The Golden Opportunity
Regardless of positioning, 2-way races are a wonderful opportunity in that there is never a chance of doing harm. But there are other benefits:
- Small-l libertarians vote for the Libertarian candidate because of the no harm situation.
- Members of the unrepresented party will sometimes vote Libertarian merely to vote against the major party candidate.
- Press coverage will be more even because without the Libertarian candidate, there is no race.
- The major-party opposition candidate will spend less time/money that he would if the other major party had a candidate. This levels the playing field.
FACTORS OF 40 ARE SIGNIFICANT!!!!!
It would be well to take advantage of these opportunities. There is no shortage. Many legislative races are currently uncontested due to gerrymandering -- over half in the 1999 VA state elections!
That said, let's look at how we can improve on two-way race strategy.
Here, we have a fairly typical scenario of a Libertarian running against
the incumbent in a Republican-gerrymandered district.
Once again, we have a tendency to run a "Republican Extra Strength", but
the results are not as bad.
Those to the libertarian side of the axis will feel free to vote for the
Libertarian.
And some opposition votes will come from the "hate Republican" sentiment
of the Democratic minority, along with some of those who care about
the social issues.
But we can do better.
Here, surprise! surprise! the Libertarian candidate is closer to the
center than the major party candidate!
Yet, the Libertarian is still significantly closer to the libertarian
ideal than the Republican.
Given some real funding, such a positioning has a real shot at winning
the election.
Take the free-market Republicans, libertarians of various types, the
liberal minority and some of the centrists and you have a potentially
winning coalition.
Copyright 2000, Carl S. Milsted, Jr. All rights reserved.