7 Libertarian Upstarts Who Might Help Democrats Keep Their U.S. Senate Majority

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http://www.alternet.org/election-2014/7-libertarian-upstarts-who-might-help-democrats-keep-their-us-senate-majority

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1. North Carolina’s Sean Haugh. Is he really a pizza delivery man running a campaign based entirely on YouTube videos? He seems to be exactly that, drinking a different craft beer as he delivers his folksy bromides from a basement bar stool. The WaPo said that he has raised $4,000, a fraction of one bitcoin, and recent polls give Haugh 8-to-11 percent of the vote. That showing boosts prospects for the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Kay Hagan, against her GOP rival, North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis.

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2. Montana’s Roger Roots. Now that we’ve had some fun, it’s time to be scared. In the late 1990s, Roots sued Montana Human Rights Watch for libel because they said that he was an organizer for the Klu Klux Klan in Billings. An appeals court threw out Roots’ lawsuit, but not without citing even more alarming facts about his background in a lower court’s ruling:

“[He] authored a publication entitled Whites and Blacks 100 Facts (and One Lie), which is advertised for sale nationally. The publication lists “facts” about African-Americans, such as: blacks have low I.Q.’s due to small foreheads; they have never invented anything; and they are more likely to have syphilis than whites. [Roots] is a columnist in the Jubilee, wherein one of his columns states that the Holocaust was a hoax.”

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3. West Virginia’s John Buckley. Compared to the Wild West, the Libertarian running in West Virginia is almost sane. John Buckley is an ex-state legislator from Virginia and has worked for a gamut of right-wing think tanks: American Conservative Union, Cato Institute, and George Mason University’s Law and Economics Center. The WaPo noted that he once made Rolling Stone’s cover, holding a Ronald Reagan bumper sticker.

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4. Virginia’s Robert Sarvis. Sarvis, in contrast, is probably the kind of Libertarian you would let your sister date. He’s a successful entrepreneur who believes in the free market but doesn’t go off on paranoid tangents like his partisan brethren. Of course, his reply to Obamacare is to give all the power back to insurers and hospitals, as he told Reason.com. But Sarvis sounds even-tempered, which contributed to his receiving 6.5 percent of the vote in 2013’s Virginia gubernatorial race. He’s now running against ex-RNC chairman Ed Gillespie, a quintessential party insider, and incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, an ex-governor. The WaPo says that Sarvis gets about 6 percent in current polls, including 11 percent from those very important independent voters. Their analysts said that he won’t be a "spoiler" for Gillespie, which, of course, means that the Republican establishment is worried.