Some of you may be aware of the Free State Project—a program by some “big-ell” and “small-ell” libertarians, frustrated with failing to achieve critical mass on the national scene, to get a bunch of similarly-minded folks to move to a smallish state, and use that as a base to influence local and state politics (and eventually to expand outward from there).
The state chosen to “take over” was New Hampshire. The thought is that if Free State Project members can make up 1% of the population of the state, that will be enough to to influence local and state politics in a more libertarian direction.
Some of the folks participating in the Free State Project have fulfilled their pledge to move to New Hampshire. So, Jason Sorens has taken a look at how they might have influenced the primary.
The punchline of the long article:
The main result from the regression analysis is that every additional Free Stater per 100 Republican primary voters resulted in approximately 2.5 percentage points improvement in Ron Paul’s share of the vote in that town. Thus, in Grafton, Free Staters represented 4% of Republican primary voters (we don’t know that they all voted, or voted Republican, or even supported Ron Paul, of course), and the model predicts that if no Free Staters lived in Grafton, Ron Paul would have gotten 13% of the vote, instead of 23% (23-0.4*2.5). [...] What that means that we definitely know that Free Staters influenced the election beyond their own votes.