A Report from Kevin Gaughen
It has been 20 months since the Mises PAC took full control of the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania at the 2022 convention. At the time, the LPPA was one of the most successful state affiliates of the National LP.
Let’s see how the LPPA is currently doing…
To keep things objective and quantifiable, I will compare pre-takeover numbers to current numbers via these five hard data points:
• Revenue
• Membership
• Cash on Hand
• Election Wins
• Active County Affiliates
I served as executive director of the LPPA for 3 years. Financial reports and membership data were always published in the LPPA newsletter.
Since the takeover, Mises-installed LPPA leadership has hidden this kind of data. However, someone leaked recent reports to me.
Arrows on these charts mark where my term started. My term ended where the graph ends, at the 2022 Mises PAC takeover. The graph clearly shows that the “Old Guard” had built the LPPA into a powerhouse with 1,600 dues-paying members and over $120,000 in gross receipts.
Mises PAC likes to take credit for those numbers, but it had nothing to do with them. The Old Guard put a LOT of time, effort, and money into building up the membership and revenue. This graph summarizes what we did when, and one can see the results it had on membership.
By comparison, here are screenshots of current, post-takeover membership numbers. The LPPA only has 597 dues-paying members right now.
The Mises PAC caused a net loss of 62.5% of the membership. ONE THOUSAND members have walked away in disgust.
OK, but what about donation income? Well, the current LPPA has only had $46,608 in revenue between January 1, 2023 and September 16, 2023. Annualized, we can project that the LPPA will take in about $65,937.67 for the year.
There has been a 45.9% decline in income.
So, how much cash did the Old Guard leave the new Mises-installed LPPA board?
According to the 2022 convention minutes, outgoing treasurer @NicoleShultz4PA handed over $47,377.92 to the new board.
Well, that was nice of us. Hmm, I wonder how much of it they have left.
Only $17,953 remains.
This year, they are operating at a net LOSS of $4,365.14 due to overspending.
In addition, apparently Chairman Cowburn tried to give himself an $8,000/year discretionary budget. It didn’t pass.
62.1% of the cash position has been depleted.
One of the many stupid things the Mises-installed board of directors has wasted money on was a very expensive and frivolous lawsuit in 2022 where they attempted to get Republicans on the ballot as Libertarians but were unable to due to Pennsylvania’s “sore loser” laws.
Election wins: In the municipal election prior to Mises PAC’s takeover, the LPPA got 173 candidates elected to local offices. We’d spent 6 years building a very powerful election committee and we’d sent 40,000 letters to Libertarian voters to recruit them as candidates.
In the election yesterday, the post-takeover LPPA won only 18 seats.
This is an 89.6% decrease in election wins.
This result can be expected after Mises PAC purged actual political experts from the election committee, thereby losing a lot of institutional know-how.
Interestingly, all seven candidates that Mises PAC endorsed in Pennsylvania LOST their elections yesterday – and by a large margin.
The 18 Libertarian candidates who did win were not endorsed by Mises PAC.
A Mises PAC endorsement has become the political Kiss of Death.
OK, so what about county committees? Well, before the takeover, we’d worked our butts off and drove all over the state to get new county committees organized.
We had a thriving organization with 39 active committees covering 48 counties!
If Mises PAC can organize to take over the entire LP then surely it can organize county committees, right?
Nope. There are currently only 20 active committees covering 22 counties. The rest have gone defunct.
This is a 54.2% decline in county-level organization.
To recap this thread, Mises PAC’s hostile takeover of the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania has resulted in major organizational collapse:
Membership down 62.5%
Revenue down 45.9%
Cash position down 62.1%
Election wins down 89.6%
County organization down 54.2%
Mises PAC promised that its takeover would double the LPPA’s successes by making it less woke, more bigoted, and by purging members who didn’t obey their leader.
Turns out, you can’t purge your way to growth and donors hate edgelording.
What a surprise.
If there were a secret plot to intentionally sabotage the Libertarian Party just as it was starting to threaten the political duopoly, would it look any different than Mises PAC’s hostile takeover?
Perhaps that’s exactly what happened.
The above report from Kevin Gaughen was originally posted on X.com, and is reprinted here with his permission.
Kevin Gaughen’s hard work coupled with the leadership of Steve Scheetz and Jennifer Moore brought us the most success we’ve ever seen in the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania by any metric.
I didn’t walk away from the LP or the LPPA (though I did move out of the state to Tennessee). In 2023 I spent over 40 hours finding the same sorts of open positions for the Moulton manuveur I found in 2019 and 2021. I found those positions earlier (for every county) than past years and shared them with the LPPA (not with the Keystone Party or a Classical Liberal Party or some other entity). The current leadership of the LPPA, including state chair Rob Cowburn and the current board, was very enthusiastic about the Moulton maneuver. Unfortunately, it takes more than enthusiasm to execute: it takes money and it takes manpower. By manpower I mean people to prepare mailings, people answer phone calls and emails from prospects, people to help prospective candidates understand the nomination and petitioning process, and people to make sure all the appropriate paperwork gets filed with each county for ballot access. Steve and Jenn and Kevin weren’t here to help in 2023 as they were in past cycles. Wes Benedict was not in a position to help much without a salary due to steep drops in donations to his PAC. The state party allocated some money to the project, but not enough to make it happen on the scale that was needed. The national party dragged their feet for a month (wasting a lot of time), then declined to financially support the project. I will find openings again in 2025. The question is whether there will be money and manpower to follow through with it.
The LNC likes to claim it supports electing Libertarians. Austrian economists tout the difference between “stated preference” and “demonstrated preference” (similar to Samuelson’s “revealed preference”) — basically do you just talk the talk?, or do you walk the walk?: what you want and prioritize is shown by what you do, not what you say. In my opinion the LNC’s stated preference is clearly contradicted by its demonstrated preference of not funding and supporting the election of Libertarians.
I hope the LPPA and the LP can get back on the path of success someday.
If I were to play devil’s advocate I’d say that you’re putting the cart before the horse because you were only able to achieve such metrics by being insufficiently libertarian ideologically , however they define that, and that metrics success is meaningless if what you’re pushing is watered down , or some version of that. I might add that you could achieve even higher metrics by further watering down.
I don’t see which comments Steve is referring to?
All such propositions are dubious, but they are opinions which exist, and some people have them.
They may have other metrics they think are more important – social media engagement? – although why those would benefit more than they would suffer from the structure of a political party is a great deal less clear .
I am not seeing what comments Steve is referring to. His is the only comment I see. Jacobs was the only name mentioned so I did find in page and it does not appear to be in the body of the report , unless it’s in an image. Is Steve’s comment copy pasted from somewhere else?
When we started this project in 2019, we were averaging around $6K per year. (for like the 8 years preceding). When we went forward with a plan to grow the party that would involving spending half the treasury at the time (somewhere around $8,000 I believe.. I am not looking, but it was around there) some members called me to complain about squandering the money in the treasury to which I responded: “Well, what else were we using it for?”
Time went by, membership grew, revenue grew, we brought the party into compliance with financial reporting for the first time…. EVER… We actually elected Libertarians to office in, at the time, a huge way!” time went by, and I started hearing about how none of that was our doing, it was being done by members of the mises caucus.
I won’t bother going into the inside baseball details, but suffice to say that the people responsible for all of the success have the numbers backing them.
More importantly, those who claimed credit for the success? Membership is down, Donations are down, Affiliates are in disarray, and given the lack of a news letter or any indication of anything else going on with the party, it is a fair assumption that all of the committees which had been functioning as needed, are either no longer in existence, or are not working as they should.
I was told that people said I ruled the party with an “iron fist.”
What actually happened is that whenever someone needed something, regardless of what it was, if there was nobody available to make it happen? Stuffing envelopes, donating the money for expenses the board did not have time to approve, courier when we needed paperwork in Harrisburg but could not trust that the USPS, or even FED-EX would get it there in time… Whatever was needed, we had a good team who was there for each other.
I don’t believe the current group running things can say the same thing.
Finally, I can see that their numbers are telling people that they were NOT, in fact, responsible for the success in Pennsylvania. I have Andy Jacobs blocked because his nonsense does not change with more accurate information available. The others suggesting Kevin has no integrity? Either they have never met him, or they are straight out lying. I have no patience for people who lie about my friends or the people who I work with.
Sincerely,
Steve Scheetz