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The main theme of political commentary inthis decade is polarization. Since the battles overthe impeachment of President Clinton and theFlorida vote in 2000, pundits have been telling usthat we’re a country split down the middle, red vs. blue, liberal vs. conservative. Political analyststalk about base motivation and the shrinking of the swing vote. But the evidence says they arewrong.Not all Americans can be classified as liberalor conservative. In particular, polls find thatsome 10 to 20 percent of voting-age Americansare libertarian, tending to agree with conserva-tives on economic issues and with liberals on per-sonal freedom. The Gallup Governance Survey consistently finds about 20 percent of respon-dents giving libertarian answers to a two-ques-tion screen.Our own data analysis is stricter. We find 9 to13 percent libertarians in the Gallup surveys, 14percent in the Pew Research Center Typology Survey, and 13 percent in the American NationalElection Studies, generally regarded as the bestsource of public opinion data.For those on the trail of the elusive swing voter,it may be most notable that the libertarian voteshifted sharply in 2004. Libertarians preferredGeorge W. Bush over Al Gore by 72 to 20 percent,but Bush’s margin dropped in 2004 to 59-38 over John Kerry. Congressional voting showed a similarswing from 2002 to 2004. Libertarians apparently became disillusioned with Republican overspend-ing, social intolerance, civil liberties infringements,and the floundering war in Iraq. If that trend con-tinues into 2006 and 2008, Republicans will loseelections they would otherwise win.The libertarian vote is in play. At some 13 per-cent of the electorate, it is sizable enough toswing elections. Pollsters, political strategists,candidates, and the media should take note of it.
The Libertarian Vote
by David Boaz and David Kirby 
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
 David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute. He is the author of 
Libertarianism: A Primer
and edi-tor of 
The Libertarian Reader, Toward Liberty 
 , and
Left, Right & Babyboom: America’s New Politics
. David Kirby is executive director of America’s Future Foundation and a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Executive Summary 
No. 580October 18, 2006
� 
 
The main theme of political commentary in this decade is polarization. Since the bat-tles over the impeachment of PresidentClinton and the Florida vote in 2000, punditshave been telling us that we’re a country splitdown the middle, red vs. blue, liberal vs. con-servative. Liberals and conservatives read dif-ferent books, watch different networks, andgo to different churches.But, in fact, a substantial number of  Americans don’t fit into that liberal-conserv-ative dichotomy. As we demonstrate below,10 to 20 percent of Americans could bedescribed as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, or libertarian. They tell pollsters thatthey tend to oppose government involve-ment in both economic and personal affairs,meaning they don’t fall into either the liberalor the conservative camp. That’s a substan-tial part of the electorate in any election andespecially in elections as close as recent presi-dential and congressional votes. There is evi-dence from polling data that libertariansshifted significantly away from Republicancandidates in 2004. Libertarians are increas-ingly a swing vote, and they are a larger shareof the electorate than the fabled “soccermoms” and “NASCAR dads.” And lately nei-ther party has shown much interest in thelibertarian vote, as Republicans counter big-government liberalism with their own big-government conservatism.Why is this substantial and growing liber-tarian strength not more widely recognized?We see several reasons:
We are all trapped in our dominant par-adigms. Political scientists have taughtfor more than 50 years that politics isarranged on a liberal-conservative con-tinuum. It’s simple, and comfortable,and we like such systems.
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It also seems to fit political activists andelected officials better than it fits thepublic. Politicians in both parties facetwo kinds of pressure: to conform to theparty line and to accommodate them-selves to big government. That pusheselected officials in the direction of big-government conservatism and big-gov-ernment liberalism. No wonder libertar-ians are becoming swing voters, havingbeen abandoned by both parties.
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Libertarians are less likely to be orga-nized than either liberals or conserva-tives. Social conservatives have evangeli-cal churches, the Christian Coalition,and Focus on the Family constantly advocating their views with Republicanstrategists. Liberals have unions andidentity-politics groups and advocacy groups like MoveOn.org. Libertarianshave think tanks. People who wantsomething from government—whetherspending programs or lifestyle regula-tions—are more likely to organize politi-cally.
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Organized punditry also contributes tothe flawed idea of the liberal-conserva-tive spectrum. Every cable talk show debate features one liberal and one con-servative, one red and one blue, oneGingrich and one Estrich, one Coulterand one Moore. In so doing, thoseshows neither serve nor reflect theiraudiences. They fail to give their viewersa reliable understanding of the distribu-tion of political ideas in America, andthey offer no leaders or spokespeoplefor the 10 to 20 percent of Americanswho hold libertarian ideas. Indeed, inthe words of identity-politics activists,they “invisibilize” libertarians.
•
Pollsters tend to ask people to definethemselves as liberal or conservative, notincluding a libertarian option, and thento report the results that way. Thus they too “invisibilize” libertarians.
•
Most voters who hold libertarian viewsdon’t identify themselves as libertarian,though many of them would say they are “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.”This paper presents evidence on the size of the libertarian vote and suggests that it willbecome an increasingly significant part of a divided electorate.
2
Libertarians areless likely to beorganized thaneither liberals orconservatives.
 
Liberals and Conservatives
The 2004 election was marked by talk of “bringing out the base.” Both parties turnedtheir attention to finding and engaging peoplealready inclined to vote for them. As early as1992, political scientist Raymond E. Wolfingerargued that most independents vote as weakpartisans, like “closet Republicans and Demo-crats.”
1
 Joshua Green reported in the
 Atlantic 
that the 2000 election had seen “the lowest voter crossover ever documented.”
2
With that inmind, Bush pollster Matthew Dowd arguedimmediately after the election that the empha-sis on swing voters was misplaced; the key toreelection would be “base motivation.”
3
Demo-cratic nominee John F. Kerry, less appealing tomoderate voters than Bill Clinton, likewisefocused on finding and motivating Democratic voters.In many ways the 2004 strategists were just acting on what political scientists hadlong been saying. The traditional premise of postwar political science was that Americanscould be divided into liberals, conservatives,and “confused.” The orthodox definition wasthat a liberal favors government interventionin the economy and protection of civil liber-ties, while a conservative is opposed to botheconomic intervention and the expansion of civil liberties. Anyone whose views did not fitthose categories was explained away as “con-fused.” Scholars such as Herbert McClosky, Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, EverettCarll Ladd, Charles Hadley, Norman Nie, andSidney Verba relied heavily on that liberal-conservative continuum as the organizingprinciple for examining American ideology.That tendency was strengthened by evidencethat political activists, especially party activists, do closely fit the liberal-conservativedichotomy.
4
Political scientists William S.Maddox and Stuart A. Lilie of the University of Central Florida wrote in 1984:If we look closely at the way in whichideology has been studied, we find thatall these studies share a commonapproach: A single liberal-conservativedimension is the primary tool for evalu-ating the presence and direction of ide-ological thinking among the public.None of these studies seriously consid-ers the possibility that the public’s belief systems may be organized in morediverse and complex ways. Citizenswhose attitudes do not fit the liberal-conservative definition are categorizedas nonideological or inconsistent.
5
Challenging the Liberal-ConservativeContinuum
Evidence shows that not all Americans arein fact either liberal, conservative, or con-fused. Maddox and Lilie, in a 1981 paper andthen in a 1984 book, laid out a four-way matrix of American ideologies (Figure 1):We propose a two-dimensional approachas the basis for the analysis of mass belief systems. We measure attitudes towardeconomic intervention by governmentand attitudes toward individual libertiesas separate dimensions and considerfour ideological categories based onthese two dimensions: liberal, conserva-tive, libertarian and populist. Our defini-tions of liberal and conservative are gen-erally consistent with current practice;there are also, we will argue, validgrounds for including the categories of libertarian and populist. Our approach,then, is an outgrowth and complementto current research in that it includes theliberal and conservative categories as tra-ditionally defined, but attempts toaccount for many of those others whoare [in the words of one highly regardedpolitical science book] “consistent inways we do not recognize.”
6
Drawing on poll data from the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies, they constructed a new matrix of political ideologies.They selected three CPS questions relating togovernment intervention in the economy andthree others involving personal freedom and“social issues.” On the basis of answers to those
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Libertarians areincreasingly aswing vote, andthey are a largershare of theelectorate thanthe fabled “soccermoms” and“NASCAR dads.”
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