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Stephen Cox's challenge of traditional election punditry! Analysis How Badnarik Avoided Disaster by R.W. Bradford The Badnarik
campaign got a respectable vote count because it picked up more than 80,000
additional votes by getting on the ballot in states where Nader did not, and
another 8,000 votes by advertising on television.
In the election just past, the Badnarik campaign focused
its efforts (and spent most of its meager resources) in four "battleground"
states, in hopes of taking enough votes from incumbent Bush to swing the election
to challenger John Kerry. The move was a failure: Bush carried three of the
states with margins that dwarfed Badnarik's vote, and in the other state, Kerry
won by a margin greater than the LP candidate's vote.
| | R.W.
Bradford is editor and publisher of Liberty.
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Worse still, as I noted in the January Liberty, the LP vote share fell 17%
from 2000 in the states where the Badnarik campaign concentrated its resources,
while falling only 8.4% in other states that the campaign had pretty much
ignored. This suggested, as I observed, that "perhaps the more voters know about
the Libertarian candidate, the less likely they are to vote for him."
This conclusion, despite the data supporting it, seemed preposterous. Another
explanation occurred to me: perhaps the "why waste your vote" argument had
greater impact in battleground states than in other states, accounting for
Badnarik's poor showing there. I mentioned this possibility in my article, but
didn't pursue it.
I am embarrassed to confess that it didn't occur to me until the day we went
to press that there was a relatively simple way to verify or falsify the theory
that the Badnarik campaign had actually had a negative impact. With the magazine
laid out and undergoing final proofing, there was no time to compile the data and
rework the article.
But here's the idea. My theory could be checked by comparing how Badnarik did
in the battleground states where his campaign focused its efforts to how he fared
in the other battleground states. I did a Web search and came up with a list of
13 states that were widely identified as battleground states by experts. Four of
these states had to be eliminated from the comparison because either the LP
nominee or Ralph Nader had failed to achieve ballot status in both 2000 and 2004.
This left three battleground states where the Badnarik campaign had concentrated
its advertising and six in which it had not.
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| The Badnarik campaign's
advertising in battleground states won the candidate an additional 8,137 votes at
a cost of $22.89 each. |
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In the three battleground states that the campaign concentrated on, Badnarik's
vote share fell 17.6% behind LP nominee Harry Browne's share four years
earlier:
| State | 2000 vote | 2004
vote | Change | | Nevada | 0.55% | 0.39% | -29.60% | | New
Mexico | 0.37% | 0.31% | -15.60% | | Wisconsin | 0.25% | 0.22% | -14.80% | | Average | 0.32% | 0.26% | -17.60% |
In the six battleground states that the campaign more or less ignored,
Badnarik's vote share fell 36.3%:
| State | 2000 vote | 2004
vote | Change | | Florida | 0.32% | 0.16% | -49.50% | | Iowa | 0.24% | 0.19% | -19.90% | | Michigan | 0.31% | 0.22% | -30.10% | | Minnesota | 0.22% | 0.16% | -26.30% | | Washington | 0.51% | 0.39% | -24.60% | | West
Virginia | 0.30% | 0.18% | -39.40% | | Average | 0.32% | 0.20% | -36.30% |
So the impact of the Badnarik campaign's spending about $186,270 was
favorable: the LP vote share fell less than half in battleground states where the
money was spent than in battleground states the campaign more or less
ignored.
How many votes did the campaign win over with its advertising and candidate
appearances in its favored battleground states? Simple extrapolation suggests
that if the campaign had saved its money, it would have won a total of 13,336
votes in those chosen battleground states. In fact, Badnarik captured 21,483
votes in those states. This suggests that the cost of gaining each of the 8,137
votes was $22.89. Actually, the cost of each vote gained in those states was a
bit higher than this, since the campaign also concentrated candidate appearances
in those battleground states.
The last time it was possible to calculate the cost of gaining votes by
television advertising was the 1988 campaign, in which advertisements purchased
on behalf of the LP candidate by the party in Kansas were able to increase LP
votes at a cost of about $1.86 per vote. The cost in the 2004 election was more
than twelve times as high. Whether the difference is entirely the product of the
higher costs of television advertising, or is partly the product of the higher
cost of swaying voters in battleground states than in uncontested states, is a
matter for conjecture.
| If Libertarians have
anyone in particular to thank for their non-disastrous finish, it is the election
officials who kept Nader's name from appearing on the ballot in those states.
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The 8,137 votes that the Badnarik campaign got for its $186,270 investment
were dwarfed by the votes it got from another identifiable source. In 2004, Ralph
Nader failed to appear on the ballots of twelve states on whose ballots his name
had appeared in 2000. In those states, the LP vote share went up 17.4%. In the 33
states where Nader and the LP nominee appeared on the ballot in both elections,
the LP vote share fell by 30.4%. If Nader had not been denied ballot access in
those twelve states in 2004, it is virtually certain that the LP vote would have
been substantially less: simple extrapolation suggests that those who kept Nader
off the ballot in those twelve states increased the LP vote total by 83,489
votes.
That's more than ten times as many votes as the LP candidate won by
campaigning in battleground states. If Libertarians have anyone in particular to
thank for their non-disastrous finish, it is the election officials who kept
Nader's name from appearing on the ballot in those states.
In most cases, Nader was kept off by people with motives curiously similar to
the Badnarik campaign's strategy of focusing on battleground states: state
officials believed that most voters who would have otherwise voted for Nader
would vote for Kerry, increasing his chances of winning those states. Similarly
the Libertarians running the Badnarik campaign hoped to attract votes that would
otherwise go to Bush, thereby increasing Kerry's chance of winning.
It is curious that those who kept Nader off the ballot failed to sway a single
state for Kerry. Had Nader been on the ballots of those twelve states and
performed comparably to how he performed elsewhere, and every one of Nader's
votes came out of Kerry's total, the outcome would not have been changed in a
single state.
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