Margin of Difference. A provocative op-ed ran
in the New York Times on Nov. 16 by conservative writer John J.
Miller, titled A Third
Party on the Right. Miller (no relation) observes that in South
Dakota's hotly contested Senate race, Republican challenger John
Thune lost by a mere 524 votes, while Libertarian Party candidate
Kurt Evans drew more than 3,000 votes. Says Miller, "It marks the
third consecutive election in which a Libertarian has cost the
Republican Party a Senate seat." He continues:
It's important to appreciate that Libertarian voters are not merely Republicans with an eccentric streak. Libertarians tend to support gay rights and open borders; they tend to oppose the drug war and hawkish foreign policies. Some of them wouldn't vote if they didn't have the Libertarian option. But Libertarians are also free-market devotees who are generally closer to Republicans than to the Democrats.
(In all fairness, I should note that many Libertarian Party voters don't support anti-discrimination laws for gays or anyone else, but do oppose government-sanctioned discrimination -- and many don't think the government should be in the business of deciding who can marry whom.)
Miller's point is to castigate Libertarians for running candidates against Republicans, but an alternative conclusion would be that Republicans have to start courting those who vote Libertarian -- i.e., politically engaged voters whose "live and let live" views on social issues are often diametrically opposite those of the religious right. It won't be easy to reach out to Libertarian voters and to placate religious conservatives, but no one said life, or politics, was easy.
Times Says "Never Mind". On Nov. 14, the New
York Times ran the following correction:
An article yesterday about a California judge's victory after a bitter but nonpartisan campaign to be San Diego's district attorney, making her the first openly gay elected prosecutor in the country, misstated her political affiliation. The judge, Bonnie Dumanis, is a Republican.
As I wrote on Nov. 13, the Times just naturally assumed that a ground-breaking lesbian D.A. would be a Democrat. The lesson: don't assume.
Update. A readers writes in to say:
I think you went too easy on the NY Times getting Dumanis' party affiliation wrong. They didn't just simply misstate her political affiliation as "Bonnie Dumanis [D]", they smugly declared, "it was no secret to the voters that she is a Democrat." They tried to make it sound as if they have the inside track on Ms Dumanis and her friends. They outright lied in print - and this is a newspaper of record America is supposed to trust?