Did Libertarian John Hicks cost Bevin the election?
In this survey, 53.2% of Hicks voters identified as Republican compared to 15.3% who identified as Democrats and 31.5% who identified as Independent. Assuming that the roughly half of Hicks voters who identify as Republican chose to vote for Bevin instead, Bevin would have easily beat Andy Beshear by close to 10,000 votes.
"assuming" is the correct word here ...
The Hicks-voters voted Hicks for a reason: because they did not want to vote for Bevin under any circumstance.
So, the answer to the question is: NO.
It also looks like they didn't bother assigning the Democratic Libertarian voters to Beshear or attempting to calculate how the independents would break. Among those Hicks voters, they also didn't bother assigning the other D/R support percentages (i.e. Bevin winning 81% of GOP and Beshear winning 93% of DEM), instead just giving 100% of GOP-Hicks voters to Bevin (and 0% of DEM-Hicks voters to Beshear).
Calculating that and then assigning independents based on that broader group's lean in the election (58/31 Beshear) would have given Beshear a lead of around 1,500 rather than the Bevin lead of 10,000 votes they claimed.
Bevin ends up winning roughly 55% of Hicks voters in this scenario to Beshear's 42%:
Beshear 721637 (50.03%)
Bevin 720172 (49.93%)
Unknown 581
Even then, we're talking about small margins among a very volatile group, so their prognostication is completely without merit.
