without them Biden probably wouldn’t have won Georgia or Pennsylvania.
Ralph nader sends his regards.
But i suspect the libertarians who voted L really didn’t want trump to win, and prefer Biden.
Nah. They hate liberals first and foremost. They know nobody is ever going to choose their kooky weirdo goldbug party. They’re the “change my mind” drama queens, they derive their satisfaction from spoiling other people’s races and declaring that the other 99% should cater to them and “earn their vote”.
Occasionally they solemnly intone that even though know they lost for the thousandth time, they take comfort knowing they have surely moved the discourse a bit in the direction of liberty.
A defeat for Trump is a defeat for Libertarians, whether they admit it or not, and we should all be happy about that.
I know a few Libertarian activists, including party delegates and people who work at Reason magazine. Most of them voted for Biden, or rather against Trump. They aren’t dumb and represent the threat Trump represents. For at least a couple it was the first vote they’d cast for a major party candidate.
You say they’re not dumb, but if 2020 is the first time they cast a ballot against a major party candidate, then they didn’t make smart choices in 2016.
In my experience, I wouldn’t call them dumb, but they are so self-absorbed in their hermetically sealed absolutist philosophical world that the distinction is hard to see.
You could say the same things about the greens/progressives/Bernard brothers. The libertarian vote is all over the map. a lot would stay home if there wasn’t a libertarian candidate.
I’m pretty sure most "L"s voted for Biden, if they didn’t choose Jorgensen, while most "l"s don’t really have a good understanding of what libertarianism actually is, voted for Trump, and probably couldn’t tell you who Jo Jorgensen is or what she is about.
The reason.com staff, with a single exception, are all selecting either Joe Jorgensen or Biden.
I can, and I enthusiastically do, except about progressives. Progressives have plans, strategies, and a movement full of people.
Maybe we can get the conservative folks on board with ranked choice voting. Protect your mainstream deeply-rooted party from having elections “stolen” by “spoilers” while at the same time make it less a case of “throwing your vote away” to select a 3rd (4th, 5th) party as your first choice, because you can pick one of the big two as ONE of your (eventual) choices.
I know quite a few libertarians. Every single one of them supported Biden. The last thing they want is libertarianism to be associated with Trump.
This blogger suggested Jorgensen won the election for Biden:
In 2016, IIRC, half of Libertarian voters would have voted Democrat, so Mr. Bell is probably wrong in his analysis. I suspect Republican leaners would be less likely to vote for a transgender candidate as well, so if anything this could have been bad news for Biden.
We heard less about third party candidates influencing the vote this year than the last election (and the one we heard the most about was Kanye West). I literally didn’t know about Jorgensen until I came across that blog post.
There are “serious” libertarians who combine unrealistic hostility to all controls on individual freedom. These you find on the board of Reason. There are a bunch of folks who call themselves libertarians who are really simply obsessed with not paying taxed and being able to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, etc. They all voted Trump, but the last Republican they didn’t all vote for was George H. W. Bush.
My brother is one of the latter. Astonishingly he made his pile in defense contracting but claims to be a pacifist (he’s a vegan). He also refers to Black people as sub-humans, “Mexicans” as vermin and denies that Nazis were/are anti Semitic.
I’m a bit skeptical that Libertarians cost Trump this time around. They were completely invisible except for Kayne. I don’t even remember them bellyaching or getting arrested for trespassing at the debates this year.
In any election, there’s always some who refuse to vote for a major party candidate and nothing will change their mind. And there are some true believing libertarians, both PA and GA have a decent number of colleges and every dorm gets at least one Libertarian convert each year!