The heart of my analysis:
Sarvis drew equally from liberals, moderates, and conservatives according to this poll—3 percent of each.
But when it gets to party identification, he drew statistically nothing from Democrats, 3 percent from Republicans, and 7 percent from Independents. Independents were otherwise split evenly 47-47 between Warner and Gillespie. So, there is indeed some cause for GOPers to think that Sarvis' presence in the race was bad for them.
Sarvis wrote me last night with a contrary analysis, hooked to a fact I neglected to account for: that not all Republicans, if the exit poll is correct, actually voted Republican in this race–7 percent went Warner:
One can't assume the 3 percent Rs would be voting [Gillespie] in my absence—it's quite likely these R voters would have joined the 7 percent of Rs voting for Warner. Polls throughout the race showed Warner enjoying double-digit support among Rs, and a fair number of Rs told us they can't stomach voting for [Gillespie]. A lot of business-type Republicans consider Warner acceptable, so probably many Rs who really disliked [Gillespie] voted for me because I was preferable to Warner, but would otherwise have voted Warner not Gillespie. So those R Sarvis voters were "taken" from Warner not Gillespie.
Similar thing happened last year, with pretty high certainty. A poll in September showed that *among Sarvis supporters*, 60+ percent had a favorable opinion of Gov. McDonnell, but 70+ percent had an UN-favorable view of Cuccinelli. So I was a vessel for moderate, R-leaning, anti-Cuccinelli voters who preferred voting for me to voting for MacAuliffe, i.e., I "took" moderate R votes from MacAuliffe.
Moreover, my share of the Independent vote clearly skewed younger, so from voters not inclined to vote D than R.
Reason on the whole "spoiler" thing with the Libertarian Party.
The post Robert Sarvis, Libertarian Senate Candidate from Virginia, Denies "Spoiler" Charges from the GOP appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It isn't common for Democrats to accuse Libertarians of "spoiling" elections for them, but a look at NBC News exit polls show that Haugh voters indeed came more from people who consider themselves "moderate" (5 percent of self-identified moderates went Haugh) and even "liberal" (4 percent of liberals voted for Haugh) than from conservatives (only 2 percent of whom voted for Haugh). Those were the only three choices for self-identification.
Only 1 percent each of self-identified Democrats or Republicans voted Haugh, while 9 percent of Independents did. (Those again were the only choices.) (Independents otherwise went 49-42 for Tillis over Hagan.)
In other exit poll results, Haugh's portion of the vote fell pretty steadily as age groups got older—he got 9 percent of the 18-24 vote, and only 2 percent of the 50-and-over crowd.
Haugh did strongest among white women in race/gender breakdowns, with 5 percent of that crowd, and only 1 percent of black men or black woman—and no polled number of Latino men or women.
Other interesting Haugh exit poll results: His overall man/woman breakdown was the same, 4 percent of each in the exit poll. Haugh's numbers got progressively smaller as voter income got bigger—he earned 6 percent of the under-$30K vote but only 1 percent of the over-$200K vote. Libertarians aren't just for plutocrats.
Interestingly, Haugh got more votes from people who want to raise the minimum wage than from those who don't, giving credence to the notion that he represents a libertarianism not that interested in economic liberty issues. He got more votes from those against the wars in Syria and Iraq than those for it, and only slightly more votes from pro-gay marriage types than anti-gay marriage types—5 percent of the pros, 4 percent of the antis.
Now for Robert Sarvis, who you can bet will be accused by some of "costing" Republican Ed Gillespie the Senate election. Sarvis got 2.45 percent of the vote; winning Democrat Mark Warner got 49 and Gillespie 48.48.
What can NBC's exit poll tell us about where Sarvis voters came from?
Sarvis drew equally from liberals, moderates, and conservatives according to this poll—3 percent of each.
But when it gets to party identification, he drew statistically nothing from Democrats, 3 percent from Republicans, and 7 percent from Independents. Independents were otherwise split evenly 47-47 between Warner and Gillespie. So, there is indeed some cause for GOPers to think that Sarvis' presence in the race was bad for them.
In other Sarvis exit poll results from NBC, Sarvis did best among Independent men, with 7 percent, and best among college graduates, with 6 percent. In term of family income, he did best among the under-$50K crowd, with 4 percent of those, vs. just 2 percent of the $100K or more folk.
Sarvis did only slightly better with the antiwar crowd, getting 3 percent of them vs. 2 percent of the pro-war crowd. Sarvis got statistically zero among members of the military, and did better with the pro-gay-marriage crowd, getting 5 percent of the pro and only 2 percent of the anti. He also did better with small city and rural than suburbs or big city folk, getting 4 percent with the former and only 2 percent with the latter.
The post Exit Polls for Haugh, Sarvis: Who Did Those Libertarians "Spoil" Their Senate Races For? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As Virginia prepares to elect its next U.S. senator, how will the state's millennials cast their ballots? A statewide poll released today finds young people prefer "anyone but Republican Ed Gillespie." Bloomberg Politics reports:
Democratic Senator Mark Warner captured 47 percent in a survey of voters between the ages of 18 and 35, which was released Thursday by the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. The first runner-up was Libertarian Robert Sarvis with 24 percent. Eighteen percent said they were undecided, and 11 percent said they will choose Gillespie. [emphasis added]
In other words, the libertarian candidate appears to enjoy six times as much support from the millennial generation as from the electorate at large. (Real Clear Politics' polling average currently puts Sarvis at just 4 percent.) However, there are some very good reasons to think that level of support for Sarvis from young voters might not actually materialize.
In a previous post here at Hit & Run, I discussed the phenomenon of polls tending to overstate third party candidates' preformance on election day. But there's another problem with taking this finding at face value, which the Bloomberg article itself points out: It assumes young voters will show up at the polls.
It's unclear how many millennials will actually go to the polls.
"A majority say they are certain to vote, but only 44% say they are paying close or somewhat close attention, so it's easy to imagine many who might intend to vote not actually making it to the polls on Election Day," said Wason Center Director Quentin Kidd in a news release.
Historically, young people cast ballots at far lower rates than older voters. According to a study from the U.S. Census Bureau, released in April:
In every presidential election since 1964, young voters between the ages of 18 through 24 have consistently voted at lower rates than all other age groups…Overall, America's youngest voters have moved towards less engagement over time, as 18- through 24-year-olds' voting rates dropped from 50.9 percent in 1964 to 38.0 percent in 2012.
But that's not all—even older voters have a track record of being, shall we say, overly ambitious when reporting their likelihood of voting. Consider the Scottish independence referendum as one high-profile example from this year. An Ipsos MORI poll taken just before the election found some 95 percent saying they were certain to turn out—a 10 on a 10-point scale. In fact, just under 85 percent of registered voters actually cast ballots—a "record number," and no wonder considering the historic nature of the election. But it still wasn't 95 percent.
And the number of people who misrepresent their vote likelihood is often much larger than that. A 2013 Harvard Kennedy School study looked at a series of races and found that in all of them, "a sizable fraction of those who self-predicted that they would vote mispredicted and did not actually vote." In one case, more than half of self-predicted voters failed to turn out.
So while a majority of Virginia millennials might believe themselves to be certain to vote—and nearly a quarter say they'd vote for Sarvis—chances are, quite a few of them are mistaken.
The post Virginia Millennials Say They Love Libertarian Rob Sarvis, But Will They Show Up on Election Day? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Democratic Senator Mark Warner captured 47 percent in a survey of voters between the ages of 18 and 35, which was released Thursday by the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. The first runner-up was Libertarian Robert Sarvis with 24 percent. Eighteen percent said they were undecided, and 11 percent said they will choose Gillespie
The post Virginia Millennials Prefer Libertarian Robert Sarvis to GOP Candidate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For the next six weeks, nothing matters more to the country than Republicans taking a majority in the Senate. When it comes to politics, conservatives need to learn one thing from liberals: All that matters is winning.
As if conservatives in Congress have done anything to rein in overweening government, reduce the budget, cut programs, or protect civil liberties.
More amusingly, she writes:
If you are considering voting for the Libertarian candidate in any Senate election, please send me your name and address so I can track you down and drown you.
In Virginia, I am voting for the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, Robert Sarvis, this November.
So O.K., Ms. Coulter, come give drowning me a try. My home address in Charlottesville is marked on the map. Google Map directions to my house from your digs in Palm Beach are below. See you soon.
The post Ann Coulter Wants to 'Drown' Libertarians: Come Try to Drown Me—Address Provided appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Robert Sarvis made the biggest splash for the Libertarian Party in many years with his surprising 6.6 percent—nearly 145,000 votes—total in 2013's Virginia gubernatorial race. The former tech entrepreneur and lawyer did this even while making Republicans angry that he was allegedly stealing votes from their man Ken Cuccinelli, dodging bogus accusations of being a secret Democratic Party plant, and annoying some of the Libertarian hardcore by answering questions about health care by taking about policies that stymied competition rather than just repeating "repeal Medicare!"
Sarvis is trying politics again, running for U.S. Senate in Virginia, in a race likely to include incumbent Democrat Mark Warner, vying for his second Senate term, and Republican Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair and consummate insider. (Gillespie does not yet have the nomination, which doesn't come officially until a state Republican convention in June, but seems to have it locked.)
Sarvis, who tells me he won't be working any other jobs for the duration of the campaign, is a calm, rational guy, not given to the emotionally charged side of the small government message. This served him well in the statewide race; we'll see how it plays in a Senate race that might get more national attention. It is telling that he treats "rational" and "freedom-centric" as synonymous. True, but does it play at the voting booth? We'll find out in November. Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty interviewed Sarvis by phone last week.
Reason: Running for office again—why are you putting yourself through this?
Robert Sarvis: The same thing that motivated me last year. I see policy being pretty abysmal and see both Republicans and Democrats not at all moving toward more rational policies, more freedom-centric policies. The front runner in the Republican race and the Democratic incumbent are not going to change their offerings, so I just felt the opportunity was here to build on the momentum from last year and reach more people with a message of freedom in economic and personal lives.
Reason: What's the story with your major party opponents?
Sarvis: Mark Warner, he's a former governor and completing his first term. He's pretty much been a big government guy, going along with all Obama's major spending programs and new programs. As governor he was responsible for a very large tax increase in 2004 and as senator he's been behind all expansions of government.
The Republican likely is Ed Gillespie. He is basically a big government lifelong Washington GOP insider, a former RNC chair, a former lobbyist on behalf of large companies. He was a subordinate in the George W. Bush administration, was big on Romney's campaign. He's the status quo in the GOP.
Reason: You've been trying to use your profile to grow the Libertarian Party as a whole. Talk about what you're trying to do in Virginia.
Sarvis: I've been trying to recruit a whole slate of candidates. It helps the L.P. and the libertarian message to have more candidates around the state; the idea being to maximize our effect this year and make sure that every voter in every part of the state has a Senate and House candidate to vote for. We have off-year state elections in 2015, all state legislative seats go up, so it will be nice to set the L.P. up for a large contingent of state and local candidates [for 2015].
So I've been looking through who was enthusiastic about my campaign last year and trying to find people even remotely interested in running, letting them know it is doable to run for Congress.
I will help them, campaign with them, we're gonna work like a team. That helps people get over how difficult it is to get your name out [as a third party candidate]. Each opportunity I get to campaign, if there's media coverage I'll make sure the media is noting the fact we also have House candidates out there, trying to use whatever name recognition I have to help them to build [the party at large].
Reason: Have you begun campaigning in earnest yet?
Sarvis: We are going to be doing as much fulltime campaigning as we can, and right now are trying to build a team and build an organization that's more structured than last year, a bigger team that's more professionalized and more effective.
I'm getting significantly more [media] mentions this time [at a comparative point in the campaign]. I started working in total obscurity last year and this year reporters clearly [already know I exist]. They are still focusing mostly on the other two but [usually are] at least mentioning my presence; there has been some reaching out for comment on certain things [which I expect will] increase through the course of the campaign. Once we're past the primaries and ballot access [and the focus is on] policy, we'll have a real chance to distinguish ourselves as more responsible, more rational, more in line with what voters want.
June 10 is the signature gathering deadline. Each congressional candidate needs 1,000 valid signatures from registered voters in their district and I have to get 10,000 [statewide]. It's always a close call at the end. Ballot access is time consuming, resource intensive, and the [state L.P.] has 10, 11 candidates to worry about in addition to me. I think we'll make the ballot, I'll make it, and a vast majority [of the lower-ticket candidates will make it]. We've got no national help [from the L.P.] though some of the local affiliates are helping with signature gathering.
Reason: I saw Ed Gillespie talking about how the GOP needed to appeal more to the under-30 voter in this election.
Sarvis: Exit polls [from my governor's run last year] said 15 percent of the 18-29 crowd [went for me]. I think Republicans have a really hard sell [to the young]. They are kind of obsolete. Young people are really turned off by the GOP approach to civil issues. Both Republicans nor Democrats are awful for the situation of young people, with large debt transfers of wealth from young to old, so all the libertarian policies are very attractive [to young voters].
Reason: What are the main issues you want to run on in this Senate race?
Sarvis: I think the economy is the biggest. The great recession, and unemployment levels, in many ways is caused by government policies and when it comes to longer-term economic growth, we have structural issues hampering the economy, with regulatory things that kill job creation and business activity. Increasing costs of hiring, an incredible uncertainty about the future of policy.
At the federal level, this is a much different race for me than last year, issues like foreign interventionism and immigration are really important. Democrats are only able to get away with calling themselves pro-immigrant in contrast to Republicans. I look at [the Democrats] as having a hugely protectionist constituency in labor and Libertarians have the responsibility to take the issue and run with it. Immigration is important for economic growth and improving living conditions of people around the world, allowing people to live to their maximum potential, allowing them to come to a free society. Northern Virginia is very diverse, and I'll have a good time reaching out to those voters.
And defense spending: In Virginia a huge portion of the economy depends on federal expenditures and the defense industry, so I want to talk about how to reduce defense spending and I have to be up front about why I believe it and not try to pander to people reliant on the defense industry.
There is a role for the Defense Department and the Norfolk area has a wonderful resource in the bay there, so it's a natural place for the Navy to be. It's not like it's just going to pack up and move entirely. With defense spending, we need to recognize that incredible spending can't just continue on and on, so the question is do you want Republicans and Democrats deciding [how to ramp back on defense on old-fashioned political grounds] or someone taking a more rational approach?
Reason: How will you deal with liberty-minded Republicans worrying that your presence or vote totals might harm the Republicans' chances of regaining a Senate majority?
Sarvis: I think last year's results are fairly clear: I probably brought to the polls a lot more people that if I hadn't been there would have voted for the Democrat than the Republican. This whole "stealing votes" issue gives me an opportunity to bring up things like instant runoff voting and range voting.
I think that liberty-leaning Republicans have no reason to invest in another big government Republican. Similarly on the Democratic side, people in favor of getting rid of corporate welfare and cronyism, if they want real drug policy reform, immigration liberalization, they should vote for me.
If the Senate is up for grabs, looks close to 50-50, that increases the importance of looking outside the two-party system. I'm just gonna make the argument that we are one out of 100 senators and what difference would it make sending another Republican or another Democrat? The way to make the biggest difference is to send a Libertarian. That immediately changes the game.
Reason: What are your fundraising expectations? [Gillespie and Warner are already each collecting over $2 million a quarter]
Sarvis: I have no idea about uncoordinated stuff. As far as direct donations, we started sending out letters and emails but it's a little early to tell [about the response]. My assumption is I'll have a much harder time raising money compared to last year, since there are so many other races to compete with. For the governor's run, I took in a little over $200,000.
I have no minimum in mind I think I have to raise. We'd like to raise a lot of money, but I take the approach of doing the best with whatever we get.
I may be getting a full time staff member very soon, that's being hammered out now. It's still all volunteers of varying degrees of time. It's hard to say the number of total active volunteers. We sent out a request for help with ballot petitioning, and a lot of people start helping without letting us know beforehand. By July I'll have a better sense how it's going in building a network.
Reason: If you get funded enough for an ad campaign, what do you expect it to say?
Sarvis: We've brainstormed, and if there's only money for one it would be more generalized, asking people to take a chance on us because doing the same thing we've done for the past 50 years is not working and making the argument that we've made over and over again, which is in this race certainly the two parties have become the same, these two big government [parties], and it's doing no good to send one back to the Senate.
Social media has to be huge part of our strategy. We do plan to do more with YouTube, continue what we've done with Facebook and Twitter and explore other avenues to reach people.
Reason: The Richmond Times Dispatch did a fact check thing on a controversial tweet from you: "Did you know U.S. population growth is at its lowest since the Great Depression? RT if you support liberalizing our immigration laws." Why is that an important issue to you?
Sarvis: It's not population growth per se, though I am a libertarian who believes more people is a fine thing, as is freedom of movement. But I wrote that for a couple of reasons. One is that we could certainly stand to have more population growth, part of the reason it's down is because of the bad economy and families already here choosing not to have more kids. We have less immigration in part because of a bad economy.
It also points to the idea that population growth is something we can have more of in regard to the generational impact of entitlement spending. If we want to transition from an intergenerational transfer model to one more about investing in your own self, your own retirement model, it's a huge transition cost and so one of the ways to soften that blow is [increasing population through immigration]. There are a lot of benefits to doing that.
Reason: You've got a couple of big national issues as a Senate candidate that were maybe less important for your state governor's race: health care and foreign policy. How will you approach them?
Sarvis: I generally like to stick to basic principles. A big part of the problem in health care on both federal and state levels are regulations that totally mess up the marketplace, so we have to have a unified approach in my view. I don't want to propose a specific model of a system that would imply that that system and no other is what's acceptable. I'd certainly argue we need lots of deregulation of the health care sector, that can get us enormous benefits and I'll try to bring up telecom deregulation and expanding the ability to reach poor people with low-cost services. Not just technical innovation but business model innovation, there's way too little of that. A lot of that is because it's so highly regulated, there's less competition, the number of doctors is fairly stagnant, we license nurses to keep them from doing expanded scope of practice. There are so many ways to expand competition and innovation.
As for foreign policy, my general message is that we try to do too much by force and we think we know too much about other countries and cultures and we try to influence their behavior too much. A better approach would be to lead by example, have a free society at home, free trade with all nations, try not to be a world policeman, not to give countries a false sense of security. One reason we have countries left in the lurch with bully neighbors [is the U.S.'s] implicit promise to do something when in fact it makes no sense for us to be involved, certainly not militarily. [If countries] assume we will come to their rescue they are not investing in their own defense, not investing in creating common protective umbrellas in their own region that creates weakness that bullies can thrive upon.
I am fairly non-interventionist though I keep an open mind. Though there is an inordinate amount of money on defense spending and I think the direct foreign aid we give is malinvestment, I'd much rather foreign aid be the organic "foreign aid" of remittances from families [working in the U.S. sent] back home. That's a much better model for helping actual people rather than governments.
About Iran, I can't say our current approach is working, I don't know what one would even judge to be "working" but I just think my sense is that the Iranian people are very young, 80 percent under 35, and they are exposed to a fair amount of Western culture and commerce, they are individuals and the animus against the U.S. [government] as opposed to the American people is an important aspect. So more engagement, more commerce, is a better approach rather than isolation and constant demonization—in both directions, we are [condemned as the] Great Satan but how much of that is a product of meddling for 50 years? So I'm kind of against, not really a fan of, throwing U.S. weight around [the globe].
Reason: Any lessons you think will carry over from your last run to make this one work better for you?
Sarvis: Certainly, I learned the need for a more organized volunteer network, so I'd like to try and build that more effectively this year.
I also learned there is an enormous thirst for something different. People want to hear someone credible, who cares about issues, and is willing to tell you where they stand. Obviously the two party system is very strong. It's going to be uphill to get people past that, at the very least to get people behind us because of issues and policies and lead us to increase [the L.P.'s] share or compel the other parties to think deeply about [changing their] policies.
The post Robert Sarvis: Libertarian for the U.S. Senate from Virginia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>That was the third largest vote percentage any Libertarian has ever won for any governor's race. The two who did better, Dick Randolph in Alaska in 1982 and Ed Thompson in Wisconsin in 2002, had, unlike Sarvis, held elective office in their states before. Sarvis copped the best third party result for any party in the South for a gubernatorial candidate in 40 years.
Many Republicans reacted to Sarvis' strong showing, combined with Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's narrow defeat by Democrat Terry McAuliffe, with accusations that Sarvis caused Cuccinelli's loss.
The resulting bad feelings have caused schisms within the roughly conceived "liberty movement" in the Virginia area. The Republican Liberty Caucus and both Ron and Rand Paul supported Cuccinelli, and consequently many of the people associated with the Paul campaigns and Paulite groups such as Campaign for Liberty are heating up social networks and real relationships. "There's a lot of friction between libertarian Republicans and the Libertarian Party," says Virginia state LP chair Chuck Moulton. "A few friendships were lost. People are very angry at each other."
Said bad feelings—the Sarvis campaign and the national LP both report a heavy wave of hate calls and emails in the past week—are based on some misunderstandings.
The first is blaming Sarvis for Cuccinelli losing, presuming that naturally Republicans rightfully own the votes of all believers in liberty and smaller government (despite Cuccinelli's social conservatism). The Federalist website has the most thorough summation of the data that proves that notion totally wrong in this case, noting:
Sarvis received only 6.5 percent of total votes cast, he received 15 percent support from 18 to 29-year-olds, not an age group that traditionally supports Republicans….Sarvis received only 3 percent of votes from self-described conservatives, but he garnered the support of 7 percent of liberals (McAuliffe won this demographic by 85 points) and 10 percent of moderates….(McAuliffe won this group by 22 percent). Liberals were more than twice as likely as conservatives to support Sarvis.
Most of Sarvis' supporters came from ideological groups — liberals and moderates — that overwhelmingly supported McAuliffe…..
Exit polls show that if Sarvis were not in the race, McAuliffe would almost certainly have won by a larger margin than he did.
A second reason many "liberty movement" types hate Sarvis is a story that broke the morning of the election in The Blaze which claimed Sarvis was a deliberate Democratic Party plant meant to help McAuliffe win the election. The state LP chair suspects the accusation was coordinated with the Cuccinelli campaign. Moulton says he heard reports from various precincts across the state that Republicans around the polling places were armed with the story just as it broke. See above for how silly that would make the Democrats look if the accusation were true: Sarvis' presence in the race hurt McAuliffe, by all available evidence, more than it hurt Cuccinelli.
This conspiracy theory is extremely unlikely not just because it would've been a counterproductive strategy for Democrats. The idea that Sarvis was a Democrat plant is based entirely on the fact that the Libertarian Booster PAC, run by longtime Texas LP man Wes Benedict (who currently serves as executive director of the national LP), gave a bit over $11,000 toward getting Sarvis on the ballot. And that PAC, in turn, received $150,000 from Texas software entrepreneur Joe Liemandt. Liemandt and his wife, in turn, have both also donated six-figure amounts to the Obama campaigns. But Liemandt was no carpetbagger swooping onto the LP; he has also given high five figures to the Libertarian National Committee since 2009, and $100,000 to the Libertarian Action PAC in April 2012. I was unable to reach Liemandt, but sources close to the LP say that the Democratic Party is far more his wife's interest than his. Besides, as others close to the campaign point out, wealthy businessmen often think big political giving to big political players is a necessary fact of life.
Benedict and Sarvis both deny that Liemandt played any part in either Sarvis's decision to run or the PAC's decision to fund him. If Sarvis was intended to help ensure a Cuccinelli defeat, it's curious that the PAC Liemandt funded and supposedly manipulated gave such a petty amount to the hugely outspent Sarvis, and that they didn't pick a candidate who would appeal more to likely Cuccinelli voters rather than one who stressed a civil liberties and tolerance message designed to appeal more to Democrats disaffected by McAuliffe's sleazy reputation.
Chris Stearns, a 26-year-old liberty movement member of the state Republican Party's central committee, worked briefly for Cuccinelli's campaign, and considered him a worthy liberty candidate even though he disagreed with Cuccinelli on things such as sodomy laws and gay marriage (neither of which a governor would have unilateral power to change anyway, as libertarians for Cuccinelli would point out). But Stearns understands and respects those who feel they need to pursue liberty activism through the LP, and thinks Cuccinelli should have been open to letting Sarvis in the debates. "I think we can easily survive some bitterness and bad blood among a few of us" in the larger liberty movement, Stearns says. He doesn't think the Sarvis vs. Cuccinelli brouhaha will affect the progress of Ron Paul types in the Virginia GOP; "the vast majority of those supporting Sarvis never operated within the infrastructure of the Republican Party anyway."
Sarvis came to the LP not through the machinations of the Democratic Party, but by being a disaffected former GOP candidate for state Senate in 2011. Moulton remembers attending meetings of the state's Republican Liberty Caucus back then and "my impression was that they are misnamed; they are more like the Republican Fiscally Conservative Caucus, because they didn't seem to care so much about social issues. I asked each candidate in a Q and A about those issues and Sarvis stood out as the only truly libertarian candidate there."
Moulton tried and failed to talk Sarvis into a 2012 LP run for Congress, but when the LP and the Libertarian Booster PAC were both looking for a candidate for governor who could afford to help finance his own ballot access and race—the state Party was down to only around $5,000 in the leadup to getting a candidate on the ballot—Sarvis stepped up.
His surprising vote total followed even more surprising and overly optimistic polling that occasionally had him above 10 percent. His team ran a professional media contact operation and managed to get more earned media than almost any other state-level libertarian candidate ever, winning genuine respect for his seriousness from many local papers and TV stations. Being so close to D.C. national media, he got big national play as well.
That national media led to his third big problem with liberty movement types: an interview with Chuck Todd on MSNBC where the very cool and cerebral Sarvis answered questions about health care reform and taxes not with ringing calls to end Medicaid and cut all taxes, but with measured and wonky responses about the market interventions that make medical care more expensive, and about the importance of cutting spending rather than only talking tax cuts.
This led National Review to declare misleadingly that Sarvis wanted to expand Medicaid and did not want to cut taxes, although his website lists various taxes he wants to cut, including the Car Tax, the Machine & Tools tax, Merchants' Capital tax, and other business taxes. He wrote on his website of "[e]liminating, or dramatically reducing, the income tax…Reforming property taxes by excluding, or lowering the rate applied to, improvements to land."
His love of user fees over taxes per se got him in trouble with no less a libertarian luminary than Ron Paul, after Sarvis skylarked about the possibility of a mileage-based user fee to make users of roads directly pay for them. (Virginia's transportation bills lately have been moving more toward general taxes to finance roads.) Since most versions of such a mileage-based tax require government GPS units in our cars to measure miles, Sarvis was accused of specifically advocating that privacy-damaging policy, even though he never said so explicitly and actually thought a mere odometer reading could be a close-enough measure.
Sarvis explained his position on health care in a post-election interview: "The idea was to switch the focus of spending from comprehensive expensive programs to subsidies and catastrophic insurance," he says. "Then on the state regulatory side to increase the supply of health care professionals and services through licensing reform, getting rid of certificates of public need…but a lot of what I talked about [on MSNBC] were the federal regulations we have to get away from…I was the only candidate talking about the root causes of the health care problem rather than just talking about Medicaid expansion."
Arthur DiBianca, co-founder of Libertarian Booster PAC, says he personally found Sarvis not as much of a hardcore libertarian firebrand as he would have liked, but admits Sarvis' milder, calmer tone may have helped with Virginia voters. But "it also helped Sarvis that the Virginia race was one of the only big political shows of the year and he was the most interesting thing about that race, which got him big free press coverage, very unusual for a Libertarian. He was also helped by the fact that McAuliffe and Cuccinelli were both assholes."
While his campaign ended up raising only around $200,000 in direct contributions overall, Sarvis says money really picked up with the good polls and positive press: "It really snowballed toward the end; October was our biggest month. We brought in something like $80 grand from October 1-23, then from the 24th to Election Day another sizable amount." But much of it came too late for Sarvis' campaign to do anything in terms of classic ground game, phone banking, or get out the vote efforts; in the end the campaign was largely one of personal appearances and media.
Sarvis says he's "definitely interested" in running for office again, though he isn't sure at what level or when. He is already embarked on a plan to help the Virginia LP recruit candidates for state Senate seats opening in the coming year, and wants to get them fielding candidates in every congressional district. Benedict, the executive director of the national LP and founder of Libertarian Booster PAC, hopes Sarvis will run for office again, but understands running with the LP can seem like "you go spend money and time and there's no prize; you don't get money from special interests looking for favors, big corporations aren't giving money since you don't win so you don't get to hand out favors. So you do it because you believe in a cause. You can only ask so much from people."
DiBianca of Libertarian Boosters thinks the lessons of the Sarvis candidacy for the LP are clear: "You have to show up. We did not know in advance Sarvis would turn out this well, we didn't expect him to turn out this well. We need to take every opportunity to put someone on the ballot because we don't know in advance who will turn out great. Also, we learned it's valuable to have a broad message," not to zero in on only fiscal or only social issues. DiBianca also thinks the immediate future of the Party will likely rely more on nimble PACs rather than the LP's often tottery official apparatus.
Moulton of the Virginia LP admits that the likelihood of Virginia pulling so much outside money in 2014 is slim, lacking a race like the governor's to draw national attention. But he thinks both locally and nationally that Sarvis' attention and success will inspire other serious people to run, and maybe inspire some who might have otherwise run as independents to run under the LP banner. Ironically, Moulton thinks the animosity toward Sarvis may have harmed some of the six downticket LP state House of Delegates candidates in Virginia, who were constantly fielding anti-Sarvis rage on social media and in person. Regardless, Sarvis actually narrowly beat Cuccinelli in a few precincts in gentrifying areas of Richmond, and strongly outperformed his own state average in Henrico County around Richmond, Eric Cantor's territory.
Sarvis' campaign manager, John LaBeaume, was especially delighted by the uncoordinated fundraising from Purple PAC, a SuperPAC for libertarian-leaning politicians of any party run by former Cato Institute president Ed Crane, who famously stopped supporting the LP 30 years ago. Purple PAC announced it would spend $300,000 on Sarvis ads late in the campaign. LaBeaume thinks with that, and with inroads Sarvis made with a younger wave of student libertarian activists, that the Libertarian brand as attached to the LP itself may see a renaissance in the wake of Sarvis, after years when the LP seemed the least significant part of the larger libertarian movement.
"The Sarvis campaign has strengthened the Libertarian brand in the electoral realm more than any but a handful in the history of the Party," LaBeaume says, looking back to "low tax liberal" Ed Clark's near one percent in the 1980 presidential race for the LP. "We got more of the large libertarian policy and donor community interested in a substantive way in a mainstream but principled Libertarian candidate, and that is very encouraging in moving forward for the whole movement, in the electoral realm, in student activism, and the think tank policy realm."
The post The New Future of Libertarian Politics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I'm still seeing conservatives and Republicans bitching and moaning that the Libertarian Party candidate in the Virginia governor's race, Robert Sarvis, somehow threw the election to the awful Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe. Fact is that exit polls from both CNN and ABC News confirm that Sarvis took votes from McAuliffe and put the race within reach of the Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli.
But more to the point, trying to fix blame on minor parties when major-party candidates lose is a category error. Dems and Reps don't "own" votes that are somehow stolen by third-party types. And as I wrote earlier this week at Time.com there's this:
Americans have come to expect if not demand a wide range of increasingly diverse and personalized choices in every part of our lives, from coffee shops to clothing stores to bookstores. And yet in something as important as politics, we allow the two major parties to systematically rig the system to exclude a range of opinions extending beyond two parties that were founded before the Civil War. Is it any wonder that a record number of Americans now call themselves political independents?
Reflexively blaming third-party candidates when a Republican or Democratic candidate loses only adds insult to that injury. Despite having every advantage going in, Al Gore ended up losing in 2000 because, among other things, he wore bizarre orange makeup to one of the presidential debates and came across as an environmental zealot fundamentally at odds with modern industrial technology. Ken Cuccinelli lost because, among other things, he failed to assuage fears that he would bring back sodomy laws, alienated single women, and he had no connection with young voters.
The major parties already enjoy vast advantages in terms of money, brand recognition, ballot access, and get-out-the-vote operations. When their candidates lose elections, especially tight ones, they would do better to look at what they did wrong rather than off-loading responsibility or blame on third parties who give voters more options to express themselves.
The post This One Goes Out to All Those Folks Still Blaming Ralph Nader for Al Gore's Loss in 2000 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Says Benedict:
I realize that, no matter what I say, paranoid right-wingers will think I'm a sneaky operative trying to help Democrats beat Republicans. This message is for the rational people out there.
I founded the Texas-based Libertarian Booster PAC in late 2011. Its purpose was to recruit and assist Libertarian Party candidates for public office. You can read more about it here.
In 2012, the PAC focused solely on non-federal races in Texas. With satisfactory accomplishments, and no partisan election happening in Texas in 2013, I looked to expand to other states where permitted by law. Virginia was one of two states with a gubernatorial election in 2013 plus state legislative elections, so it was an obvious choice.
Back at the end of 2008, a man contacted me expressing interest in the Libertarian Party. It turned out he was a successful high-tech entrepreneur. One of his comments was along the lines of, "What could the Libertarian Party do if it had a million dollars?" Naturally, I contact this man whenever I think I have a good idea that needs funding.
I've raised $300,000 from this donor for the Libertarian Booster PAC. He has provided very little in the way of instruction or advice regarding use of the money….
It was my idea, and my decision, to have the Libertarian Booster PAC help recruit Libertarian Party candidates in 2013 in Virginia. I even advertised about it in February.
According to The Blaze, "[Rush] Limbaugh said the Democrats enlisted a 'fake Libertarian candidate' who was 'bought and paid for by an Obama bundler.'" That's an outright lie, and Limbaugh should retract his claim.
My strategies and tactics have never been secret. They are common strategies in the Libertarian Party, and they are the same strategies promoted at the founding of the Libertarian Party. I try to publicize them any way I can. I've even written a book about them and included a chapter about PACs.
I want Libertarians to win elections. But I also want them to run for office even when they're unlikely to win. Why? To get the public to discuss and consider libertarian principles…
The total amount the Libertarian Booster PAC gave to Sarvis' campaign was barely over $11 thousand, by the way. Sarvis freely discussed the PAC's role in helping him get on the ballot in my October interview with him, hardly a good idea if that was the key to revealing he was some sort of Democratic plant all along.
Benedict points out that:
If I wanted to hurt the Republican in Virginia, I would have supported a right-wing candidate who sounded like a Tea Partier — who only talked about cutting welfare, Obamacare, and how bad Democrats are. I would never have helped someone like Robert Sarvis, who talked a lot about social issues that appeal to liberal voters. As it turned out, polls show that if Sarvis weren't in the race, McAuliffe would probably have won by a slightly bigger margin.
I'll be writing more extensively about the Sarvis campaign and its meaning for libertarianism and Libertarianism in American politics moving forward here next week.
The post Libertarian Booster PAC Denies Supporting Robert Sarvis for Virginia Governor as Part of Democratic Party Plot appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Virginia Governors race between Dem. Terry McAuliffe, Rep. Ken Cuccinelli, and Libertarian Robert Sarvis demonstrates, frankly, the best way to get politicians to listen to you is to significantly impact an election. While Sarvis did not impact the outcome of the election, he likely narrowed the Democrat's margin of victory. In the case of the Virginia Governors race, the lesson may be for Democrats, not just Republicans, to pay closer attention to moderate voters who value both economic and personal freedom.
Despite McAuliffe leading by 7 points in the polls leading up to the election, he only won by 2.5 percent. A surprise to many is that Sarvis, the libertarian candidate hurt McAuliffe the Democrat more than Cuccinelli, the Republican. Sarvis turned out not to be the Republican spoiler conservatives had predicted. Exit polls reveal that twice as many Sarvis voters would have otherwise voted for McAuliffe over Cuccinelli. (ABC reports a third would have gone for McAuliffe, more than twice as many as for Cuccinelli)
Pundits had assumed the relatively popular libertarian candidate, Sarvis, garnering roughly 10 percent in the polls was a boon to Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, at the expense of Ken Cuccinelli the Republican. (And yes, 10 percent in public opinion polls for a libertarian is high). However, Sarvis proved himself a serious candidate and deserving of attention—not just of Republicans but Democrats too. He's a graduate of Harvard, Cambridge, George Mason, and NYU, pushes market based solutions for health care, and advocates for less government intervention in the economy, but also supports same-sex marriage. He also favors eliminating certain taxes and regulations that give preferential treatment to some industries, and strengthening liability laws to empower property owners to hold businesses accountable for environmental damage. Perhaps the fact he was even willing to discuss environmental protection and closing tax loopholes earned him credibility among Democratic voters.
Exit polls reveal that Sarvis voters were slightly more likely to be found among moderates, liberals, those with higher educational attainment, among those who think abortion should be legal in most or all cases, and non-tea party supporters. Moreover, what is even clearer is they were not overwhelmingly found among conservatives, those who disapprove of the president, or disapprove of the health care law.
These data provide some preliminary evidence to suggest how pragmatic libertarian candidates can appeal not only to Republicans, but Democrats too. Political candidates who believe markets generally solve problems better than government bureaucrats but also publicly demonstrate a sincere concern for the environment, and the power of the wealthy and politically connected to take advantage of government at the expense of everyone else can perhaps prove to Democratic voters they are not a shill for "powerful others" like corporations.
The lesson for libertarians is an unfortunate truth: the best way to get the political apparatus to care about you is to win an election, or at least significantly impact it. In fact, this is how evangelical Christians made their way into the Republican Party in the 1980s and 1990s. The tea party movement really only garnered significant national attention when tea party backed candidates beat out establishment backed Republicans in the primaries (i.e. Sen. Rand Paul beating Trey Grayson in Kentucky, Sharon Angle beating Sue Lowden in Nevada, Sen. Mike Lee replacing Bob Bennett in Utah, etc.)
Pragmatic libertarian candidates may be painful for the political parties in the short run, but may also demonstrate the importance of appealing to voters in the middle who want both parties to lean toward greater economic and social freedom.
The post The Real Way To Get Politicians To Listen: Impact An Election appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>dumbfounded that he (according to the polls) is poised to become the next governor of Virginia.
Allow me to explain. McAuliffe represents an unseemly slice of Washington. His primary role in politics for the past two decades or more has been raising money—most notably, for the Clintons. He cooked up the idea of essentially renting out the Lincoln bedroom during the Clinton administration as a fundraising vehicle, and he smashed all previous presidential fundraising records in the process. When McAuliffe was the Dems' top fundraiser, a campaign finance scandal besieged the Clinton White House. Coincidence? No. McAuliffe was all about pushing the envelope when it came to the political money-chase.
That alone might not be enough to render him a distasteful political candidate. What's different about McAuliffe is his brazen mixing of his campaign fundraising activity and attempts to enrich himself personally. Many of McAuliffe's business deals have come about due to his place in the political cosmos, not because he possesses a wealth of business skill. That tangled history has linked him to a long list of unsavory characters.
The rest of the story details many of those specific unsavory associations.
In other Virginia race news, revisit various Reason pieces examining surprisingly high-polling Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis, including hopes that he can cause permanent breaks in Virginia's crummily choiceless party system from Ronald Bailey and Skip Oliva, Nick Gillespie's stirring defense of Sarvis from accusations of allegedly stealing votes from a somehow worthwhile Republican, my interview with Sarvis from last month, and Scott Shackford on polls indicating that if he's "stealing" votes from anyone, it's McAuliffe, not GOPer Ken Cuccinelli.
The post Virginia Governor's Election Today: <em>Mother Jones</em> Attacks Dem McAuliffe, and <em>Reason</em> Roundup on Libertarian Sarvis appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Robert Sarvis' campaign slogan: "Open-Minded and Open for Business" has to be one of the most copacetic I've ever encountered. If Sarvis can clear the 10 percent electoral benchmark that would give the Libertarian Party a line on the ballots of the Old Dominion through 2021, offering Virginians a way to get beyond the intellectually bankrupt so-called major parties. The Danville Register and Bee summed up the situation well in its editorial endorsement of Sarvis:
Both the Democrats and Republicans failed to come up with good gubernatorial candidates this year. If we were to endorse either McAuliffe or Cuccinelli, we would be playing their game. "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got," the saying goes.
Robert Sarvis offers a real alternative this year, a break from the two-party paradigm that has not served us well.
As a Libertarian, Sarvis favors restraints on the size and scope of government. We're comfortable with that.
"I realized that the Republican Party, at least in Virginia, in the current era, is not a good vehicle for liberty candidates," Sarvis told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in August. "Republicans are very strident on personal issues. When they talk about liberty, they don't mean any personal issues, there is very little respect for personal autonomy.
"And on economic issues, it's almost like they don't believe in what they talk about. They talk about limited government, but they are just as bad as the other party at cronyism, raising taxes and growing government."
If there is one knock on Sarvis' record, it is this: He has never held elected office. If he wins on Tuesday, he would have to navigate a swamp of partisan politics in Richmond.
But as a conservative, he would be a political kindred spirit with many of the Republicans in the General Assembly. We believe he could be more than just a novelty candidate in 2013, but the kind of governor who inspires confidence from Virginians and respect from other members of the General Assembly.
What we won't get from Sarvis is a big-government agenda. In a year when so many other things have gone wrong, a young man with a new way of looking at our old problems is just what the Old Dominion needs. We're not interested in what Robert Sarvis can do for the Libertarian Party; we're interested in what this young, intelligent and highly-motivated family man can do to change the two-party trap we've gotten ourselves into.
I'm off to the polls in a bit to cast my ballot for a candidate who offers more than the usual lesser-of-two-evils electoral choice.
For more background, see S.M. Oliva's Reason.com excellent profile of Sarvis here.
The post Will Virginia Libertarian Gubernatorial Candidate Sarvis Crack Open the Corrupt Democrat/Republican Duopoly? appeared first on Reason.com.
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