We don’t yet know the final outcome of last night’s election, but there are hints that we may be facing a divided government. The stock market is up strongly, perhaps anticipating that if Biden wins he will not be able to enact a “big government agenda”.
We do know the outcome of many other referenda, and there seem to be lots of wins for libertarian-leaning voters. John Cochrane has a post expressing satisfaction with the outcomes of a number of propositions in California, where voters defeated rent control and affirmative action, and approved a measure exempting ride-sharing employees from burdensome regulations. Uber and Lyft drivers will be able to continue operating as independent contractors.
Elsewhere, pot was legalized in New Jersey, Arizona, Montana and even in highly conservative South Dakota. The national trend seems unstoppable. What’s holding up New York?
Possession of all drugs was decriminalized in Oregon, and psychedelic mushrooms were decriminalized in Washington DC. Illinois voters seem to have rejected a progressive income tax. [Update: Possession of small amounts of all drugs in Oregon.]
More speculatively, there is some indication that the “socialist” label (fair or not) has little appeal to many minority voters.
To be sure, there were a few losses for libertarians, such as Florida raising its minimum wage. But overall, a very good night for libertarians. Please add races I missed in the comment section.
READER COMMENTS
Corey
Nov 4 2020 at 2:35pm
I think the defeat of MA question 2 is a disappointing loss for libertarians in Massachusetts. Ranked choice voting could have given those of us with heterodox political opinions a way of expressing them without feeling like you were “throwing your vote away”
Garrett
Nov 4 2020 at 3:42pm
Looks like it lost 55/45. Proponents could take that as constructive and spend the next 2-4 years educating people on the benefits and try again.
Mark Brophy
Nov 4 2020 at 11:31pm
Ranked choice lost in Alaska, too. Maybe they should try New Hampshire, Vermont, and Minnesota.
robc
Nov 5 2020 at 10:50am
Or Nebraska, who like Maine adopted the district electoral votes. So NE can follow ME into rank choice also.
That is why NH is a good choice for it, as they are neighbors — let it spread organically. Of course, if the LP in NH makes inroads due to it (they have elected state house members in the past under current system), that will stop it from spreading too far.
Matthias
Nov 5 2020 at 8:01pm
Australia has some kind of voting where you have to rank your choices. Doesn’t make their political system less of a two party one.
Don Dale
Nov 4 2020 at 2:56pm
In Illinois there was a referendum on an amendment to the state constitution. Currently, the state constitution mandates a flat tax — the same rate at all income levels. The governor led an effort to amend the constitution to allow the legislature to enact a progressive tax system. Naturally, this was called the Fair Tax and heavily promoted. It needed 60% to pass, and got 45%.
Rajat
Nov 4 2020 at 3:30pm
I agree – it’s unlikely the Democrats will be able to get any major new legislation through the Senate. In the recent past you’ve downplayed the likelihood of a significant legislative attach on the big tech companies. After last month’s House Judiciary Committee report on digital markets, I wanted to ask you if you still felt the same way. But Republicans didn’t sign on to most of the solutions, so it seems unlikely we will see major new regulation or break-ups.
IronSig
Nov 4 2020 at 4:23pm
As long as they play-act enough antagonism, you could have Ted Cruz, Elizabeth Warren, Josh Hawley and Bernie Sanders going in on some kind of Tech Regulation. Can Warren and Cruz sufficiently disguise new barriers to entry enough to make both Facebook shareholders and their donors happy?
MarkW
Nov 4 2020 at 4:07pm
What’s holding up New York?
The struggle over how to divvy up the spoils?
Yes it was a good night. A president with a razor-thin victory and no mandate or majority in Congress. If Biden wins (as looks likely), make that a tired, uninspiring, confused old man with no mandate and no majority in Congress. The results in California were, indeed, a welcome and unexpected surprise, and I do love all of the drug legalization. It was even to see the Antifa candidate lose in Portland, and I have some relatives who’ll be happy about the loss of the progressive income tax proposal in IL too. The end of Trump but no ‘blue wave’? Just about right.
IronSig
Nov 4 2020 at 4:20pm
Under old circumstances, an incoming House & White House of one party could negotiate with the rival-held Senate to pass a grubby cross-partisan “Infrastructure Bill.” There’d be a list of shovel-ready projects that’d have the MMT-Job Guarantee Left telling themselves that they’ve got a foot in the intellectual door.
If Trump remained with a Democrat majority in the House and an under-60 Democratic majority in the Senate, I figured that there’d be three non-exclusive gists to legislative action.
Infrastructure and other rent-seeking projects (Not-so Strange Bedfellows)
Impeachment of officers all the way to the President (Too Picky to be Bedfellows)
Veto-proof overhaul of delegated power (Bedfellows Under the Sanctity of Article One)
A divided Congress won’t pursue any of these projects. Any majority in the near-future will be so surprised at their own success and so fearful of their own unstable majority that no amount of leadership
So will that political capital get used up, almost by automation, in another COVID bail-out? Will the process be constipated enough that the Republican Senate puts out for a State Pensions bail-out or resurrected SALT deductions in return for some greasy protectionism blessed by Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell? Or will it be a massive shut-down struggle to pass any and all Continuing Budget Resolution until July 2022?
I don’t want to make any bets yet.
IronSig
Nov 6 2020 at 9:48am
James Copland at the Manhattan Institute proposes that if my 3rd option of Divided Government & Divided Congress (and band-aid Continuing Budget Resolutions until the 2022 run-up) is correct, the real winner of this election is the auto-pilot of bureaucracies.
I wonder by “new antifederalists” he means outfits like the Pacific Legal Foundation, Mountain States Legal Foundation and the Goldwater Institute.
https://www.city-journal.org/real-election-winner-might-be-administrative-state
Nicholas Weininger
Nov 4 2020 at 4:23pm
Short term, I agree that libertarians had a good night. I was as surprised and pleased as John Cochrane at the proposition results from CA.
Long term, one major risk is that without a Senate majority Biden will be unable to pass voting rights reform, and that will further undermine liberal institutions by giving the GOP further incentive to suppress even more votes to preserve its power despite becoming even more unpopular.
This is bad because in the long term, individual liberty is highly and not coincidentally correlated with the ability of a majority which dislikes the current officeholders to vote them out. This doesn’t mean pure democracy– there are a lot of reasonable pro-liberty restraints on democracy, such as those that impose supermajority requirements for large changes, provide for judicial review, and/or stagger terms of legislators to reduce the impact of any one election (Garett Jones catalogs these as well as anyone in _10% Less Democracy_). But letting incumbent politicians decide to make voting much harder for some people than others, or make some people’s votes count less than others, has no pro-liberty upside I can see and lots of historically important downside, especially for ethnic minorities whose votes get disproportionately suppressed. And while both parties have practiced voter suppression at times, it’s currently mostly a GOP thing because they know they are persistently unpopular with a majority of the electorate.
Fred_in_PA
Nov 5 2020 at 1:03pm
Nicholas Weininger;
If the GOP was engaged in voter suppression, they don’t seem to have been very good at it. I suspect that, like the frequent and casual accusation of being racist, this is just a knee-jerk (and carelessly fact-free) accusation used by the left to beat up anyone they don’t like.
If there was voter suppression I suspect it was subtle, and applied against Republicans. Out of a foolish devotion to being ornery, a lot of old white guys got themselves locked into having to vote in person — which is risky for them in an era of Covid. And, on cue, the mainstream media and Democratic politicians went into overdrive about how the virus’s second wave was going to kill us all! “Better to stay home, old guy.”
It will be interesting to see if Trump was right, and the virus — or at least the panic about it — will just “magically” go away, now that the scare has served its intended purpose. (Then again, maybe not. There are other areas where the Left still feels the need to herd the rest of us into lockstep, belligerent conformity, and the panic can still be useful for stampedeing the rest of us lemmings.)
You speak of voting rights reform legislation: What, specifically, did you have in mind?
Russ Abbott
Nov 4 2020 at 4:33pm
Three cheers for the elimination of drug laws. But three boos for the defeat of Prop 22 in California and for more progressive taxation. In those cases, it looks like money bought what it wanted. That’s not libertarian; that’s oligarchy.
MarkW
Nov 4 2020 at 5:20pm
In those cases, it looks like money bought what it wanted. That’s not libertarian; that’s oligarchy.
Nah. Remember, Amazon couldn’t even swing a city council election in Seattle by spending a bunch of money (nor were Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton able to defeat Trump in 2016 despite each having much more money to spend). And how much did Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer spend getting no votes in Democratic primaries? The power of spending in election campaigns is vastly overrated.
And not having the state force everybody into an employer-employee relationship definitely a victory (though it would have been much better if the whole terrible law was overturned rather than adding yet one more carveout for a favored industry)
Scott Sumner
Nov 4 2020 at 6:06pm
One of the stories of this election is that huge sums spent in certain key senate races seemed to have no discernible impact.
robc
Nov 5 2020 at 10:52am
I have been joking that Jaime Harrison spent 3 times the world GDP in order to lose to Lindsey Graham by 11 pts.
That is a slight exaggeration. He lost by 10.5%.
Mark Z
Nov 4 2020 at 7:55pm
So… Obama’s victory over Romney was a win for oligarchy? It should be obvious, but just because a winning side raised more money doesn’t mean it “bought” the win. Popular policies tend to get more financial supporters.
For a counterexample, look at California Prop 22: “Yes” received over an order of magnitude more money than “No” – mostly from ultra-rich people and big corporations – and yet lost by a wide margin. Which side was the oligarchy on there?
Mark Z
Nov 4 2020 at 7:56pm
*meant prop 16, not prop 22. This is why they should be given names instead of numbers.
Steve
Nov 4 2020 at 4:53pm
Colorado pluses
reduced state income tax (barely, from 4.63% to 4.55%)
increased tax on vaping products (maybe not Libertarian but I’m all for it)
defeated measure prohibiting abortions after 22 weeks
eliminated property tax rule that required revenues to be split 45/55 between residential and commercial property (weird, arbitrary rule that has just benefitted homeowners while ratcheting up taxes on businesses)
kicked out hypocritical Republican Senator who delayed Obama’s supreme court nomination but completely reversed course and voted for Barrett
Colorado Minuses
approved the creation of a paid family/medical leave system, with a new payroll tax that will almost certainly need to be raised again and again over time to pay for it
Overall happy, but that last ballot measure feels a little “California” to me
Scott Sumner
Nov 4 2020 at 6:08pm
Colorado is trending a bit toward California politics, partly due to migration.
robc
Nov 5 2020 at 10:55am
I almost moved to Colorado last year and have considered it for the future, but the continued Californication* may take it off the table.
*reference to the good song, not the bad tv show.
Walter Boggs
Nov 5 2020 at 1:45pm
We Coloradoans tried building a wall to keep the CA expats out, but they wanted us to pay for it.
Thomas Hutcheson
Nov 4 2020 at 5:54pm
I’d call the californi result “neo-liberal,” the disappointment being the making property tax breaks heriditary in California.
Brandon Berg
Nov 4 2020 at 9:21pm
Regarding the Oregon proposition, I have a concern about decriminalization of possession of small amounts of drugs that I don’t think I’ve ever seen discussed elsewhere. Many of the problems associated with drug prohibition stem from the fact that it’s illegal to produce and sell drugs. As a result, the supply chain is controlled by criminals, with a great deal of associated violent crime. We saw the same thing with alcohol prohibition, so this is probably causal.
Decriminalization of possession for personal use without legalizing the production and sale of drugs not only does nothing to address this problem, but in theory could exacerbate the associated crime problems by increasing the demand for illegal drugs.
BC
Nov 4 2020 at 11:31pm
The election of a Biden-McConnell government seems most of all like a return to pre-Twitter normalcy. The big losers are the Twitter warriors: the woke/socialists on the left and the conspiracy mongering populists on the right. Twitter Left first wanted Warren or Sanders, then thought they could settle for a “blue wave” that would leave Biden with no choice but to abolish the filibuster, pack the court, enact the Green New Deal, etc. Twitter Right, obviously, will lose when/if Trump loses. Whatever one thinks of Biden and McConnell, these are not guys that want to fight culture war over social media.
Might this be the end, at least temporarily, of Flight 93 politics? Biden and McConnell both prefer process and institutions over “crisis” mentality. Return to institutional normalcy seems favorable for libertarians as institutions limit the pace of government activism, if only through institutions’ slow bureaucracy.
Comments are closed.