Readers who listened to the second day of the recent LNC meeting will have noted the argument about strategy. The Project Decentralized Revolution! that the LNC endorsed is based on running people for local, city, and county office. There is no mention of running people for statewide or Federal office.
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The contrary opinion was advocated by one LNC member, who argued that the project of the last five decades, running a candidate for President in as many places as possible, was the correct strategy. He denounced any emphasis on building the party from the ground up rather than the top down. He then mounted his favorite hobby horse, arguing for some alternative to first past the post elections. Readers will note that the speaker and his cronies have not been entirely innocent of blocking efforts to improve support for non-Federal elections, though under National Chair Sarwark we nonetheless had an extensive candidate training program.
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The advocates of the Decentralized Revolution maintained that the top down strategy has been tried for five decades, and has not gotten us much of anywhere.
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Some version of this argument has been heard for as long as I have been in the party. Readers will note that the top down and bottom up strategies are complementary, not contradictory, and that both need to be carried out at the same time. To those who say we cannot afford both, I say thet we cannot afford NOT to do both. My book Libertarian Renaissance has most recently proposed actual strategies for effecting these goals.
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Some readers will recall there were also people who advocated that we should concentrate all our resources on membership recruitment, not electoral politics.
The problem with bottom up is we have this thing called ballot access laws that are typically driven top or near top down. So if you have nothing at the top you’ll have to petition signature every single race underneath. This will be done at a candidate level instead of a local level, which means every candidate is more capital-I Independent instead of capital-L Libertarian.
The irony of “Project Decentralized” is that it’s coming from the central location.
As others have stated here, different levels of the Party have different priorities. The national Party’s priorities are supposed to be fundraising, the convention, federal lobbying, the P/VP campaigns once nominated, and backstopping the state affiliates in litigation, ballot access, and if necessary, base organization. The state affiliates’ priorities are supposed to be building the local affiliate infrastructure, running candidates, fundraising, ballot access where necessary, outreach, growing membership, and lobbying legislatures, county commissions, city councils, and other governing boards and officials.
Those areas are not completely mutually exclusive, but they aren’t completely the same, either. National priorities are more top-down, and state priorities are more bottoms-up. Each are needed in their own way and each should not be sacrificed at the altar of the other. They are complements and supplements.
Why that understanding seems to be lost on some leadership is a different question, and ultimately it must be answered to properly restore focus on what needs to actually be done to grow the Party in the best manner.
Which is exactly why the current regime wants to disrupt things. It is obvious to anyone looking in from the outside that one fact is clear: the caucus in charge right now has no intent to grow or even maintain the libertarian national party. Their goal is clearly to disrupt it, and prevent any chance that it can harm their real agenda.
There have been many disagreements in the past over how to run the party. And in any political organization, they’re all always will be disagreements. But as I recall, people on different sides may have disagreed on the method of advancing the goals of the party, but none of them wanted to destroy it.
That is really the only thing that has changed here.
This is not new – on 11/05/2008 as acting XD I announced the start of Operation ElectUs. Our goal was to raise $200,900 towards supporting & electing local & state wide candidates in 2009.
Over the last 2 decades – this was always the focus on odd years.
I’ve forgotten…were you acting director twice or three times over the past two decades?
I do remember ‘08. You got a numbrer of good projects started.
Of course we should be running candidates at every level. I have seen some say we should not run a presidential candidate at all because it is too expensive and we could grow the party more by using that money for other elections. That argument is absurd.
This is the average monthly growth in signature members, by year (using the old, unrevised data):
2005 338.6 (only 6 months of data)
2006 506.2
2007 251.3
2008 439.7
2009 350.2
2010 208.8
2011 176.6
2012 420.8
2013 300.6
2014 241.1
2015 149.8
2016 884.8
2017 377.6 (excludes the April list purge)
2018 259.7 (excludes the January list purge)
2019 338.8
2020 675.0
2021 454.3
2022 263.6
The average of the 4 presidential years is 605.1. The average of all other years 301.2. The year immediately following a presidential election averages 364.2. The midterm year averages 295.9. The year preceding a presidential year averages 229.1.
There is also an increase in the LNC donor count in presidential years. The questionable ability to capitalize on those leads in non-presidential years is a separate issue. The interest is only revealed and data collected in presidential years.
Anyone who actually looks at the data can see that LP growth gets a substantial extra boost from Presidential politics.
50 years ago it might have been true that all politics is local. At some point it flipped. All politics is now national. Even local candidates for school board are now running as “MAGA Republicans”, or whatever.
Strange, then, that the LP still has 12,000 members as it did 30 years ago? And how many state parties are far stronger (or weaker) than in 1994? How to get off the hamster wheel going nowhere?
Give or take a bit, the ratio of signature members to total donors stayed between 10% and 14% from the conclusion of the Unified Membership Program until January 2023, when the data from the new CRM became all screwed up. There is no way to do any sort of historical comparison with the data which is released now.
Here’s a chart I made a few years ago: https://i.imgur.com/Q68Fqli.png
Just ignore the part on top. It was still true up until the most recent data point released from the old data format (January 2023).
Total Donors / Signature Members
Jan 07: 12,147 / 105,098 = 11.56%
Jan 09: 16,146 / 113,247 = 14.26%
Jan 11: 14,846 / 119,909 = 12.38%
Jan 13: 15,078 / 127,367 = 11.84%
Jan 15: 12,564 / 133,568 = 9.41%
Jan 17: 20,714 / 146,350 = 14.15%
Jan 19: 14,774 / 137,535 = 10.74%
Jan 21: 21,584 / 150,473 = 14.34%
Jan 23: 16,520 / 158,298 = 10.44%.
Over the long term, Signature Membership growth does track higher donor counts.
The Signature Membership data that IS released for this year has been abysmal. If it were comparable to the old data, this year has had the absolute lowest growth on record (back to 2005). It’s 35% lower than the next lowest year (2015). The MC is driving people away from the party. There’s just no getting around that.
This, of course, is a reflection of a wider cultural problem. Most Americans don’t pay much attention to politics, except in a Presidential election year. So, it IS important to have a Presidential candidate, even if there isn’t the slightest chance of making an impact on the outcome. (Altho, the party has shown some capacity in recent years of playing the spoiler in some swing states. IMO. the more that happens, the more there is talk of alternative voting methods -which is good. Plurality voting at all levels is a problem for the party)
But, just running a Presidential candidate gives people exposure to alternative ideas they may not have considered at all. David Nolan believed that, if nothing else, the party has an educational role. That should be considered the main role of the Presidential candidate.
The job of a national party is, by definition, national elections. Therefore, it has a responsibility to work from the top down.
The job of a state party, also by definition, is local elections and statewide – where their mission and the national party’s intersects on federal elections.
The National party can and should help by providing common and consistent resources for things like candidate recruitment and candidate training. And they are certainly a huge factor in recruiting new members for the party.
But it is not a national party’s responsibility to run local elections, although there are ways for them to help through recruiting and encouraging non-federal contributions to local candidates.
But a national party that willingly gives up their primary obligation and abandons running candidates at the national level is no longer a national party. A national party that makes deals to fund raise for candidates that sought and failed to achieve the nomination of the party is both foolish and a clear violation of what is commonly called fudiciary responsibility.
The easiest way to sabotage a party is to do exactly what these fools have done. And I call them fools because they bow down and worship their master with the orange hair and small hands.
I have a bet going with a MC supporter. I declared that LPs elected in 23 would be lower than in 21, he the opposite. We got our ’21 figures from the LP website to set the baseline ’23 needed to pass.
I wrote that to explain why I know that https://www.lp.org/elected-officials/ used to have post-2018 election data on it. Now it doesn’t, except for a single 2019 entry that was accidentally given a different date format than the standard and was apparently thus overlooked in the purge. There were entries for ’23 electorial wins before now, albeit not many. Today there are not. I previously blamed the lack of recent data on failures in record keeping (“assume incompetence instead of malice”) but if they’re being out and out redactive recidivists I think the threshold to assume intent has been bypassed.
How are you supposed to make incremental improvements in a “Bottom Up” endeavor if you intentionally burn/conceal all your historic metrics? How do you run “Top Down” if your candidates of choice never show up, are too high to compete, or get actively sabotaged by the board?