“Back in January, the Democrats announced that Denver would host their 2008 nominating convention, in a nod to the fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters who helped deliver 2006's Democratic victories in America's libertarian Mountain West — including a Senate seat in Montana, two House seats in Arizona, and one House seat in Colorado. But a little bit more than a month later, it looks like this may be all that Democrats plan to do to attract these voters to the party in 2008…This is a surprising oversight on the part of Democrats because, according to the libertarian Cato Institute, Democrats have made real gains in attracting the support of libertarian voters in recent years, partially as the result of good candidate-recruitment out West and partially because the Republican Party has done so much to trash its reputation for fiscal responsibility….Whereas the roughly 13% of the American electorate that could be described as libertarian supported George W. Bush over Al Gore by 72% to 20% percent in 2000, by 2004, Mr. Bush's margin among these voters had dropped to just 59% to 38% over Senator Kerry. More significantly, according to Cato, between the 2002 and 2006 mid-term elections, libertarian voters went from favoring Republicans over Democrats by a margin of 47 percentage points to favoring them by just 23 percentage points. In other words, Democrats are winning in part because they've been gaining ground with libertarians….”