In the latest Membership report to the LNC, LNC Executive Director Hannah Kennedy reports that membership fell by 600 from August to September. At the end of September, the national party had 11,461 sustaining members, of whom 3,268 were life members. She writes:
“We lost 140 members in the first five months of 2024, but have lost 743 members in the 4 months since convention. The top two cited reasons for cancellations are dissatisfaction with our presidential ticket, followed by leaving/taking a break from politics. Together these make up more than three quarters of our cancellations. Financial hardship accounts for approximately 1/5th.”
She offers a contrast: “Presidential years have historically had a very positive effect on membership and financial growth, reaching new people and bringing them into the party through messaging. 2016 brought in 7,958 and 2020 brought in 4,176 new members. We have not received a similar bump this year.”
Kennedy notes that the staff is vigorously engaged in cleaning up imported records. In October 6000 of these were eliminated, including 200 duplicate sustaining membership records that were counted in the August report. With this correction, membership did not increase in August. Filtration of duplicates is continuing, and is expected to have a significant effect on teh end-of-October membership report.
These new reports are terrible. The ones from past terms were much more informative. The ED probably is not aware of the old formats.
That 743 number is the net. 12,204 in May minus 11,461 in September. We don’t actually know the number of new members or quits because the LNC no longer publishes that data.
In 2016 there were 9,701 new donors, 7,446 renewal donors, and 8,434 lapsed donors. The net of that was a gain of 8,713 donors. (20,406 at year end 2016 vs 11,693 at year end 2015.) Even in 2016 there were thousands of people not renewing their memberships, and many of those certainly would have cited the Presidential ticket as the reason.
For all we know Oliver may have brought in thousands of new donors. The LNC just doesn’t give us that data, anymore.
Just hypothetically the numbers might look like this:
12,204 Membership at end of May
+2,000 Joined because of Oliver
-1,100 Quit because of Oliver
-1,000 Quit because taking a break from politics
-550 Quit because financial hardship
-93 Quit for other reasons
11,461 Memberships at end of September
All of that works with the information given – more than 75% cancelled because of the top two reasons, with a majority of those going to quits because of Oliver, and around 20% quitting because of financial hardship.
I will be very curious to see the voter turn out then, if they want to focus now on the camapign as the loss of membership then Oliver should have lower numbers than Jo did and lower than many previous elections. I wonder though how do they explain the nearly 3rd of the party that left before then?
The mises caucus currently resembles a toddler sitting in their own shit wondering how in the world this happend.