Can Barr Matter?

I would like to think that Barr’s candidacy will help Democrats in the fall. I’ve been pretty skeptical, even if we assume that Barr can attract more support that the typical Libertarian candidate. The biggest reason is that one would assume a serious Libertarian to cross-cut existing political cleavages in the way that Nader didn’t. The GOP is better on some Libertarian issues but worse on others, and while in practice a strong majority of Libertarian voters seem to be of the “Republicans who want to smoke pot” faction as the Libertarian vote expands I don’t think one can assume that they’re just taking votes from Republicans.

In this case, however, there’s a possibility that a somewhat increased Libertarian vote could help the Democrats, because given his prior history Barr is likely to have a lot more appeal to conservatives disillusioned with Bush than left-libertarians. And perhaps he can provide an outlet to libertarians (for obvious reasons) really, really hate McCain but are reluctant to vote for a Democrat. Still, overall I think Atrios is probably right that Barr can only have an impact in a race that Obama is already poised to win comfortably; my guess is that most strongly anti-McCain Libs will vote for Obama anyway, and it’s a pretty small faction.

As some people have pointed out, the biggest impact Barr might have is putting Georgia in play. I very much doubt that Obama could win it, but if he can even force McCain to waste scarce resources there it would be helpful. If you want to be a real optimist, you can remember that Clinton narrowly won and narrowly lost Georgia in three-way races in 1992 and 1996. I wouldn’t read much into that — it’s a different climate, Barr won’t be as popular as Perot was in 1992, and ’96 just reinforces Duncan’s point — but it’s not unreasonable to think that Barr might give McCain a fire or two to point out in Georgia and/or a couple western states when he doesn’t really have the money to spare. Not a major impact, but it can’t hurt.