Libertarian Helped Shift Senate to Democrats

We might have a Libertarian to thank for the Democrats taking control of the Senate. The Washington Post has a profile on Stan Jones, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for Senate in Montana. Jones received 10,324 votes, substantially higher than Tester’s margin of victory of 2,565 votes. The Washingon Post says “Jones is a quirkily conservative kind of libertarian — opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage.” While I would not immediately assume Libertarian votes come from Republicans (as discussed here), trom this descripiton it does sound like he would have taken substantially more votes from Republicans than Democrats.

Reason’s Hit and Run is happy with the result:

It’s heartening to see the GOP’s neglect of its libertarian wing come back to bite the party in the ass. That the poster-boy for the LP’s unfortuanate bent toward whack-jobbery did the deed makes it all the sweeter.

While the full description of Jones is not one which makes Libertarians proud, if his spoiler status forces Republicans to look more towards libertarians than the religious right it could be a good thing.

2 Comments

  1. 1
    janet says:

    I am still not convinced that the votes came from either party. This guy is out there and it was easier to vote for him as an alternative to voting for either Tester or Burns. If he had not been on the ballot, the folks who voted for him would not have voted for the Senate seat or would have written in Donald Duck.

  2. 2
    battlebob says:

    Did Green Party cost Democrats control of Michigan Senate?

    Link

    [snip]
    Republicans won the two closest Senate races in last week’s election by a combined 1,294 votes out of 210,000 cast, giving them a 21-17 majority instead of a 19-19 tie to be broken by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s lieutenant governor. Both races had Green Party candidates who ran as part of the “Stop the War Slate.”

    Democrats say most of those votes would have been theirs if not for the Green Party, a reminder of Ralph Nader’s spoiler role that possibly cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000.

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