It’s late on Monday night, and I’ve just spent several hours researching and organizing my upcoming Townhall column “Victory Lessons from Ronald Reagan” (to honor Reagan’s birthday, February 6th).
One odd little fact captured my attention, but it didn’t really fit into the column; instead, I’ll share it here with all those who can appreciate a strange but significant piece of political trivia.
When Reagan won the Presidency in 1980, crushing the incumbent Jimmy Carter 51% to 41%, he not only overcame a third party vanity race by a former Republican Congressman named John Anderson (his “Independent” Party drew 6.6% of the vote), but he also triumphed over by far the strongest Libertarian Party candidate in Presidential history.
Amazingly enough, Ed Clark, the Libertarian standard bearer, won almost a million votes (921,188) for 1.06% of the total.
To rational observers, a national campaign that wins only 1% of the vote looks pointless and pathetic, but by Libertarian standards the Clark campaign represented a veritable juggernaut, and the party’s breathtaking summit of achievement. Clark’s performance more than doubled all subsequent Libertarian nominees, even though some of them (like two time loser Harry Browne) raised and spent far more money for their sad little races. In terms of their percentage of the popular vote, Libertarian presidential candidates since the high-water mark of 1980 have drawn between 0.24% (David Bergland in 1984) and 0.5 (Harry Browne in his first race of 1996). Most recently, that burning hunk of unstoppable charisma Michael Bednarik earned a paltry 0.3% of the popular vote – less than one-third the showing that Ed Clark managed 24 years earlier.
The point isn’t merely that the Loser-tarian Party has moved decisively in the wrong direction (you don’t build majorities by losing two-thirds of your voters), it’s that they happened to succeed best against the finest conservative candidate in recent history.
In other words, the Libertarians lie or at least delude themselves when they claim that they will win votes by drawing people who are disillusioned with both big government Democrats and me-too Republicans. They drew more votes when running against the unequivocally conservative Ronald Reagan than they did against the likes of Bob Dole, either President Bush, or Gerald Ford for that matter.
Thus, the argument that they are pushing the Republican Party in a more conservative direction by taking away votes of die-hard conservatives is, like so much else about the Libertarian Party, a complete fraud.
If Republicans ever became worried about defections to the lunatic fringe represented by the Loser-tarians, they should be sure to nominate relative moderates like Dole, Ford or the first President Bush. If Libertarians do best against Reagan then, if anything, their misguided political activism would lead Republicans to move toward the center, not to the right. When you move to the right, and nominate a strong conservative, it seems as if the Libertarians only take more of your votes.
Of course, in the real world, neither Republicans nor anyone else need concern himself with the fortunes of the Libertarians. In 2008, these odd-ball adventurers will no doubt enjoy yet another election cycle of futility and fatuity. They stand little chance of ever-again reaching the glorious total of 1.06% they achieved against Reagan. And their relative success in gunning for the Gipper should in no way deter Republicans from fielding a candidate next time who best exemplifies the Reagan tradition and who can, in the true Reagan spirit, chuckle good-naturedly at the pitiful exertions of fifth party losers.