Written by Jillian Mack - Libertarian Party Candidate for Ohio House District 33

Convincing Voters…and Candidates

Frequently I hear from Republicans who say that the Libertarian Party is just taking votes from the Republican Party, or a vote for a Libertarian candidate is a vote that was “thrown away.”  Even though many of these folks more closely align with the libertarian philosophy, at the present time they will almost never vote for a Libertarian Party candidate for fear of taking a vote away from the Republicans, and allowing a Democrat to win the seat.

After encountering this thinking pattern so many times in my discussions with everyday voters, I’ve begun to think of ways to help them see the issue from a different perspective, in the hopes of getting them to vote for a Libertarian Party candidate someday.

• If rather than voting your conscience you vote for candidate just because they have the letter next to their name which you feel is the lesser of two evils, isn’t that really a vote that was thrown away?

• You keep voting Republican and then repeatedly find yourself unhappy with your elected Republican officials.  Wasn’t it Albert Einstein who said that the very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome?

Although I stand by these arguments and will continue to assert them to potential LP voters, I’ve also begun to think that it may not be just the voters who need to be convinced of something.  That perhaps it’s the Libertarian Party and our candidates who need to be convinced of something.

If we, as a party, always target the Republican voters under the false pretense that Democratic voters do not tend to be libertarian-minded, I think we will always be doomed to fail, because we’ll always be perceived by Republicans as the party who will let the Democrats win by taking Republican votes.

Until recently, I had never talked politics with a long-time co-worker and friend of mine, because I usually try to keep political debates away from the workplace.  However, I recently asked him for his signature on my petition to run for Ohio House of Representatives, District 33, and this of course opened the lines of political communication.

I had made some assumptions about his voting pattern because he’s a young professional, trying to build his career and save for the future, and he’s married to a bright young woman who is finishing up her residency at a local hospital.  Based on this assessment, I had quite incorrectly predicted that he normally voted Republican.

Through our conversation I immediately came to know that he strongly identifies with the libertarian philosophy, but that he always votes Democratic because he can’t let the Republicans win.  When I asked why he felt so strongly, I learned that he has an extreme distaste for the neoconservative position of allowing religion, through the government, to dictate which personal liberties an individual should be afforded.

He is a moral person, an upstanding member of the community, and yet completely non-religious and doesn’t want to be dictated to by those on the “religious right.”  When I asked him how he felt about President Obama’s economic policies, he strongly disagreed with them, but he even more vehemently stated that he’d rather pay $10,000 more per year in taxes than to have the government restrict his personal liberties on the basis of religious beliefs which are held by those in power.

I have a few other close friends who feel this way too, but hearing it come from someone new, and hearing how fervently he expressed these feelings, made me consider how many more voters may feel this very same way.  This led me to consider that the LP may be able to draw in more voters from both sides of the aisle if we target Democratic voters.

It seems to me that the LP did traditionally take voters from the Republicans, as many members of the LP leadership belong to older generations who defected from the Republican Party.  However, we have a younger generation of libertarian-minded people who traditionally have voted or will be easily persuaded to vote Democratic due to the social and personal freedoms they hold so dear.

Over the past 10 years, I can attest to the fact that the LP has gained some popularity and recognition with younger voters, including myself, who have traditionally thought of themselves as Democrats.  Unfortunately, this shift does not seem to be widely known, and has therefore not changed the general perception that we only take votes from Republicans.

If we actively target and capture this group of youthful voters by presenting them with the true principles of freedom which the LP has to offer, perhaps we can both build our voter rolls with former and potential Democrats and simultaneously change the perception that we only take votes from Republicans.  In turn, I think this change in perception of where we get our votes could make it more likely that we could win those libertarian-minded voters who have traditionally voted Republican, because we’d be perceived as taking votes equally from both major parties.

The next topic to consider: how do we properly target traditionally or potentially Democratic voters?