Bob Barr Not Going Viral

The New York Times ran a feature today on Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr being a spoiler. But there is little evidence so far that Barr is gaining much traction in this election.

Consider, for instance, the rather modest fundraising goal established on Barr's webpage. He seeks to raise $88,000 by July 4, of which $27,000 has been raised so far. Candidates generally do not set fundraising goals that they do not expect to meet, so let's say that Barr succeeds and raises another $61,000 over the course of the next week to beat his goal. In fact, let's say that Barr beats that goal by 50 percent and raises $90,000.

A candidate who is raising $90,000 per week will raise approximately $1.7 million dollars between now and Election Day in November. How would this compare to the amount of funds raised by other recent third-party candidates? The amounts below reflect the total amount of individual contributions to third-party candidates in 2000 and 2004, ignoring PAC money, self-loans, etc.:

2004
Nader        Independent     $2.5 million
Badnarik     Libertarian     $1.0 million
Cobb         Green           $0.5 million
Peroutka     Constitution    $0.3 million

2000
Buchanan     Reform          $15.3 million
Nader        Green           $10.8 million
Brown        Libertarian     $2.1 million

There was a huge reduction in the amount of funds available to third-party candidates between 2000 and 2004, perhaps because Ralph Nader's impact on the 2000 election led voters to realize that third party candidacies weren't such a cute little idea. But a fundraising haul of $1.7 million would be relatively modest, even by the standards of your typical third-party candidate. Of course, this is just the roughest guesstimate of what sort of money Barr is bringing in, and fundraising may be a relatively small part of the story for a third-party candidate -- Pat Buchanan got more than $15 million from individual contributors in 2000, and had all of 0.43 percent of the vote to show for it. But so far, the Ron Paul money has not been flowing in.

In fact, Ron Paul's website is still getting two or three times as much traffic as Barr's, and appeared to be getting something like 30-40 times as much traffic at its peak in January versus what Barr's is getting now.

It's still early in this election, but perhaps less so for a third-party candidate than for a major party one. There's really very little going on right now on the campaign trail, making it a good time for a third-party candidate to get some free media impressions from a bored press corps. But once the Beijing Olympics begin on August 8th, the country will be distracted for two weeks by those and then we begin the mad dash to the finish, with the conventions and the debates and both sides ramping up their advertising and their opposition research. So Barr has about five or six weeks left to do something newsworthy, or he's going to find it hard to get media oxygen later on.

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Can Nader help Obama?

CNN's new national poll ran versions both with and without third-party candidates. Obama performs one point better in the version with third-party candidates than without, leading McCain by 4 points rather than 3.

This would not be surprising if most of the third party vote were going to Bob Barr. But in fact, it's Ralph Nader who is picking up most of those votes. He polls at 6 percent in this survey to Barr's 2 percent.

                 Obama  McCain  Nader  Barr   D/K
No Third Party     49     46      --    --     5
w/Third Party      47     43       6     2     2
Change             -2     -3      +6    +2    -3

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Nader takes votes away from the Democrat. Indeed, I suspect that most of his 6 percent comes from Democratic voters. But I suspect that it's coming from a particular kind of Democratic voter: disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters. Some of those folks are not yet ready to "endorse" Barack Obama. But they might also have significant reservations about voting for John McCain. Ralph Nader (and Bob Barr) provide for something of a soft landing. Even Larry C. Johnson, the seemingly chemically imbalanced former CIA agent behind the anti-Obama conspiracist website No Quarter, yesterday told his truthers that he would be voting for Bob Barr.

By the time the Obama campaign has finished saturating the airwaves in November, it will probably have succeeded in convincing almost all of its base that John McCain is an unacceptable alternative. As some of those voters might still not be ready to vote for Obama, the presence of Nader's name on the ballot might be as helpful to Obama as it is harmful.

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The Libertarians' Big Tent

I sometimes describe myself as a "libertarian in theory, liberal in practice". At times, I've found the idea of a third party seductive, but I've never voted third party for a major office. But the whole Ron Paul phenomenon sufficiently piqued my curiosity that I attended his rally when Paul passed through town last August.

It was really something to see. The crowd was a relatively diverse mix of city-dwellers and yokels, hippies and hipsters and yuppies (it was, however, overwhelmingly white). The impression I was left with was that these were people who followed the news, but were generally disdainful of the political process itself, at least insofar as it involved the two major parties. It did not seem like Paul was "stealing" votes from anyone in particular.

What was more remarkable was the relative diversity of ideological opinion within the audience. When Paul said something about the war in Iraq, most everyone stood up to cheer. But there was a less enthusiastic response when he spoke of withdrawing back from the world stage generally. One part of the crowd stood up when Paul talked about the influence of corporate lobbyists, another when the subject was civil liberties, and a third when he spoke of monetarism and the Gold Standard. It was a bit like watching the State of the Union address, when Nancy Pelosi and Dick Cheney each do plenty of standing and clapping, but never quite in unison.

Such ideological diversity was also on display at the Libertarian Party National Convention this week, where candidates as diverse as Bob Barr (who authored the Defense of Marriage Act) and Mike Gravel (who advocates single-payer health care) sought its nomination. Barr was eventually nominated, receiving 54 percent of the delegates on the sixth ballot after Wayne Allen Root threw his support Barr's way.



The result will no doubt upset some capital-L Libertarians, particularly those on the libertarian left, who might feel as though Barr is a bit of an impostor. But it is a decision that opens up the Libertarians' tent. And if the Libertarian Party is ever to achieve viability at the national level, it will need to have a bigger tent. Just as the Democrats can accommodate a Travis Childers and a Pete Stark, or the Republicans an Olympia Snowe and a Rick Santorum, the Libertarians can accommodate a Mike Gravel and a Bob Barr. National parties require support which is both broad (spanning a fairly wide space on the ideological spectrum) and deep. The Libertarian Party has expanded its breadth; it will now need to work on its depth.

Indeed, the decision to nominate Barr may well have fewer implications in 2008 than it does in future election cycles. In particular, it seems to me that there is some chance that the Libertarian Party will become the de facto third party, remaining vaguely aligned with some core beliefs like the protection of civil liberties, but otherwise accommodating a fairly wide array of political thought. More fundamentally, it would become a party driven less by ideology and more by a desire to win elected office. The Libertarian Party has some infrastructure in place and a fairly decent brand name (hey, who doesn't like liberty?). And while Barr is not a terrific political athlete, he does come across as pragmatic and perhaps fairly mainstream, and is probably a better long-run spokesperson for the party than someone like Ron Paul.

Barr's goal this year -- and it must be considered a long-shot -- is to achieve the 15 percent support he'd need in national polling to be invited to participate in the presidential debates in September and October. If that happens, the Libertarian Party would literally be sharing the stage with the Democrats and the Republicans for the first time. While that probably wouldn't be enough to win them any electoral votes in 2008, it would certainly make their convention worth watching in 2012.

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Today's Polls, 5/12

In Pennsylvania, a Susquehanna poll offers good news for both Democrats: Hillary Clinton leads John McCain by 11 points, whereas Barack Obama leads him by 7. Pennsylvania has almost moved into the territory where it is a safe state for Clinton, as her win percentage there is now 80 percent. Obama's win percentage in Pennsylvania has bumped up slightly to 61 percent.

In North Carolina, PPP's monthly tracker has John McCain leading Barack Obama by 7 points, and Hillary Clinton by 8. There appears to be a lot of noise in the North Carolina data, with some polls showing Obama doing as well as having tied McCain while others show him 8 or 9 points back, but this really just looks like some fairly natural variance around a mean of about 5-6 points. Obama may have a means to win North Carolina if he can increase African-American turnout.

Two quick notes: I should have some sort of reflection on West Virginia going up tonight. And given Bob Barr's entry into the race today, it's very much worth your time to read Dave Weigel's preview of the libertarian nomination fight. Barr is the most likely nominee, though by no means a certain one.

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Barr, the Libertarians and Georgia

The American Spectator has an interesting article today on Bob Barr, the former Georgia congressman who is gunning for the nomination of the Libertarian party. Barr has an interesting (and somewhat fluid/amorphous) set of political characteristics: anti-war, fiscally conservative, increasingly sympathetic toward civil libertarian causes (he's joined the ACLU), but also with some cultural conservative bona fides -- he was a ringleader in passing the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 (a position he could now presumably try and justify from a federalism standpoint). Basically, he's from the Republican wing of the Libertarian party.

It's not certain that Barr is going to win the Libertarian party's nomination, for which he'll be competing with Mike Gravel (who won't win it) and a number of Libertarian-party insiders. It's also not completely out of the question, I guess, that Ron Paul could enter the running. But if he does, where might Barr have the biggest impact?

Below, I've listed the leading states by percentage of the general election vote that went for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate in 2004.

2004 Libertarian Party Vote Share

Indiana       0.73%
Idaho         0.64%
Illinois      0.62%
Arizona       0.59%
Alaska        0.54%
Texas         0.52%
Massachusetts 0.52%
Wyoming       0.48%
Washington    0.42%

I'll take "states that begin with the letter 'I'" for $200, Alex! Actually, that list is a little weird. I don't think that Indiana has ever really been thought of as a third-party stronghold, for instance. But one thing we need to contend with here is that some people just want to vote for a third-party ... and they're indifferent about which third party they vote for. In Indiana, there were only a couple of third parties on the ballot, so Badnarnik might have picked up a lot of the generic anti-establishment/protest vote. It might be more instructive to look at the total third-party vote in 2004.

2004 Third Party Vote Share (Libertarian vote in parenthesis)

Alaska        3.42% (0.59%)
Utah          2.47% (not on ballot)
Montana       2.37% (0.38%)
Vermont       2.26% (0.35%)
Wyoming       2.06% (0.42%)
Rhode Island  1.91% (not on ballot)
Maine         1.85% (0.27%)
Connecticut   1.74% (not on ballot)
Nevada        1.65% (not on ballot)
South Dakota  1.65% (0.25%)

That's a little closer to what I was expecting to see, with a concentration of states in the Interior West. If the American Spectator is right that Barr would drain more votes from McCain than Obama, Alaska and Montana bear watching. And although it hasn't recently had a heavy third-party vote, so might Georgia. If Barr could peel the votes of some culturally conservative whites from McCain in Georgia, who might mistake him for one of their own, Obama might have a path to victory on the strength of the black vote and upscale whites in suburban Atlanta.

UPDATE: More good background on this from the Atlanta-Jorunal Constitution. Barr doesn't seem to care if he plays the role of spoiler.

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