Reason's Hit and Run has a discussion about libertarians aligning with the left. This topic comes up from time to time on most libertarian blogs. As always, it draws out from the dark shadows many so-called libertarians that really get on my nerves. I find most right-libertarians to be uninformed in both their understanding of where the political parties actually stand and what it actually means to be a libertarian. Advocates of tort reform and caps on damages, as if libertarians are opposed to a trial by jury, are particular heinous to me.

You can check out my reply to the post, but I wanted to highlight some numbers worth thinking about.

Votes Received John Kerry in 2004 Primary: 9,869,140
Votes Received John Edwards in 2004 Primary: 3,134,554
Votes Received Howard Dean in 2004 Primary: 894,222
Votes Received Dennis Kucinich in 2004 Primary: 617,231
Votes Received Wesley Clark in 2004 Primary: 535,533
Votes Received by Michael Badnarik in 2004 General: 397,157
Votes Received Joe Lieberman in 2004 Primary: 385,027
Votes Received Al Sharpton in 2004 Primary: 279,655
Votes Received Carol Mosley-Braun in 2004 Primary: 103,204
Votes Received Dick Gephardt in 2004 Primary: 62,951

Aside from Al Sharpton and Wesley Clark, all Democratic Presidential candidates had some level of high political office, either Congress or being a Governor. I can't help but wonder how someone with at least some degree of credibility, perhaps Aaron Russo, had ran in the Democratic Party. I suspect that he could have managed to at least force his way into the debates. And who knows what would have happened from there?

Thomas Knapp has some suggestions for the Libertarian Party going into the 2008 election. In particular he, he highlights the importance of having a candidate that is "someone plausibly ready, willing and able to do the job" and "who "educates the voters" -- to the extent that he or she does so -- on the fact that the Libertarian Party agrees with them on the issues they care about."

Similarly, imagine a libertarian running in the Democratic Party. He (or she) should be a plausible candidate, but when you're running alongside Al Sharpton the idea of plausibility is stretched. Through the debates and the media attention you will be assured a level of access to voters that Badnarik was never able to receive as a third party candidate. The issues the candidate focuses on should be actual issues that people are concerned about, not trying to convert people to issues they aren't focusing on (abolition the Federal Reserve, for example). Aaron Russo could easily have campaigned on the War in Iraq and the Patriot Act in the Democratic Primary. He could also have been the only candidate to offer up an agenda that focused on cutting the deficit without repealing the Bush Tax Cuts. He wouldn't have won, but certainly he could have made a showing as strong as some of the other candidates, yes?

Here's some additional numbers from 2004. The Badnarik campaign didn't focus on New Hampshire, in fact they weren't even on the ballot, so it's hard to determine how many potential libertarian activists there are in the Granite State that could vote in the primary. Certainly the Free State Project is expanding the number. But in New Mexico, a state I recall Badnarik targeting, he received 2,382 votes, which would have given him close to 5% in the 2004 Democratic caucus. Next door in Arizona, which had a primary at the same time New Mexico had a caucus and was also a focus of the Badnarik campaign, Badnarik received 11,856 votes, which would have also put him around 5% in the Democratic Primary.

I'm not trying to make the case that a libertarian could win the Presidential primary of a major party, but that at the very least they'd receive more attention and be able to build a larger libertarian movement. The game plan for the future should be to elect a libertarian affiliated with one of the two major parties to Congress, a House seat would do it, and use that as a spring board to run for the Presidential nomination of a major party. Why can't we have a libertarian version of Kucinich in 2012?