The last couple cycles libertarians have been increasingly voting for Democrats instead of Republicans. That’s the significant trend, though I think it has a whole lot more to do with the GOP settling into DC than the Democrats cozying up to Wall St.

I shhould’ve left out the fringe electoral part of the above post, it was a funny afterthought, an embarrassing lapse of self control. There is no point in mocking the hopeless and irrelevant. It isn’t even funny. I will. Stop.

I think that this time, the libertarians just went Democrat instead of registering a protest vote. Libertarians have decided that party differences on social issues are far wider than differences on economic ones, and economic differences became impossible to discern in a Friedmanite (government spending not taxes) sense. So libertarians are going to settle with the Democrats for a good while.

Now that Wall St. seems to have a lot of sway over the D’s, I think the libertarians will find themselves surprisingly comfortable in the Democratic Party over the next few years.

Smither did have some legitimate support, which made his candidacy marginally interesting to traders. The Intrade market accurately reflected his lack of critical mass.

Re: Byrne, NY has had very idiosyncratic third-party rules in place since the Progressive era that allow candidates to run on multiple party lines. Buckley ran as both a Conservative and a Republican if memory serves, and the vote was split between a Liberal and a Democrat, so he nosed his way in between them.

And as for Smither, a lot of Republicans (particularly Erick of http://www.redstate.com) wanted Smither over Sekula-Gibbs. There was legitimate support for Smither at all levels, but it didn’t reach a critical mass.

You said: “This could involve setting up and running a non-profit exchange or paying Intrade to offer certain contracts, or variations between.”

But there are startup think tanks that are more or less one person operations plus support from networks like Atlas and the State Policy Network that would qualify. See the NYT on think tank startups last month.

I don’t see a party doing much with political futures — parties are organizations used to win elections, not to determine good policies, and I don’t think there’s a lot of election-winning expertise that a market can tap but a campaign manager can’t. I don’t think the LP is any good at winning elections (obviously), which is why I’m a Republican. But they really don’t deserve to be mocked for something they aren’t trying to accomplish in the first place.

The think-tank offer is noted. Do individuals count as think-tanks?