Okay, I am not on hiatus yet, and Sullivan offers such an easy, fun target: 

It was much more significant in the 2006 elections than the white evangelical vote. In 2006, a full 36 percent of self-described libertarians voted Democrat – easily the biggest share of that vote that the Dems have had in recent times. ~Andrew Sullivan

This has already been talked to death, but here it is one more time: in 2004, these libertarian voters supported the Dems 44-53 in House races and 43-54 in Senate races.  That means that 2004 was the peak of libertarian support for Democratic candidates in Congress.  Both of these results for the Dems are much higher than in 2002 and 2000, but they are also a little higher than in 2006.  So 36% is obviously not the biggest share of the libertarian vote the Dems have had “in recent times,” unless Sullivan defines “in recent times” to be “after the 2004 elections.” 

I also don’t know how he can determine that the libertarian vote is more significant than the white evangelical vote, since there are obviously fewer libertarians, even of the Boaz/Kirby “libertarian-leaning” bloc (which is supposedly 13% of voters), than there are white evangelicals.  According to this and this, white evangelicals consistently made up 23% of the electorate in 2000 and 2004.  Unless roughly half of them sat out the last election–which is a claim I haven’t seen made anywhere–they remain a significantly larger group of voters than the mythical “libertarian swing vote” imagined by Boaz/Kirby.  As to how many “Christianist” voters there are, well, I leave that to Sullivan to invent right along with the Christianists themselves, since they exist only in his head anyway.

It may be that there was a more significant change between 2002 and 2004  and again between 2004 and 2006 in the voting patterns of these “libertarians” than there was in the voting of white evangelicals, but I don’t have the latter’s numbers handy.  What is certainly not the case is that these libertarians, even as broadly and questionably as the bloc has been defined, somehow formed a larger part of the electorate than white evangelicals.  Is there any conclusion in this post that Sullivan didn’t get wrong?