When you read the title of this post, you are probably thinking to yourself, “Well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.” Here, let me explain to you why I am posting this.
A recent Cato Institute analysis indicated that libertarians constitute a significant portion of the swing vote — which is roughly about the same size as Christian conservatives. A recent survey taken by LibertarianLists.com took a look at the libertarian vote with respect to the 2008 presidential elections.
The survey had 1,995 responses, 69.62% percent indicated that they would vote for Ron Paul. Though not too surprising that 92.68% of the people surveyed recognized Ron Paul’s name. 71.33% feel very positively about the candidate and 15.19% feel somewhat positively about him. 2.96% are neutral while 2.01% felt somewhat negative about Ron Paul and only 1.20% feel very negatively about him.
It was also surveyed that Ron Paul had the support of 53.98% of the Republicans who participated in the survey, along with 72.24% of Libertarian Party members and 70.59% of independents. Additionally, Ron Paul received 27.08% support from the Democrats and Greens responding to the survey.
“Ron Paul is the hottest thing on the Internet for a very good reason: He is connecting with the general public and the typical American voter. If you give the Republican and Democrat machines the chance to win, one of them certainly will. However, if you give common-sense Americans a chance to rise above the political machines, Dr. Paul will clearly dominate,” said LibertarianLists.com founder Stephen Gordon.
Until I ran across this information, I had no idea the libertarian voters were as large as Christian conservatives. I was always under the impression they were just a small group of people. I imagine if we were to combine these results with the large number of internet supporters who have yet to register as a Republicans and thus are not included in national polls because of the horribly dated method traditional polls use, we would see a large jump in Ron Paul’s numbers.
Sources:
The baseline survey results: http://www.libertarianlists.com/surveyresult1
The survey was conducted online with e-mail addresses used as the primary controlling mechanism. The survey was conducted between July 2 and July 10, 2008. There were 1,995 survey participants from across the United States. The margin of error is +/-2.19% at a 95% confidence level. The data are taken from online respondents only and have not been weighted.
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