Third parties bled away over 60% of the few votes Romney lost by in his failed eastern strategy in Election 2012.
Mitt Romney's bid to win the White House failed by 64 electoral college votes, all of which he narrowly lost in an eastern strategy in just four states by a total of only 429,522 popular votes:
Florida, lost by 74,309 votes, where third parties garnered an unbelievable 90,972 votes;
Virginia, lost by 149,298 votes, where third parties garnered 60,147 votes;
Ohio, lost by 166,272 votes, where third parties took a whopping 101,788 votes;
and New Hampshire, lost by 39,643 votes, where third parties took 11,493 votes.
That's a loss for Romney of 64 electoral college votes, enough to have taken him from 206 to 270 to take the presidency, losing 429,522 total popular votes in just four states where third parties all told took 264,400 votes, 61.5% of the total needed by Romney to win.
This isn't to say that those were all necessarily Republican votes which went third party, but fully 50.5% of the 264,400 were cast for the libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson of New Mexico, who had been a Republican candidate for president until late 2011 when he was excluded from the Republican debates. At that point he bolted to the Libertarian Party, and
openly stated his intention to play a spoiler role:
“I hope that I would get labeled as a ‘spoiler’ from the standpoint of people actually focusing on what it is I am saying, and that this changes the way whoever wins governs,” Johnson told Sunshine State News in an exclusive interview Saturday at the 2012 Ron Paul Festival.
Combine the pique factor around that with the natural alienation felt by libertarians toward a Mormon candidate who was himself socially conservative in his habits and loathe to exercise himself on behalf of libertarians' usual limited government ideas and you can make a case that it was libertarians who cost Romney the election, by casting spoiler votes, staying away from the polls entirely, or even voting for Obama out of spite.
This is a better explanation for the Romney loss than some mythical 4 million conservatives staying away from the polls in 2012 as Rush Limbaugh keeps saying. The numbers themselves disprove that, as Romney garnered 1 million more votes in 2012 than McCain in 2008. It was a much closer election than the (mostly libertarian) punditocracy wants you to know.
Conservatives, most of whom are Christians, aren't put off by abstainers like Mitt Romney the way libertarians might be (many Christians are abstemious too), and Christians find it much more morally problematic to stay away from the polls, or to vote out of spite, in a way which libertarians would not. Christian voters are nothing if not preoccupied with their moral and social responsibility, but libertarians care little for that.
In fact, withdrawing from social responsibilities is elevated to the level of a moral principle by libertarians. Staying away from the polls is a John Galt tactic straight out of the playbook from Ayn Rand. It's an ongoing and adolescent fantasy of theirs. It's not a Christian tactic, which is to say it's not a conservative tactic. Conservatives love their country too much to let it go down the drain, and they actively admired Mitt Romney for his commitment to and long record of public service even if his religion and social policy positions bothered them.
It remains a question if Republicans can expect to succeed in future with a brood of vipers in their party such as the libertarians. Republicans should reconsider their tilt toward libertarianism and seriously ask themselves whether things might not go better for them if they more actively pursued the social conservative vote. From the Christians Republicans can expect forgiveness, but from the libertarians only vindictiveness. Isn't that how the Bushes got elected after turning their backs on the Reagan revolution? Isn't that the conceit of moderate Republican presidential aspirants still today?
Why isn't that an easy call? After all, the libertarian Ron Paul who bitterly lost to Romney in the Republican primaries never left the Republican Party, but he never endorsed Mitt Romney either: "I don’t fully endorse him for president,” he
said, as late as August 2012, less than three months before the election. Message to libertarians: good ahead, stay home, see if I care.
Call it an ironic payback to Romney, whose moderate Republican father likewise wouldn't endorse the conservative Barry Goldwater after losing to him in 1964, but it's also another sign in a long list of signs that libertarians have more in common with liberals than with conservatives.
They're content if they too can defeat Republicans.
