What Will Your Chair Candidate Do This June?

Last updated on January 12, 2024

Added candidate names

And slightly different dates for people trying to control the Green, Constitution, Reform, and other political parties.

Readers will be aware that the Libertarian Party has at least three candidates for National Chair.

The candidates are:
Angela McArdle

Mark Rutherford

Pietro Salvatore Geraci

Each of them is making at least modest efforts to campaign and organize in favor of their election. That describes what they’re planning to do in the run-up to May, but skips over the rest of the year.

I ask these candidates: What will you do, if you win?

A serious candidate for national chair of a political party, in a party where the national chair is actually elected by the membership as opposed to being chosen by the presidential candidate, should explain what she or he is planning to do if she or he wins the election. (The opposite is seen in the Democratic Party, which had a competent national chair in Howard Dean.  Dean proposed that the Democratic Party should organize everywhere, contest every election just as Tip O’Neill said, and vigorously recruit popular support. He was in essence dumped by Barack Obama, who soon thereafter found that his party had lost control of Congress and he had lost his ability to get legislation passed.)

So what should a national chair propose to do? Having run for national chair repeatedly, I do have some opinions on the matter. They were outlined in my book Stand Up for Liberty!  The top line is the purpose of a national political party. The purpose of any political party is to advance its agenda, to run candidates and win elections, and to use electoral victory to put its program into effect. How is this to be done?

The short form answer is that the Libertarian National Committee and its employees and volunteers need to start doing all of the things that a national political party does. At the moment it is doing almost none of them. Of course, in its defense, the only thing the national party is required to do by its bylaws is to organize the next national convention. Questions have been raised as to the quality of the organizational effort. Firing from the Convention Oversight Committee the one person with considerable experience in running a Libertarian national convention has ,in a few places, raised minor doubts.

Nonetheless, one reasonably asks what a party national committee should be doing.  Forthe  new Libertarian National Committee, a good step is to disentangle itself from the lawsuits it has launched or threatened to launch in different directions.  Those suits have antagonized large numbers of members, and as of the date of this writing make it at least plausible that there will soon be a competing libertarian-leaning national party.

Raising money is clearly the most important single step, because almost everything else a national party might want to do costs money. A candidate for national chair will outline a serious fundraising campaign including detailed plans, steps, and timetables as to how the money will be spent, enough to convince former or potential future donors that the Libertarian National Committee, Green National Committee, Constitution Party National Committee, or whoever is a worthwhile investment.

How do you do fundraising? The correct first step is to procure a copy of Richard Viguerie’s book Go Big! which compares approaches to doing this. The short form answer is that even under modern conditions direct mail is the most effective fundraising tool. For details see the end of this article.

A good fundraising letter has a substantial amount of white space, reasonably large type, meaning thirteen or fourteen point, a respectable use of color, inserted small boxes, colorfully outlined, with pithy key phrases, and at the end multiple post scripts, P. S., P. P. S., And so forth. A signature in a different color into than anything else will at least look as though the letter is hand-signed.

A key part of fundraising is to tell people exactly how you are going to spend their money, in the near future, and then soon be able to report that you actually spent the money the way you promised. If you spend the money on something else, like paying off staff members, discharging old debts, etc. and not on what you promised, people’s interest in giving you more money will go down. The amount will go down a great deal, especially if you have a bad record from the past.

A second step is to maintain regular contact with the membership as to what you are doing. For the Libertarian Party, a reasonable step is to revive LP News. As people who were paying attention noted, the money raised by sticking LP news in an envelope with return envelope and fundraising drop card more than paid for the cost of producing and mailing the newsletter. The newsletter is also critical for other steps the national party should be pursuing.

The most important of these other steps is candidate recruitment. Pounding the drum encouraging people to run for local office is a good step. Providing advice on how to run for office, for example how do petitioning is important. Articles on how to run for office can be gathered up and eventually inserted into readable booklets, watchable video pieces of short length, and the like. It should be recognized that the most important tool for persuading people to run for office is to ask them personally to run. Of course, this won’t always work, and counterarguments such as “my wife said no, and she knows where the gun locker is.” should be taken seriously.  For candidates for U.S. Senate, a telephone call from the national chair is good. Further down the line, LNC members should view recruiting congressional candidates as part of their remit. After all, you are the officers of the national party, you have the ability to support federal candidates directly, so you should try to recruit good federal candidates, as opposed to candidates who have never opened their mouth without reducing the stock of human wisdom.

Along with candidate recruitment comes candidates support.  Tthe LNC has regularly run programs assisting people in learning how to run for office. There are a lot of steps to running for office, but most of them can be taught. Under current conditions the Libertarian Policy Institute is doing candidate training, and the National Committee should encourage it to continue doing so.

Public outreach, either directly or through the press, is an important part of what a national committee should do. To do so, it needs an office actually in Washington, small but attractive, and three staff members. Three staff members are the secretary who mans the desk and two publicists, both young, bright, and physically attractive, who attend as many events as possible and are seen as representative of our party.  An aspect of this is regular press conferences, for example press conferences and press statements, given by renting a room short-term in the National Press Club.  As a separate aspect, the LNC should develop and use effectively the largest possible email-list of newspapers and reporters. As is sometimes not recognized, small local newspapers and college newspapers are an effective tool for this outreach, because they are relatively desperate for material to publish. They may well give coverage that large national newspapers, especially those with an ideological axe warehouse to grind, will not.

Successful political parties have local organizations. The locale needs to be small enough that people can drive across it to some center point for meetings, but large enough that all meetings have a reasonable number of people in attendance. The local groups also need activities. Some groups will be fortunate enough to have creative members who suggest which activities to run. For other groups, support packages of material on how to do X this month may be useful.

An important part of running candidates at every level is to use their campaigns to develop the Libertarian party. The presidential candidate and Senate candidates and Congressional candidates can show up, do events with more local candidates, and use their presence to draw an audience while the local candidate does the talking. After all, it is the local candidate that they are trying to support.

A substantial aspect of developing the voter base is to have a good list of party supporters in an accessible form. Party supporters include people who have registered as Libertarian, though that only works in states where you can register by party, which is very definitely not all of them. Anyone who was ever contacted the party is a potential supporter. At least on occasion, the national committee should stay in touch with them.

There are alternatives to geographically-based organization.  Every national party of any size is surrounded by a large number of special interest groups. Their connection with the national party may be more or less obvious, but there is a connection. For libertarians, one can imagine the Libertarian Youth League, the Libertarian Microbrewers, Moms For Liberty, End The Food Tax!, and so forth. The Democratic Party turns out to have vastly more of these groups than the Republican Party does. The Libertarian party has almost none of these, and one of the objectives of the National Committee should be to make the situation change.

How do you develop special interest groups? You identify causes with the Libertarian theme. You  find the activists who will make the special interest group fly. The group won’t work unless there are people want to commit serious time to it. You then launch an interest group linked to the cause, for example Friends of the Third Amendment. One then does fundraising and membership recruitment for the group. The national party can certainly help with this. The interest group is there to support libertarians, but unlike the party the interest group should occasionally support candidates of other parties. Why? Because that support kills the claim that the interest group is simply a tool of the Libertarian party.

Think tanks. The LNC is elected to be people who hopefully have some skill and decent ideas about what the national party should do. That’s very different from generating short or long policy papers proposing changes in the libertarian direction. For those policy papers, sufficiently well developed that a candidate can be familiar with them and have answers when he is challenged on something, one needs libertarian think tanks. The LNC cannot be the think tanks, but it can take appropriate steps to help those groups form and organize. Some readers will call that the mouth-breather wing of the National Committee, when I propose this two decades ago, was quite negative about the LNC doing such work.   

So all told, what does the Libertarian party need for victory? It needs a Libertarian National Chair who will focus on developing what is needed. That means developing activists, ballot status, candidates, dollars, and and enrolled libertarians. The chair needs to develop numbers: consultants,PACs, special interest groups, incumbents, candidates, and donors. Finally, the national chair national committee need to develop the volunteers and voters who will support our candidates.

So!  What is your national chair candidate proposing to do in June?

You can read much more on this in my book Stand Up For Liberty! which will by and by be posted as a series of Chapters on this site.

About fundraising letters

A reasonable direct mail piece has an outer envelope, pretty-printed, a fund-raising letter — the longer the better, a return envelope, and a drop card. A drop card is 1/3 of a sheet of paper, printed on cardboard is better, that includes bullet points on one side and the required information for fundraising on the other. There is a correct way to organize a letter for mailing. First, no matter what you are taught in elementary school, the correct way to fold a letter for mailing is to do a Z fold. The outside top of the paper is the opening paragraph of the letter. Between the second and third folds of the letter, one inserts the drop card and the return envelope.The folded letter, drop card and return envelope are inserted into the mailing envelope with the top surface of the letter facing the rear side of the envelope, the side toward the envelope flap. Why? Because when someone opens an envelope, they almost always open it by peeling off the flap or the side piece and therefore when they take out the letter the first thing they will see is the letter surface facing the rear of the envelope. That should be the first paragraph of the letter. At this point, unless the person opening the letter is very careful, the reason the drop card is called the drop card is revealed. The drop card falls out from between the second and third thirds of the letter, and drops onto the floor, where whoever is opening the letter now needs to pick it up in which case they really do have to look at it.