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The Rove Realignment
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan — ... It will be Karl Rove's historic legacy: creating a permanent majority for the Democrats and a vast expansion of the power of govenment. But we should not forget his other legacy: pushing every last libertarian out of the GOP. ...

The Door Did Miss My Ass on the Way Out
Vodkapundit — Ryan Sager : Two years ago, I wrote a book imploring the Republican Party not to follow its worst elements off a cliff—not to evolve, in short, into an insular party with little-to-no appeal outside of the rural, the southern, the Evangelical. As the McCain campaign flames out in a ball of Rovian disgrace, scorching the center in an attempt to fire up the base, it’s difficult to reach any other conclusion than that the battle for the soul of the Republican Party has been lost. A party can ignore an important segment of swing voters for only so long — four-to-eight-years in the ...

Why are Libertarians Leaving the Republican Party? Because of Disingenuous Libertarians Like Ryan Sager
The Sundries Shack — Ryan Sager of the Libertarian site Reason Online asks if Libertarians are being “driven” out of the Republican party. I say, being a Libertarian conservative myself, that’s hogwash. But Sager does have some numbers that show Libertarians less likely to vote for John McCain than they voted for George Bush in 2000. Those same number also showed that Libertarians ran toward John Kerry in 2004, which strikes me as a protest vote unless you beleive that Libertarians suddenly grew fond of higher taxes, more government intrusion into our personal lives, a larger overall nanny state - ...

Libertarian Voters:
The Volokh Conspiracy — Interesting article by Ryan Sager on Reason about the libertarian vote: The Cato Institute has done excellent work over the last few years tracking the shift in the libertarian vote—the roughly 10 percent to 15 percent of the American public that can be categorized as fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Based on an analysis of the American National Election Studies, Cato found that between 2000 and 2004, there was a substantial flight of libertarians away from the Republican Party and toward the Democrats. While libertarians preferred Bush by a margin of 52 points over ...

alicublog — "I DON'T THINK ANYTHING I'VE EVER DONE IS WRONG." Ryan Sager is pretty unequivocal about the libertarian part of the conservative coalition: Two years ago, I wrote a book imploring the Republican Party not to follow its worst elements off a cliff -- not to evolve, in short, into an insular party with little-to-no appeal outside of the rural, the southern, the Evangelical. As the McCain campaign flames out in a ball of Rovian disgrace, scorching the center in an attempt to fire up the base, it's difficult to reach any other conclusion than ...