Over the weekend, Bob Barr won the Libertarian Party nomination in Denver after five ballots were cast. I'm not about to wade into what this means for libertarian politics, but it is worth looking at the question of whether Barr would actually have an impact on the general presidential election. In Georgia, which Barr represented in the U.S. House as a Republican, he already polls at eight percent -- not an insignificant level of support (McCain and Obama get 45 and 35 percent, respectively). If Barr were to peel away enough votes to put McCain in a statistical tie with Obama and there's record turnout for Obama (Georgia's population is 30 percent African American) then it's just possible that the state and its 15 electoral votes could be competitive for Democrats this Fall.
But that's a lot of big ifs. Big turnout for Obama seems plausible (his 700,000 votes in the Georgia primary alone account for half of what John Kerry received in the general election in 2004) but I remain skeptical that that will be enough, even with Barr's intervention, to flip the state blue. And that's assuming that Barr exclusively takes votes from McCain. There are other states where Barr could have an impact outside of the special case of Georgia, but that's a subject for a separate post.
--Mori Dinauer
