*If they can’t win, at least they can beat the spread. A couple of cases where this seems a good possibility now—although which party the LP will end up “spoiling” things for is uncertain—is Phil Maymin’s race against incumbent Chris Shays in Connecticut where things currently look like a tossup, and (a much longer shot) the Arizona Senate race, where Libertarian Richard Mack had been polling within the margin of error of Republican incumbent John Kyl’s lead over Democrat Jim Pederson (which also means within the margin of error of zero).
While it is certainly far from likely that the LP will do this often enough to be credited/blamed with losing the House or Senate for the Republicans, it would be a delicious—and possibly deliciously dangerous—prospect for the LP. While still a fabulous long shot, it’s the closest the LP could come to being a significant political player this year.
But who said being a “significant political player” is what third party politics is all about? Given campaign finance laws and our first-past-the-post electoral system, actually winning offices is always going to be a mug’s game for third parties. It may be, as I’ve posited elsewhere, that third parties are best looked at as consumption expenses—or, as Bruce Guthrie told me, “the reason I’m involved in political activism is because it’s fun.”
That attitude, however realistic, aggravates a lot of people who want the LP to be an effective force for political change, some of whom are pleased by new signs of seriousness from the LP. The LP on a national level is trying a new technique this year, a web based phone bank called Ballot Base, whereby LP volunteer from across the country can do get out the vote calls via home phone or Skype-style Internet phone services with a pre-written script, and report info back to national HQ regarding what lists are doing better or poorer for them.
The LP credits Ballot Base with some of the primary victories for fusion candidates in Vermont earlier this year. They are using it in the days before the election on races in Texas, Colorado, Indiana, Vermont, and Connecticut, and have gotten up to 75 volunteers working the phones, making over 10,000 calls—a start, if not necessarily a race-winning result.
LP boosters face a constant dilemma: burn out volunteers and candidates with unrealistic expectations of unlikely results, or allow ennui and hopelessness to completely sap their quixotic crusade of any energy whatsoever. The Guthrie attitude seems the most realistic: try to play on the same field as your opponents to the degree your time and money allow—but recognize that if it isn’t fun, if fighting for liberty on your own terms within the electoral system isn’t its own reward, if you can’t be satisfied with the opportunities to spread your political message that LP campaigning allows, then you won’t have the will to keep it up for long. Because there usually won’t be any other reward. That doesn’t mean that LP campaigning can’t play a noble role, by providing a means other than staying at home to express dissatisfaction with the big government trends of the two major parties.
Senior editor Brian Doherty (Bdoherty@reason.com) is author of This is Burning Man and the forthcoming Radicals for Capitalism.
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