Answers will appear in comments. Comments will be limited to candidates, though I may invite a few former officers and officer candidates to express their opinions.
For each of the following topics relevant to the LNC, what are the strong and weak points of our current position? And what do you propose to do to improve our circumstances:
1) Fund raising and financial position
2) Membership numbers
3) Outreach, inside and outside the party
4) Candidate support and recruitment
5) LNC Business Operations
George Phillies, Thank you for posting a thoughtful list of proposals to improve the Libertarian Party’s situation now and in the future. I hope the candidates for party officers will implement them.
Answers from George Phillies
1) Fund raising and financial position
The current financial position of the LNC is disastrous. We have substantially had to abandon the objective of fifty-state ballot access for our presidential candidate due to lack of funds. Party income this year will perhaps be more than half what it was a few years back, but only because we are having a national convention this year. A key question is whether the national convention will at least break even or whether it will leave the LNC with major debt, as happened previously in 2002.
The proposal of the current administration, that we would cover our income and more by appealing to crypto whales, has clearly not eventuated as positively as might have been hoped. There is a dearth of major donors. Other donations are also well down.
There are several contributing factors here. Statements of some activists enjoying support at the last national convention, that the party was better off without ‘Libertarians In Name Only’, had a significant effect. Cessation of the core basis of modern political fundraising, direct mail, had a significant effect. Spending approaches that did not enjoy the general support of the membership, such as litigation against state parties and crony hiring practices, had a significant effect. Off-the-wall press releases did not help. Astute readers can doubtless list other causes.
How may the situation be fixed? First, if the forces of Reno Cancellation can overcome the forces of Reno Reset, they will be able to tell members and recent former members: We have swept in a clean slate of new LNC members. We are going to do things very differently than were done the last term. Please give us the money we need to clean up the mess we have been left.
Each member of the new LNC should be give a copy of Richard Viguerrie’s book Go Big! and told to read it, both because it has much practical discussion of fundraising and direct mail, and because it shows what we are up against.
2) Membership numbers: We have two groups of members. We have somewhat more than three thousand life members. Their numbers very gradually increase. The remaining members renew their membership every year. We are now down to nine thousand of those remaining members, from close to eighteen thousand of these members a few years back. The technical phrase here is “death spiral”, in which a decreasing revenue forces a reduction in activities, which in turn leads to a reduction in donations and memberships, which in turn leads to a reduction in revenue, and on and on and on until the good airship Liberty executes Controlled Flight Into Ground.
How do we fix the problem? The LNC makes sure that it is seen doing good things. The LNC makes sure that it has stopped doing bad things like suing state affiliates. The LNC resumes the traditional activities that the membership has always seen. These are activities like a monthly mailing or newsletter, candidate support, and candidate recruitment. Regular press releases on significant national issues are a step in the right direction. Speaking up for libertarian positions that already enjoy widespread public support are steps in the right direction.
3) Outreach, inside and outside the party: Inside the party, regular emails that are not all begging for money, but instead report opportunities and things that we have done, are a positive part of outreach inside the party. A monthly paper-mailing, at least a fundraising letter identifying concrete projects, and hopefully fairly soon a monthly or quarterly LP news, would be positive steps.
Outreach outside the party: There should be regular press releases, at least several each week, short, sensible, and to the point, sent to as many outlets as possible. When I ran for President, our press release list had fifteen thousand names on it. The Washington staff should include at least two people who function as reporters for LP News and the like. These people would have to be highly intelligent, well-informed, polite, and seen at as many press-type functions as possible. Their lesser task is collecting news of libertarian interest. The greater task is meeting the extremely large Washington press corps, and coming across as sane and presentable, rather than, well, there several alternatives here, all bad. You go to a press conference or the like, you listened politely, and if you’re there a bit early or late you get to chat up correspondents from other services. These people are more likely to remember the Libertarian party in a favorable way if they meet people who appear to be in their right mind, and understand the concept of wearing clothing at national conventions.
It is possible to rent mailing lists for fundraising and membership recruitment. The problem with this, the last time it was done on a large scale, was that the readily available mailing lists were mostly conservative and far-right groups. Recruiting primarily there led to a certain rightward turn within the party. I know that’s where we recruited, because the then-political-director sent me a complete list of where we had done direct mail, and there was an overwhelming majority of far right groups on the list.
4) Candidate support and recruitment: We have done this several times. We should start doing it again. The people who supported candidates in the past with candidate training may not be interested in working with current Libertarian National Committee administration, but might be available to a future LNC if they were asked politely.
Candidate recruitment needs to be emphasized at all levels of the party. The main reason that most people run for local and state office is that someone asks them to run. You need to start asking, and you need to start supporting people who are going to run. The stated objective should be that there are around a half million elective and appointive offices in the United States, and in every election, for every office, there should be one of our people running, either as a Libertarian or as an independent. Fine details depend on state ballot access laws, of which there are fifty states, plus D.C., plus the five populated territories.
5) LNC Business Operations: The national committee needs a competent, effective, well-managed staff. That means you need a good Executive Director, and in the first instance directors for the key operations: fundraising, communications, candidate recruitment and support, membership and affiliate services, information technology. The operation needs to be in a single location, so that the Executive Director and the National Chair can readily keep tabs on a daily basis on what is happening, be prepared to offer assistance as necessary, help train the various directors in their tasks, and if need be offer a provisional director an opportunity to pursue alternative employment in the private sector. If you spread the activities out over the fifty states of the union, the effectiveness of management will be greatly reduced.
Where do we put this operation? There are of course people who want to put the operation in the District of Columbia. However, as a practical matter the cost of living in Washington is extremely high, so to hire competent people you have to pay them a great deal, this involving money that we do not have. Real estate in Washington is even more expensive. The money we tied up in minimalistic real estate in Alexandria is money we do not have for other operations. There are good reasons why at least one of the lead credit card companies, while it nominally has a headquarters building in New York City, actually has its operations run out of if memory serves Bismarck, North Dakota. We would like someplace that is cheap to fly to, so the entire LNC and audience can readily meet in the same room without having to pay off a hotel, where we can buy a substantial piece of space with lots of parking such as an underused small mall, and where houses and apartment rents are relatively low, so that the staff can live well at salaries we can afford to pay. This does not exclude having an extremely small office in DC for the two communications reporters, once we can afford them.
Above all, information technology operations need to be stable.
What are you running for? I didn’t find you on your list of candidates in your other article.
I am providing a sample answer to inspire the actual candidates.