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October 26, 2004
Libertarians Of All Varieties
Last week when I calculated the percent going to each candidate from a Reason poll of prominent libertarians, I was surprised by Nader's relatively strong showing in 2000. While he is a great spokesman against corporate welfare, he is also the biggest proponent of regulating those same corporations. Not a quality I associate with a party of limited government.
In the same vein, when Lawrence N. Allen described his politics on the front page of the WSJ this morning as "to the left of the standard Democratic candidate", thoughts of nationalized health care, higher taxes and protectionism start flying through my head. For this reason his vote in 2000 was an initial surprise:
To prepare for next week's election, Lawrence N. Allen taught himself the Matlab statistical programming language and built a database of 1,700 state polls pulled off the Internet. His program runs a "likelihood analysis" on 15 closely contested battleground states. It takes 50 minutes to run on an old computer he got in return for a bunch of parts from a broken laptop.
The unemployed computer programmer in Oakland, Calif., identifies his politics as "to the left of standard Democratic candidates" and says he flirted with voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 before opting for libertarian Harry Browne. His calculations, made on Oct. 20, give Mr. Bush a 78.1% chance of victory.
Posted by Peter Mork at October 26, 2004 8:06 AM
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