Because it’s starting to look like that might happen:
Subtract the results of the Second Congressional District, and it is possible that the votes for Libertarian and no party candidates in all of the other U.S. House contests will exceed those cast for Democrats across the rest of Louisiana, belying the notion that state Democrats are anywhere near a sustained and successful rebuilding effort.
The final qualifying statistics registered Republicans having one or more candidates in all six districts, in five of which they are favored overwhelmingly, Libertarians contesting all but the First, and Democrats competing in just three, and in the Second their Rep. Cedric Richmond is the heavy reelection favorite.
Obviously, you need two viable parties for a stable democratic government; equally obviously, the Democrats in Louisiana are having real trouble maintaining one. Let the Libertarians have their shot, says I; they’ll have to caucus with us in Congress anyway*.
Moe Lane
*The opposite of a liberal is not a conservative; it’s a libertarian. Libertarians just think that we’re spineless trimmers; and they know blessed well who their REAL enemies are.
I tend to think we’re going to be seeing alot more of this after the O’Bama years.
Must be all those pot-smoking jazz players…
Mew
Yeah, well, in California it might end up the Democrats and the Greens. The Republicans here are pretty ineffectual.
I can only hope that the Democrats go away – IF they were truly honest, they’d name themselves what they are: Socialists or Communists. I see enough of them wearing hammer and sickle shirts, Che’ shirts, and calling openly for Obama to be given dictatorial powers.
The majority of Republicans appear to be becoming big government corruptocrats much like the Democrats used to be. So perhaps they should rename themselves ‘Democrats’.
Orion
No opposition in the 1st because Scalise is very popular, and seems to be doing a good job. Tea Party friendly. The Dems only contender is Richmond in the 2nd. Seriously, Democrats? The best guy you can find in the entire state is Cedric Richmond? Bwahahahaha!!!
I, too greatly look forward to this happening, and in fact think the republican party should encourage it in some way. If libertarians don’t get a foothold now, then the pendulum will swing back to the democrats’ side again eventually.
Good. Somebody has to keep us honest and call some of our fellows out on their paleo-statist tendencies.
Lord knows that the Democrats haven’t the moral courage to do this.
May California lose its vaunted status as the harbinger of America’s future in favor of Louisiana. Otherwise we’re doomed!
The Democrat party in Louisiana only exists because of the AA voting block. They are out of ideas and lately out of candidates. Their only statewide office holder is Senator Mary Landrieu (Senator for Life) as she’s right on all the right issues when it gets closer to election time.
I’d tell the Republicans, “don’t get too cocky” because we are not all that enamored with you either. Specially Big Government Republicans like Little Bobby Jindal.
*winces*
There, fixed that for you. I’ll teach you sooner or later that we live in a Republic and NOT a Democracy. That is why we are Republicans, because we believe in the Rule
of Law over the Rule Of Men.
We live in a democratic republic. You are splitting hairs a bit too finely there.
The third party/GOP trend of taking the majority of votes cast started when Jesse Ventura became governor of MN. (MN has since gone insane, but I digress)
Ventura and the GOP candidate (I don’t remember who it was) between them polled something like 65 percent of the votes, causing the DFL chair of MN to comment that the DFL “needed to change the way it does business.” (DFL=Democrat Farm Labor)
With the way the last couple of elections have gone in MN, I suspect cheating was the “change in the way they do business” chosen by Democrats
The founders designed a representative republic. Efforts to move us toward pure democracy are at the root of most of our ills.
Well, the MN Democrats have been making a real comeback among voters who leave their ballots in car trunks to be used later if needed. Its a surprisingly important voting bloc…
Peter – Constitutional Republic… Democracy is more like mobocracy.
werewife – harbingers can be good *and* bad … and we certainly appear to be nationally boned.
Mew
Keep in mind though, that a really strong libertarian party might draw from repubs too. I know lots of libertarian leaning repubs who dont like the hold the socons have on the repub party, and only vote repub for economic reasons, and because the libertarian party they realy favor cant win. If the libertarians got strong enough, we ight end up with a 3 party system, with the repubs mostly being socons and neocon strong defense types, and the dems being nothing but socialist big gov types, with a libertarian party that can form a cooalition with either of them, depending on the issue.
If that hap;pened, I’m not sure how you would select leadership in congress, since no party would have a majority. I suppose the ony way it could work would be for the libertarians to caucus with either repubs or dems (most likely repubs, unless the dems were willing to compromise a lot on economics in their leadership, perhaps by going to more moderate clinton-like dems), in exchange for geting their share of leadership positions.
You really don’t need two viable parties for a stable democratic government. At least not at the state level. We went over 100 years with one viable party, there can be factions within one party that create a stable democracy. The fact more Libertarians are running than Democrats is rather meaningless, as they are candidates with no real chance to win, qualifiying to run is more a measure of common sense in cases like this than political viability of a political party.
There’s a fair number of would be Dems who are turned off by the Dem worship of Moloch Childburner and other social immoralities that such a turn would boost the R’s.
And lets be clear socon=conservative.
I like a R-L two party system, and have been saying something like this was possible for years. One side effect is the extreme nutbar of the Left go violent, and we end up with an internal terrorism issue (and the Left makes alliance with Islamics also).
One likely effect of this R-L party is the end of abortion (as honest and rational libertarians would have to be against it), and probably the end/severe mitigation of the War on Drugs. The end of the WoD necessitates the end of celebutard worship as people put extra effort into making sure their kids don’t blow their lives, which means no more respect for Hollywood (other things also work together to doom Hollywood.)
Such a R-L would be good as it would force the R to get rid of their corruption, and well, it would be good for the libertarians as they got their clocks cleaned in arguement by principled conservatives. I can about guarantee a lot of really shocked libertarians as the conservatives start taking them seriously, and then the conservatives dismantle the libertarians arguements with facility and speed.
The end result of that is going to be some form of New Libertarianism which will be more mature and thoughtful than the current brand.
Or we could simply continue with the Dems saying ‘lets drive off the cliff at a hundred mph while smoking crack’ and the Reps saying ‘let’s drive off the cliff at fifty miles per hour while pretending to be serious’.
And Werewife, I’m pretty sure that the next fifty years are the years when Texas leads the nation. For a while, we had NY, then the Golden State, and now….Texas.
This will be good for Louisiana as long as ya’ll don’t try to cross swords with TX. And I think it will be good for my own Tennessee, although less affected.
There’s going to be a lot of cowboy movies made over the next decades.