made an appeal to gridlock (there was even
a graphic going around that advocated ticket-splitting under the
slogan "Block the Box"). My hunch is that there's a sizable chunk
of libertarians who will vote for a Republican presidential
candidate if it looks like there'll be a Democratic congress and
vice versa (and that the contapositive holds for congressional
races). While these libertarians may be a certain species swing
voters, they're not the sort of swing voters that either party can
expect to reliably win over.
topics:
Islam, Law, Iraq, Fascism
