LIBERTARIAN SWINGERS. Via Andrew Sullivan comes this bit from Cato's new report on the next big swing group: "Libertarians preferred George W. Bush over Al Gore by 72 percent to 20 percent, but Bush�s margin dropped in 2004 to 59-38 over John Kerry...The political party that comes to terms with than can win the next generation." Maybe so, but while losing ground amongst the electorate's most important new swing group, didn't George W. Bush uh, increase his share of the vote? It's generally not a good thing when the concessions needed to attract a certain swing group swing the rest of the electorate away from you. More generally, in an era of close elections, it's easy to vaguely word a couple poll questions and conclude that your cohort is 5 percent of the electorate, more than enough to push any party over the edge. But moving to dominate one interest group necessarily means shifting away from others. To own libertarians, for instance, Democrats would have to abandon, well, everyone else. The mark of an important swing group now isn't their size -- almost everyone is big enough to throw a presidential race -- it's their attractability. And if the term libertarian has any meaning at all -- and I think, in this report, it basically doesn't -- they're not aligning themselves with the relatively-statist Democratic Party anytime soon.
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Ezra Klein
