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Comment by backprojection | Hacker News Reader

I live in Texas, and I voted for Johnson. If I lived in Ohio I would have voted for Obama. It's hard to find numbers at the moment, but it looks like Johnsons's pulling 5%.

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Nationally as a popular vote thing, plenty of people who voted Johnson might have voted for either Romney or Obama in their "safe" state otherwise. I live in Obamaland, support Johnson, but would not have voted for Obama if I hadn't voted for Johnson. So you can't just add 100% of Johnson to Obama.

As of 3:03 am Johnson has 1% of the popular vote with just over 1M votes.

http://google.com/elections

I will never understand anyone who votes for the Libertarian candidate and then says their other choice was the far more progressive option.

Is it because both are the contrarian play to something else?

Are you confused because you believe that libertarians are on the right, maybe? If you examine libertarian positions, you might be surprised to find many of them "left" of Obama.

Socially, yes they are "left" of Obama. Where they differ on all positions is the roll of the government to remedy social and financial problems.

There are some issues which aren't fiscal (directly) but aren't really social policy (directly), where Libertarians are the farthest "left" (or right, or whatever) of the two big parties, and where people may vote based on morality.

GTFO Afghanistan ASAP (and their overall isolationist position) is one of the big ones. I could see someone who was pro-state intervention in domestic life, pro big taxes, etc. still voting Libertarian if he thought GTFO Afghanistan ASAP was the most important issue.

It's basically impossible to put US politics (or anywhere, really) on a strict left/right linear chart.

For people who social issues trump economic, Obama is far closer than Romney.

If you see the government as a solution to social issues I do not think you would vote Libertarian.

Drug liberalization, abortion, prostitution, gay marriage, are all far closer to the left when compared to the libertarians than the right.

For the record, Johnson is only pulling 1.1% in Texas and 1% nationwide. http://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results

And the only state he came close to costing Romney was Florida. But even so, he would have lost it by over 3000 votes if all Johnson supporters voted for Romney.

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