Below The Beltway

Did Bob Barr cost John McCain the Tarheel State’s 15 Electoral votes ?

It appears that the answer may be yes:

It’s about to be official: Barack Obama carried North Carolina in a squeaker.

With all the provisional votes counted, the president-elect broadened his narrow lead over Republican John McCain.

Obama carried the state with 49.7 percent to McCain’s 49.38, a difference of 14,192 votes, according to the final count by the State Board of Elections staff. Before the provisional votes were counted, Obama led by 13,746.

The vote won’t become final until the State Board of Elections meets Tuesday in Raleigh.

Obama got 2,142,649 votes to McCain’s 2,128,457, including the provisional ballots. Libertarian Bob Barr won 25,722, and there were 13,942 write-in votes.

(…)

Barr was a spoiler in North Carolina after all.

Though the Libertarian presidential candidate made only token appearances in the state and received a minuscule number of votes in November, he still got more votes than the margin of difference between Obama and McCain.

Barr’s 25,722 votes were more than one-and-a-half times the 14,192 margin that made Obama the winner of the state. Put another way, Barr had about 0.6 percent of the vote, while the margin was about 0.3 percent.

That puts Barr into elite company in North Carolina: Only five third-party presidential candidates earned enough votes to affect the outcome in North Carolina since 1908.

They are: George Wallace in 1968, Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Ross Perot in 1992 and in 1996 and John Anderson in 1980. (Technically, Roosevelt did not earn more than the margin of Woodrow Wilson’s win, but he came in second, so we count him.)

The number of write-in votes was close enough to the margin this year to almost qualify.

Of course, claims like this are always difficult to prove, because it would essentially require assuming that at least 55% (14,193) of the 25,722 people who voted for Barr would have voted for McCain instead had Barr not been on the ballot.

Quite honestly, there’s no reason to believe that this is the case. More likely than not, people who were inclined to vote for Barr to begin with had already given up on both of the major party candidates and, if they were generally Republican leaning voters, then they’d given up on McCain. It’s more likely that they would have voted for another third-party candidate, or not voted for President at all.

H/T: Independent Political Report