In 2010 and 2015, I did some data analysis to see which states had the most libertarians, based on Libertarian Party and Ron Paul election results. I’ve now done something similar for 2016.
Unfortunately, in 2016 we didn’t have a libertarianish Republican presidential candidate continue through every primary, and so we can’t use primary election results. However, Rand Paul did run for several months and collected campaign contributions, which we can use. In addition, we can use votes and campaign contributions for the Johnson-Weld campaign to try to see where the libertarians are.
The best way to do this would undoubtedly be to do issue surveys of enough voters in every state that we could estimate the percentage of voters in every state that take libertarian policy positions. But we just don’t have big enough sample sizes at the state level to do this right now. There are experimental, new methods that let us estimate issue positions at the state level with smaller sample sizes, but these methods are extremely time-intensive, and in any case we still don’t have consistent questions over time that would let us develop measures comparable over time.
There’s no one “right” way to do this, but here’s what I did – and all reasonable methods seem to yield similar results. I:
- took each state’s percentage of the vote for Johnson-Weld, campaign contributions to Johnson-Weld per capita, and campaign contributions to Rand Paul per capita;
- substituted national average values for home states (New Mexico and Massachusetts for Johnson-Weld, Kentucky for Paul);
- standardized the three variables to have the same mean and variance; and then
- averaged them together.
Substituting national average values for the home states seemed justified because these home states would otherwise be near the top of the rankings, even though none of these states seemed particularly libertarian in other elections when these candidates weren’t running. New Mexico was a below-average Libertarian state before Gary Johnson started running, Kentucky was a mediocre state for Ron Paul contributions in 2008 and 2012, and so on.
Without further ado, here is the ranking of states (and D.C.) by libertarians per capita in 2016, as best we can tell from these three measures:
| state | lp16_s | john_s | rand_s | libertarians16 |
| District of Columbia | -0.2273757 | 5.063998 | 5.91443 | 3.583684 |
| Wyoming | 1.34241 | 0.7520453 | 2.782263 | 1.625573 |
| Alaska | 1.92475 | 0.8954656 | 0.3591455 | 1.059787 |
| New Hampshire | 0.4562405 | 1.881349 | 0.7760671 | 1.037885 |
| Colorado | 1.33397 | 1.46498 | -0.1094947 | 0.8964849 |
| Nevada | -0.2358154 | 1.115038 | 1.282813 | 0.7206786 |
| Washington | 1.05546 | 1.029371 | -0.0169397 | 0.6892969 |
| Hawaii | 0.1017729 | 1.514048 | -0.1154285 | 0.5001307 |
| North Dakota | 2.211699 | -0.9076071 | -0.1790468 | 0.3750151 |
| Oklahoma | 1.815033 | -0.6429195 | -0.1350837 | 0.3456767 |
| Idaho | 0.4224817 | 0.1906986 | 0.2989358 | 0.3040387 |
| Montana | 1.679998 | -0.4868041 | -0.321723 | 0.2904903 |
| Arizona | 0.4056023 | 0.1295627 | 0.0997089 | 0.2116246 |
| South Dakota | 1.713757 | -0.8959171 | -0.3943799 | 0.1411533 |
| Maine | 1.258013 | -0.5925905 | -0.2984428 | 0.1223265 |
| Oregon | 0.9373039 | -0.3396169 | -0.2768817 | 0.1069351 |
| Virginia | -0.531205 | 0.7552064 | -0.0225921 | 0.0671364 |
| Connecticut | -0.5396447 | 0.9314943 | -0.1919439 | 0.0666352 |
| New Mexico | 0.1017729 | 0.1134186 | -0.081947 | 0.0444149 |
| Vermont | -0.3370917 | 0.315843 | 0.0580951 | 0.0122821 |
| Nebraska | 0.8529069 | -0.4625284 | -0.3718339 | 0.0061815 |
| Indiana | 1.0639 | -0.6398522 | -0.4644283 | -0.0134603 |
| California | -0.2020566 | 0.1975027 | -0.069957 | -0.024837 |
| Texas | -0.3708505 | 0.0970403 | 0.1393362 | -0.0448247 |
| Kansas | 0.8782258 | -0.57144 | -0.4413628 | -0.044859 |
| Minnesota | 0.2030493 | -0.1859483 | -0.2730781 | -0.0853257 |
| Massachusetts | 0.1017729 | 0.0265284 | -0.3852127 | -0.0856371 |
| Utah | -0.1176594 | -0.040376 | -0.111288 | -0.0897745 |
| Iowa | 0.1524111 | -0.5752427 | 0.1136567 | -0.1030583 |
| Illinois | 0.127092 | -0.2596285 | -0.2625065 | -0.131681 |
| Michigan | -0.0248227 | -0.3442523 | -0.0487973 | -0.1392908 |
| Missouri | -0.1345388 | -0.5485766 | -0.190781 | -0.2912988 |
| Maryland | -0.6240419 | 0.1328795 | -0.4675777 | -0.31958 |
| Georgia | -0.4805668 | -0.1231457 | -0.4113307 | -0.3383478 |
| Tennessee | -0.6662404 | -0.2489252 | -0.1508911 | -0.3553522 |
| Wisconsin | -0.016383 | -0.6375318 | -0.4363715 | -0.3634288 |
| Florida | -1.197942 | 0.0469722 | -0.0559043 | -0.4022913 |
| New York | -1.105105 | 0.1764863 | -0.3696713 | -0.4327633 |
| Kentucky | -0.6831198 | -0.6866438 | 0.0554005 | -0.438121 |
| North Carolina | -0.7253183 | -0.3510917 | -0.4069826 | -0.4944642 |
| Ohio | -0.3792903 | -0.6159415 | -0.5193276 | -0.5048531 |
| South Carolina | -1.062907 | -0.3300098 | -0.2762537 | -0.55639 |
| West Virginia | -0.3455315 | -0.9457347 | -0.4400242 | -0.5770968 |
| Pennsylvania | -1.029148 | -0.4462026 | -0.4482422 | -0.6411975 |
| Rhode Island | -0.3539712 | -0.8717933 | -0.7971447 | -0.6743031 |
| Arkansas | -0.8097153 | -0.6793436 | -0.6667849 | -0.7186146 |
| New Jersey | -1.468012 | -0.3178977 | -0.4170856 | -0.7343319 |
| Alabama | -1.273899 | -0.6585236 | -0.4357239 | -0.7893822 |
| Louisiana | -1.459573 | -0.6117339 | -0.3441515 | -0.8051527 |
| Delaware | -1.704324 | -0.7962323 | -0.2577564 | -0.9194376 |
| Mississippi | -2.033473 | -1.015875 | -0.2154772 | -1.088275 |
The “lp16_s” column is the standardized value of Johnson-Weld percentage of the vote, “john_s” is the standardized value of Johnson-Weld campaign donations per person, and “rand_s” is the standardized value of Rand Paul contributions per person. D.C. is the “state” with the most libertarians due to its huge campaign contributions to these two candidates, even though the Libertarian ticket did worse than average there in the actual election. Wyoming comes next. It looks pretty libertarian across the board but was especially supportive of Rand. Alaska is third; it was a great state for the Johnson-Weld ticket. New Hampshire came fourth and was above average on all three measures.
I also looked into the possibility that Johnson-Weld did worse in swing states because of tactical voting, but I could find no evidence for this hypothesis. States where the polls were close did not show lower third-party support, surprisingly.
These results are pretty similar to those from previous years, except that I hadn’t looked at D.C. before. It’s not surprising that D.C. would score so highly on campaign contributions, because lots of people there are really interested in politics. Maybe I should have used campaign contributions to each candidate as a share of all campaign contributions, rather than per capita, but I’m unpersuaded that this would be the right way to go. D.C. really may have lots of libertarians – who are nevertheless swamped by those of other ideologies. Wyoming does a lot better than in previous years, and Montana significantly worse. Alaska has always been near the top in these numbers. New Hampshire hasn’t separated itself from the pack despite the Free State Project. It was the best state other than D.C., New Mexico, and Massachusetts for Johnson-Weld campaign contributions, but it was only moderately above average for Johnson-Weld votes and Rand Paul campaign contributions.
PILEUS 
Well, in 2012, I voted Johnson, and in 2016, I voted Johnson and wrote a blog about why. Plus I mentioned “taking a third option” in a lot of election-story comment sections. how’s stuff like that figure into your numbers?
I do include votes for Johnson, so you helped boost your state’s number here! But the commenting and such wouldn’t add extra.
Will you be doing another analysis like this for 2020 election?