The 2020 Autopsy Part II
or was Hillary hated by millions of Democrats?
On December 31, 1965, Milton Friedman wrote “We are all Keynesians now” in a piece for Time magazine.
The phrase would be later attributed to President Nixon upon announcing the U.S. would be withdrawing from the Bretton Woods system on January 7, 19711. The true source of the phrase dates back to 1947.
The movement of a Republican president so far from the laissez-faire position that had defined the GOP for the nearly the first 100 years of its existence created a political moment 11 months later with the founding of the Libertarian Party.
And while fledgling Democratic Party won the presidency within 10 months of its founding and the Republicans did so in 6 years from its inception in Ripon, WI, the Libertarian Party has spent the first 40 years of its existence struggling to break the one percent mark in national elections.
See for yourself.
In 13 presidential elections, the Libertarians have broken the 1% mark 3 times (4 if one wants to be charitable and round up the 2012 results). And it took more than 10 elections to break 1 million votes.
While it seems to be a study in minor party minutia, two electoral trends seemingly emerge.
One: Libertarian Party voting skyrockets in both raw and percentage terms, when a Democrat runs for reelection.
Two: The Libertarian vote percentage goes down when an incumbent Republican runs for reelection.
Wait that one is wrong. It started looking wrong after George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection race. The trend completely unraveled in 2020.
Hold on…the Libertarian vote percentage went down in 2004 and 2020, didn’t it?
Well, the fringe Right had at least 4 candidates in the mix in 2000 comprising nearly 1% of the votes cast. And with Ralph Nader in the mix, third parties in 2000 won 3.7% of the vote.
In 2004, all the third parties combined won merely 1% of the total vote. And they were all Right of Center. The small reduction in Libertarian Party voting from 2000 to 2004 was de minimus.
But the same framework to the Libertarian Party vote going down in 2020 fails, because the Libertarian vote in 2016 was way too high to be simply frustrated Republicans and Independents.
Why? Obama won 52.9% in 2008, 51.1% in 2012, and Biden won in 2020 with 51.3%. The average of those three years was 51.76%. The GOP average from 2008 through 2020 was 46.47%2. Trump’s numbers in 2016 and 2020 fell below that.
Hillary Clinton even with the benefit of no Green Party vote would have still been short of the absolute majorities won by Obama and Biden. Her 48.2% plus the Green’s 1.07% yields 49.27% — below the 50% mark (0.73 short) and nearly 2.5 points short of the Obama-Biden average. This was not mere underperformance - her “would be” voters went elsewhere. (And no, Trump wasn’t winning them.)
So what was the true Libertarian Party vote in 2016? Probably 1.5 to 2 million votes.3 That would make the Libertarian vote percentage fall between just shy of their 2012 performance or, more likely, slightly below 1.5%.
While the above is bad news for Hillary Clinton, it’s far worse for Trump. It is one thing to have an opponent who ran a bad campaign (and that is the broad consensus), it is quite another to lose because another political party is siphoning votes from your political base.
And Gary Johnson, notwithstanding, Libertarian standard bearers have been largely forgettable. And despite that, a Clemson professor with a funny name ran an unfunded campaign that cost Donald Trump reelection in 2020.
How?
Part III of the Autopsy tomorrow.
Nixon stated at that event that “I am now Keynesian in economics.”.
McCain 45.7%, Romney 47.2%, Trump 46.1%, and Trump (again) 46.9%. The percentage figures used used were rounded up to the nearest tenth.
Send me an email and I’ll explain how I arrived at these numbers.