The disappointing third-party vote in 2008

Posted by TPW News Items --- November 11th, 2008

David Weigel of Reason takes a look at the votes for Bob Barr, Ralph Nader, Chuck Baldwin, and Cynthia McKinney, all of which were disappointing to their backers and in historical context. He then concludes:

So if you add together Paul with the four candidates he gathered at the National Press Club to endorse (and include Barr, who was invited), Paul’s favored candidates got around 1.5 million votes. In a historical perspective, that’s… not that impressive, still. Ralph Nader got almost twice as many votes in 2000, and John Anderson got almost four times as many in 1980. It’s a bigger third party vote than 2004, but not by much.

Why was this if everyone told the pollsters they were furious with the way the country was going and hated the two parties? I’d say it’s because there was a Democrat and a Republican that people basically liked, but that wouldn’t explain why 1988 third party voting was so low. I’m not hearing any of this discussed in the rest of the media, so Bob Barr’s complaint from Ron Paul’s presser rings true: The way to keep attention on libertarian political arguments was to consolidate behind one candidate. For all of Paul’s flaws, his totals in Montana and Louisiana indicate that he probably could have run a Nader 2000-style campaign and gotten about Nader’s 2.8 million votes.