Reason published answers given by quasi-libetarian quasi-celebrities when asked how they voted in 2000 and how they intend to vote in 2004. Peter Mork crunched the numbers. Versus the 2000 distribution, Kerry wins big while Badnarik (the Libertarian Party’s sure loser for 2004) and Nader crater.
For fun I did a bit more completely unwarranted crunching. If the share of libertarianesque votes holds constant and is defined by votes for Browne (sure loser 2000) divided by the fraction of Reason’s quasi-lib-celebs who reported voting for Browne, we get close to 1% of total votes cast. Given the shift in intended votes reported by Reason and Mork and holding the total number of votes cast constant, voters similar to those Reason surveyed should increase Kerry’s margin over Bush by about 190,000 votes versus Gore’s performance.
Very messy spreadsheet: reason-votes-2004.sxc (requires OpenOffice)
[…] Add 190k libertarian votes to Kerry’s margin based unwarranted (as the post says) extrapolation from an informal survey of quasi-libertarian quasi-celebrities. I don’t know whether a greater percentage of libertarians voted for Kerry than Gore (and that might get into definitional questions concerning whether a supporter of the Iraq invasion could possibly be considered libertarian), but the calculations supporting the +190k margin in the spreadsheet linked to the post, even more strongly indicated that libertarian support for both Nader and the Libertarian Party nominee would plummet. Nader’s support did crater, but libertarians were probably a negligible part of that. However, Badnarik, the LP 2004 candidate, did about as poorly as Browne did in 2000. For the candidate/party the informal survey ought to have been the strongest indicator for, it completely failed; all other calculations based on that data considered refuted. […]