Democrats and Republicans must be quaking in their boots, huh?
Though the Indiana Libertarian Party has not landed a candidate for the 2012 governor's campaign, it has identified an opening to influence the race.
On social issues, the major parties' leading candidates Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Pence and Democratic former Indiana House Speaker John Gregg take conservative stances. So the Libertarian candidate could be the only one who offers a significantly different position on issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
[. . .]
Typically, Libertarian gains in elections hurt the Republican Party — but with Gregg's conservative stance on social issues, the Libertarian candidate may pick up some voters that would normally align with a Democrat.
In the 2008 race, Libertarian candidate Andy Horning got 2.1 percent of the vote, which is practically a third-palandside by historic standards. With a strategy capitalizing on the two major-party candidates being social conservatives, gosh, they should be able to surge all the way to a whopping 2.3 or 2.4 percent.
Libertarians get more votes every election, and the party now has 157 local elected officials nationwide. But they have zero at the state or federal levels of government, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. What the candidates can do even if they have no hope of winning, the linked Indiana story otes, is drive the debates in a direction the other candidates might not like.
Third-party candidates can influence the subjects discussed in a campaign and make other candidates take up topics they don't necessarily want to address. In some cases, too, there can be an impact on the vote totals," said Robert Schmuhl, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame.
