After serving as the spoiler helping to elect a Democrat in one of the nation’s most closely watched US Senate races, one Libertarian group in Montana says they’re “already getting calls from people interested in the next election.”
First in the line of phone calls is likely to be anyone connected to vulnerable incumbent Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) who has seen his approval ratings drop ever since he took the lead on authoring Obamacare in the US Senate.
Perry Backus with The Ravalli Republic looks at the numbers showing the Libertarian candidate, Dan Cox, clearly had an impact on the outcome of the Rehberg-Tester US Senate race:
U.S. Senate Libertarian candidate Dan Cox will tell you that it was never his intention to be a spoiler in one of the most closely watched races in the nation.
But the nearly 30,000 votes Cox garnered in Tuesday’s general election were 10,000 more than the difference between Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester and his Republican challenger, U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg.
“These Libertarian candidates run as spoilers,” Deschamps (Chairman of the Montana Republican Party) said. “They don’t care to win. They know they can’t win. … Politics is a blood sport. You deal with what you get.”
Related: Politico says it is a time of “Reflection and Calibration for the GOP.”
The GOP not only lost virtually every competitive race hosted in a battleground state, it also fumbled away a pair of seats in reddening Montana and North Dakota.
In essence, moderate Democratic candidates had much more success in red states than moderate Republicans did in blue ones.
The remedy going forward, an array of Republican officials say, is to try to unite the party’s disparate groups to limit the number of bruising primaries their nominees must first endure.
Bryan
Monday, November 12, 2012 10:55 AM
When the Republican Party claims that it is the gate keeper to Liberty in Montana and then offers a candidate like Rehberg they might want to step back and look around. I like many other Montanans held my breathe and voted for Rehberg not because he was the candidate for liberty but because he was less evil than Tester. NEXT ELECTION I WILL VOTE FOR LIBERTY not the lessor of EVILS.