Barr And Obama
The idea that antiwar voters who support Barr might have backed Obama seems plausible at first glance, until you actually pay attention to who Barr’s likely voters are. They are, so far as I can tell, independent conservatives and libertarians who supported Paul, plus the regular Libertarians, who find McCain unacceptable on a wide range of issues that also prevents them from supporting Obama. You can include me in that group. Such is the strange nature of this election that this fairly consistent position strikes the Obama-supporting conservatives and libertarians as inexplicable and grounds for harsh criticism.
It’s true that Paul voters were never going to go for McCain, and many of them seem to be supporting Obama, but they continue to support Obama even now despite the emergence of Barr’s candidacy. (Strange exit poll fact of the day: McCain voters in the primaries were more likely to view Ron Paul favourably than the supporters of any other candidate besides, of course, Paul.) Those who have chosen to go for Barr anyway, despite the existence of a “credible” major party antiwar candidacy, are as irreconcilably against Obama as they are against McCain, albeit perhaps for some different reasons. The Paul voters who have turned to Obama do this on the assumption that they will achieve the same antiwar goals that Barr espouses but will never be able to implement (”barring” a rather unusual change in voting patterns). These tend to be the Paul supporters who are also not interested in the other things that Barr emphasises, particularly with regard to immigration, and who were probably less likely to find McCain’s views on immigration very troubling. Thus it doesn’t bother them that Obama is to the left of Clinton and McCain on immigration.
Obama’s biggest potential problem among his Republican supporters remains moderate Republicans, who are exactly the sort of “soft” or independent Republicans whom Obama should be able to peel away under normal circumstances, but whom McCain appeals to for reasons that continue to escape me. Single-issue antiwar voters who back Obama will not be pulled away by Barr for two reasons: Barr is not running a purely antiwar campaign, but a comprehensive small government, conservative-libertarian campaign, and they believe that Obama can actually end the war, which is their top priority (that’s why they are single-issue voters). As I have said before, though, this microscopic analysis of Obama’s Republican and right-wing supporters will probably matter very little to the final outcome, because McCain continues to pull away more Democrats from Obama than he loses among Republicans.
Filed under: politics
The divide here is between voters who are content to make a meaningless “protest vote” that at least satisfies their conscience, and a responsible vote that affects the actual outcome of the race. A lot of conservatives might sympathize with Barr more than they do Obama, but if they want to actually affect the outcome, they know they really need to make a choice between McCain and Obama. Barr’s candidacy is itself an argument to vote for Obama, in that if one really wants to protest against McCain and the Republican establishement, the only effective way to do it is to ensure that they lose this election, which is best accomplished by voting for Obama. If they happen to actually like Obama more than McCain, so much the better.
conrad, you overstate your case. No single vote actually affects the outcome of the race. Every vote is a vote of conscience.
Voters in Utah and Idaho, for example, won’t affect the outcome if they vote for Obama, but they might send a small message if they vote for Barr. It probably depends on where the voter is. The other question is whether people are voting for Barr to protest the war or to protest something else. If they are protesting something else, voting for Obama makes no sense. The people who have to make this sort of choice are Barr voters in swing states. Conceivably, if there were enough of them, they could swing the vote one way or the other. Of course, there almost never are enough of them to make a difference, which makes the issue somewhat moot.
OK, I admit it’s a digression, but would you care to offer your explanation for your strange exit poll fact? Granted that we shouldn’t put overmuch credence in exit polls, I am still somewhat boggled.
My working hypothesis is that the low information McCain voters were responding to another “maverick”, i.e. that it’s an emotional response - they preceived/responded to both as own-truth-tellers and own-truth-followers, in notable contrast to certain other candidates.