The delusions of relevance
held by third parties is again
before us. This time they’ll
make a difference in deciding
who’s President. Nader is
running again from the Left,
former Georgia GOP Congressman
Bob Barr is running as a
Libertarian from the right. It
won’t matter.
Full disclosure. Disgusted
with the Nixon presidency, a
squishy Gerald Ford, weenie
Country Club Republicans, and
conflicted with a few locals,
I took a walk on the GOP in
1976. I helped invent the
local Libertarian effort for
presidential candidate Roger
McBride and hung around for
three more cycles because by
then I was pretty much running
the whole national operation,
making it hard to leave.
To no avail. The LP’s Ed Clark
got over a million votes in
1980 using the personal
checkbook of his VP running
mate David Koch. Independent
John Anderson got almost six
million votes, also proving …
nothing. In 1984 the LP
partially imploded, the losers
moving off to things like the
Cato Institute, giving America
genuine relevance with one of
its greatest think tanks and
the LP with declining vote
totals and never again
breaking a million.
An incorrect assumption is
that Libertarian candidates
draw from the right and hurt
Republicans. It’s
counter-intuitive, but studies
show they don’t. Clark got 2
percent of the vote in Pima
County — close to 3 percent in
many heavy Democrat precincts,
less than 1 percent in heavy
GOP ones.
Libertarians consistently draw
from the left about 2-to-1.
Many right-wing LP members
often vote GOP. Democrats
should worry more about Barr
than Nader, assuming Barr can
get nominated by the current
Libertarian leadership who
four years ago dumped their
real candidates for a geek who
lived at home with his mother.
Nader did not elect Bush in
2000. That along with
believing in the validity of
exit polls is one of the
biggest myths in American
political history and based on
one-dimensional analyzation.
In 1992, former Governor Evan
Mecham was so hacked at John
McCain that he ran against him
in the general election as an
independent. The Democrat was
Claire Sargent, a nice,
ineffectual liberal. Mecham
got 10 percent of the vote.
McCain still beat Sargent by
20 points. Proving if you are
so mad at John McCain that
you’d vote for Evan Mecham,
you probably weren’t going to
vote for McCain anyway.
The 2001 Ward Three Tucson
Council race was between
Republican Kathleen Dunbar,
Democrat Paula Aboud, and
Libertarian Jonathan Hoffman,
who’s often more Republican
than I. Dunbar was concerned
Hoffman would take votes from
her, but she won handily. Four
years later Dunbar was
defeated by Democrat Karen
Uhlich in a two-way race. LP
candidates hurt Democrats.
In 2000, most Nader voters
wouldn’t have voted for Gore
absent Nader! Many would’ve
voted for Bush, or just left
it blank. That’s based on
something obvious in the
McCain-Mecham-Sargent race.
Vengeance trumps ideology.
There have been exactly two
major impacts made by third
party candidates in
presidential elections in the
last hundred years, George
Wallace in 1968 and Ross Perot
in 1992. Wallace got over 13
million votes, Perot over 19
million. Estimates as to how
those would’ve split minus
their candidacies vary, but
one thing is obvious. They
would’ve split.
So would the minuscule vote
totals gotten by Nader and all
other third-party candidates.
To believe they would have
somehow voted en masse for any
one candidate absent the
choice they made and somehow
changed the outcome of
anything defies logic and
history.
