The state of financial support by Libertarians of the Oliver Presidential campaign is a disgrace to the good name of our party. Most Libertarians should be ashamed of the state to which our Presidential campaign has been reduced. As of the same date in the campaign, here is the amount of money raised by the Oliver campaign and each of the last three Libertarian presidential campaigns (for Johnson, I show his first campaign).
Chase Oliver $268,981
Jo Jorgensen $1,927,679
Gary Johnson $1,505,648
Bob Barr $854,297
There is also third-party competition:
Jill Stein $1,852,300
Randall Terry $247,262
It is no secret that many libertarians are not entirely happy with our current National Committee and its leadership. That displeasure is not the fault of Chase Oliver. No Libertarians should take out his displeasure with the LNC on our Presidential candidate.
Disclosure: The author is a maximum contributor to the Oliver campaign, and contributed $4000 to the independent effort that put Chase Oliver for President on the ballot in New Hampshire.
Nitpicking:
The older Libertarian candidate totals listed above use “total contributions” (Line 17 a iii), other candidates (Oliver and Terry) use “total receipts” (line 22), while Stein is some sort of hybrid that is used on the summary page. The differences from the older Libertarian campaigns are that Terry loaned his own campaign $12,500 and had $1,625 in receipts from state parties, Stein had $3,736 come in from state green parties and had $28,958.25 in offsets to expenditures, and Oliver had $353.09 in offsets to expenditures.
Using the same line as was used for the older Libertarian campaigns, Stein would have $1,849,925 and Terry $233,112.
Oliver’s numbers also come from July while everyone else was through August. Oliver should be $333,084. Perhaps the FEC summary page had not yet been updated to include August’s numbers when this post was written.
Also, Johnson in 2012 includes his time running as a Republican, which I think ought to be excluded. Removing his Republican era total would bring him down to $927,523.
And while I was looking this up, I noticed Jill Stein appears to be getting a huge number of donations from people with Middle Eastern names. Doesn’t change anything, I just thought it noteworthy. Lends legitimacy to that poll from the Muslim organization that she won handily a while back.
None of that changes the greater point made in the OP. Oliver is still well behind everyone except Terry.
Ed Clark presidential candidate in 1980 received in contributions $3,234,139.00. I don’t think Chase’s campaign is going to come close to raising that amount.
A lot of this is the LNC’s fault of course – however this is not the first campaign that received little support from HQ. What makes this one different IMO from a donors perspective is two-fold:
a) He’s a candidate of a bankrupt party – not just financially but morally – that doesn’t come close to standing for the same principles as its candidate. Propping up Chase means he might do better at the polls which might prolonging the death of the party he represents simply because they’ll hold on to a smidgen of ballot access. So some find it very hard to donate to Chase because of the LNC.
b) So despite the above – some donors still might support Chase because he’s Chase – but does the campaign actually thank those supporters properly so they’re encouraged to donate again? Looking at the FEC reports for Gary & Jo you will see there are a number of donors who contributed multiple times – compare that to Chases report where you see those same donors only contributing once – why? This is campaigning 101 & Chase gets an F.
Damian is right. Presidential campaigns never relied on the national party the way people are asking the national party to help the nominee this year.
Even if the nominee was someone else, it is likely the nominee would have suffered from a lack of national support anyway. It is not Chase’s fault either in the big picture.
However, the call here is to libertarian party members, not to the LNC.
Thank you for posting this report of funds raised. I will send Chase Oliver another donation.
Fundraising is almost always the function of the campaign, not of the party.
A point on which we are agreed. However, it is party supporters who provide the money, and at the moment they are not do so very much.
The national party does little to help and openly supports Kennedy