I used to vote for the Libertarian Party candidate pretty regularly because it’s been a long time since either of the major parties represented anything that approached my views on how things should be done.  As best as I recall, here is how I’ve voted in US Presidential elections since I was able to vote:

1980 – John Anderson (I)

1984 – Ronald Reagan (R)

1988 – Ron Paul (L)

1992 – Andre Marrou (L)

1996 – Bill Clinton (D)

2000 – Harry Browne (L)

2004 – Michael Badnarick (L)

2008 – Didn’t vote

So in 8 elections, I voted for 1 Republican, 1 Democrat, 1 Independent, 4 Libertarians and there was one time I was so disgusted with the process I couldn’t even bother to go down to one of our mobile voting stations and cast a protest ballot. My personal opinion is that most Americans in the mainstream are really libertarians (Capital L and lowercase l will be used to distinguish between the politcal party and the political belief system) and yet the Libertarians routinely get less than 1% of the popular vote.  I think there are 2 intertwined reasons that this is the case.

The first is that the people in charge of the LP are ideologues and anytime ideologues are in charge their organization will be marginalized. Just ask the Republicans. The only reason the Democrats didn’t hold the White House continuously from 1988 to 2008 was that they managed to find the blandest people on the planet (Dukakkis, Gore, Kerry)  to run against the Republicans.

The second is related — when ideologues are in charge their marketing sucks since they don’t understand that everybody doesn’t feel the same way they do because it would be stupid to feel differently.

So, here’s me, all out on the raggedy edge. On the World’s Smallest Politcal Quiz I score a 100 on personal issues and a 70 economic issues. On the Libertarian Purity Test I score a 77 out of 160 which according to the author of the test makes me a medium core (?) libertarian.  Which is probably fair. The problem is that amongst the people running the LP they don’t want anything to do with me because I’m not pure enough. It would be like if the Republicans suddenly didn’t want anything to do with anybody who was pro-choice (Oh, wait…..). If the LP ever wants to be anything more than a marginal party they’ll have to embrace people who, for instance, don’t think taxes to build public roads are an abomination.

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