Updated to include two scatter plots

Having examined which states have the most and least libertarians, I’ve decided to do something similar for the 239 populated towns of New Hampshire. Towns are the most important level of local government here, and therefore the degree of libertarian-ness should make some difference to policy at the town level.

The indicators I use for number of libertarians are as follows: percentage of the vote for Gary Johnson and Ron Paul (write-ins) in the 2012 presidential general election (Ron Paul won a nontrivial number of write-ins in New Hampshire); percentage of the vote for libertarianish gubernatorial candidate Andrew Hemingway in the 2014 Republican primary (he got over 37% of the vote); percentage of the vote for Ron Paul in the 2012 Republican primary; percentage of the vote for Ron Paul in the 2008 Republican primary; and the percentage of voters registered “undeclared” (independent). These are all measured at the town level.

As in my research on the states, I use principal component analysis to reduce the correlations among these variables to a single “best” variable expressing their underlying commonality. I also “weight” the observations by population, since New Hampshire has many small towns, where sampling error should be higher (lots of zeroes and high percentages in election results). In fact, weighting the observations this way yields better results, as revealed by the eigenvalue of the first extracted component.

These variables do in fact correlate with each other and all contribute positively, as expected, to the extracted component. The highest scoring coefficient goes to 2012 Paul primary vote (0.55) and the lowest to undeclared registration percentage (0.25).

UPDATE: Here are two charts of Andrew Hemingway 2014 percentage against Ron Paul 2012 percentage, by town. The first limits to towns and cities with at least 700 population, the second to towns and cities with at least 10,000 population. As you can see, the correlation is strong.

And now for the lists of most and least libertarian towns…

Top 10:



Town Score

Richmond 11.2

Grafton 9.4

Wentworth 7.4

Alexandria 6.1

Lyman 6.0

Dorchester 5.7

Marlow 5.6

Clarksville 5.3

Croydon 5.2

Benton 5.1



Most of these are in Grafton County, where I also live. They are all small and rural. The most libertarian large town (over 5000 population) is Plymouth (score of 4.5), a left-leaning college town (also in Grafton Co.). The most libertarian-leaning municipality with a city form of government is Franklin in Merrimack County (score of 2.0). Almost all of the towns where libertarian candidates are most popular are in the west, especially northwest, of the state. Three exceptions are Francestown (5.0), Mason (4.3), Hill (4.0), and New Ipswich (3.9), but even these are west of I-93, which bisects most of the state. The top town east of I-93 is Pittsfield (3.2).

Here are the bottom 10:



Dixville -5.9

Hale's Location -4.7

New Castle -3.9

Rye -3.5

Jackson -3.2

Bedford -3.1

Waterville Valley -3.1

Atkinson -3.0

Stratham -3.0

New London -2.7



Four out of these 10 are in Rockingham County on the seacoast. Dixville and Hale’s Location are truly tiny. Bedford is a staunchly Republican suburb with a population over 20,000. In fact, many of the least libertarian places are well-to-do suburbs that are strongly establishment-Republican (Bedford, New London, Hooksett, Hampstead, Windham).

Examining the towns that are right in the middle of the spectrum will give us a sense of which places are most “representative” in their libertarian-ness. Here are those, filtering down to places with more than 1000 population:



Derry 0.2

Littleton 0.2

Goffstown 0.1

Keene 0.1

Manchester 0.1

Lee 0.0

Chester 0.0

Claremont -0.0

Sandown -0.2

New Boston -0.2



Some of these are not representative of the state in a left-right sense, however. New Boston, Goffstown, Littleton, and Chester are all firmly Republican, while Keene, Lee, and Claremont are if anything even more firmly Democratic. Derry (R-leaning), Manchester (D-leaning), and Sandown (R-leaning) could be considered somewhat representative of the state.