digamma.net - notes

Matthew Yglesias weighs the voting options for libertarians in the 2004 Presidential election:

If those [libertarian] people go for Kerry and Kerry wins, the GOP will probably conclude that it ought to move left. If those people stay home and Kerry wins, the GOP will probably conclude that it needs more traditional base-mobilizing techniques like gay-bashing. If they vote Libertarian and Kerry wins, though, the GOP just might conclude that it needs to do something to attract their votes.

I’m not sure I agree. If libertarians vote for Kerry and thus swing the election, GOP pollsters will probably be smart enough to figure that out when they seek to find out why Bush lost. Or they can just read our blogs. And if the hysterical rants I’ve heard from Democrats against Nader voters in the last three years are any indication, blaming third party voters is a lot easier than asking hard questions about why they didn’t vote for your guy - somehow votes for the opposing major party aren’t as bad in their minds.

I think libertarians in swing states should certainly vote for Kerry. If you opposed the Iraq war like me, Kerry isn’t much (if at all) better, but his people are less likely to foment a culture where you’re called a “fifth columnist", and he’s more likely to get us into Clinton-era bombing campaigns that kill a bunch of brown people and end before they get tiresome than quagmires like the one we’re in now. If you favored the Iraq war, Kerry is not much less of a hawk, and I have faith that his apointees will actually - get this - try to do the job COMPETENTLY.

The only reason for a libertarian to vote for Bush is if she’s totally swallowed the Instapundit vision of a world where Bush bravely defends western civilization against Islamofascism while everyone on the vaguely-defined “left” schemes to bring us down from the inside.

And that’s just foreign policy. If Republicans retain control of Congress and Kerry becomes President, the Republicans are likely to wake up and remember that not so long ago they wanted to slow down government growth. Kerry has said some stupid things about “Benedict Arnold corporations", but he can’t possibly be any more protectionist than Bush. Kerry’s Attorney General might not be any better on civil liberties, but maybe she’ll at least leave the porn industry alone.

As it happens, I’ve just moved from the photo-finish swing state of New Hampshire into the People’s Republic of Vermont, so I don’t have to worry about any of this. Kerry will win all three of our electoral votes in a landslide. I’ll probably do some volunteering for the Kerry campaign in New Hampshire. I don’t know who I’ll vote for personally - if the Libertarian candidate is someone ridiculous like “the real Kramer”, I’ll sooner vote Green, but if they field a credible candidate who actually puts some effort into campaigning, she’ll probably get my vote.

Oh, and as I said on the Yglesias comment thread: if you’re a Democrat who likes to refer to libertarians as “Republicans who smoke pot", maybe if you reached out to them instead of calling them names and tossing out Ayn Rand jokes you read on Mike Huben’s homepage, they’d vote with you more often.