The latest LP national party membership reveals 11,679 sustaining members, an increase of 218 over the previous month, and 3269 life members, an increase of one over the previous month. In April, 2024, which is as far back as the report extends, the national party had 12,211 sustaining members, so from April to the end of October our sustaining membership fell by 532 people.
LPedia has it back years.
That may be true, but that would eliminate the back-and-forth and debate among people here over who has the most facts and most data.
Let everyone have their fun! There isn’t much else left these days…
Obviously, this is not the first time membership has declined. It is also not the first time that factions have battled over control of the party.
But I do believe it was the first time that a national chair wore a clown nose while claiming to endorse the candidate selected by the convention. That in itself had to have damaged membership significantly. But as noted elsewhere, that may not show up in the numbers until a year later.
Our bylaws also do not say 365 days. That is just wrong. And bylaws do not give amount for life. Picky? Yes. But our reports should be right. Ms. Kennedy inherited this form, it’s not her fault. But it’s wrong and inferior to the older format imho.
In reviewing it seems that the “other” was allocated properly to the correct states. I would like to see just this month the “real” increase. I signed up multiple national members in CO but the state party does not prioritize so there is no way CO jumped 28. 10 maybe but I’d bet at least 15 came from other. It’s hard to get any meaning without that data.
170 give or take were reallocated from other? Where? Someone needs to ask this. Something is wonky here.
I think this is the first time in LP history where dues paying membership in a presidential year was lower than it was for the previous year.
Perhaps 1987 to 1988?
No surprise there, when National was busy throughout the campaign promoting candidates for President other than the party’s own. Chase was abandoned by most of the National party structure and officers. He was the best candidate we had since Badnarik, and National ruined it.
1983-84 due to the Koch faction walking away, and 1999-00 due to Project Archimedes ending.
This time, when the mises faction slinks away, the party’s membership may actually rise.
Or I should say “if”. The jury is still out on whether they will win the battle for ownership of the party. They don’t really completely own it at this point since it still contains a number of non-mises people and several state parties that they have not been able to take over and control.
Not 1987-1988? I was under impression one of the reasons Chair Jim Turney resigned was that NatCom was disappointed because of declining membership (fallen under 7,000 by Dec. ’88)
I have a complete record back to November 2002 but, for most years prior to 1996 I have only found 1 – 3 data points. Some of those are from membership reports which I either found online or came to me courtesy of Marc Montoni, some data was found reported in LP News (someday I will do a more thorough search of the old issues), some data I found listed on Joe Dehn’s personal website, and some were estimates based on an old chart which ended in 2002, which can also be found on Dehn’s website. Muddying those intermittent data points is the fact that some of the reported numbers included membership from outside of the 50 states and DC and some did not, so that could swing things by a up to a couple of hundred.
That said, what I have from that time period is:
5,483 February 1987 (might exclude members outside the US)
5,125 December 1987 (estimate based on an old chart)
6,402 November 1988 (A few days before month end, reported in Jan 1989 LP News)
6,253 December 1988 (might exclude members outside the US)
All of those should be dues paying membership, not the total number of donors, which is somewhat higher. Figure 2% to 13% higher for total donors most of the time.
The chart from Joe Dehn can be seen here: http://www.dehnbase.org/lpus/library/membership-hist.gif
My chart is here: https://i.imgur.com/q1lyoTv.png