We now reach substantive content. We quote from the report:
Members and donors vote with their wallets. Either those wallets are open or closed to support appeals from the organization. These wallet votes have spoken loudly for the past few years, and it has not been a ringing endorsement. Only a change in the board’s collective vision and behavior can move the organization forward out of this slump.
Key Impacts:
- Declining membership and donor contributions.
- Erosion of organizational credibility and public trust.
- Unstable strategic direction, undermining long-term planning.
- Increasing staff demoralization, based on erratic directives and lack of board alignment.
- Board performance in fundraising is very weak to date outside of convention in 2024.
- Forward Movement
It is imperative that this current board chooses to change the practices and behaviors that have driven the organization to this current position. What got the organization to this point in time, will absolutely not serve it in moving forward. It is time to actively choose to change.
Here we see the LNC being blamed for the organization’s difficulties. The LNC has earned a great deal of blame, but not for the reasons listed here.
Consider first the difficulties. Membership, donations, and candidate count have indeed all been declining. Having made an enormous effort to procure a building, the LNC then stopped using it and let it deteriorate physically. There was lack of credibility, such as the National Chair and the Party Treasurer agreeing to let credit card charges pile up while making minimum payments on credit card bills. There was unstable strategic direction, namely the National Chair urging members to vote for Donald Trump. Staff demoralization arises in the first instance from a lack of job security, starting with Robert Kraus, a man with decades of experience, being sent on his way by not renewing his contract. However, that is again primarily a National Chair issue.
“…lack of board alignment…” Are there strong disagreements within the Board? Of that there can be no doubt, namely there are two ongoing derivative suits, in which a Board Member is suing the Board on behalf of the Board. There were payments from the LNC to an operation formed by the National Chair’s boyfriend, payments that the LNC finally insisted be cancelled.
However, “Board performance in fundraising” is not a difficulty. The LNC has an assigned list of tasks. They are in the Bylaws. Raising money for the party is not one of them. Of course, you would have to have read the Party Bylaws to know this.
“It is imperative that this current board chooses to change the practices and behaviors that have driven the organization to this current position.”
However, the fundamental LNC failure is not lack of a strategic plan, it is failure to mind the store. The most glaringly obvious is that the LNC paid a respectable sum of money for this report, but so far there seems to have been no discussion of it by the LNC. No motions corresponding to the report have been put on the table for the forthcoming LNC meeting.
Where else has the store not been minded? For some time, the LNC has been receiving completely minimal Treasurer’s reports. ‘Minimal’ is not a new problem, but rarely have LNC Treasurer’s reports been accompanied by financial analysis from the Treasurer. On the same line, even though the needed information is readily available from FEC filings, the LNC instead only received crude sums, rather than itemized reports of where the money went. It took Jake Porter to uncover interesting issues related to the Freedom Calls financial arrangement. To the extent that the crude sums revealed issues, for example credit card debt, the LNC seemed supinely uninterested. A similar case could be made for membership reports. Once upon a time, we saw membership counts going back over several years. We are now limited to the most recent half-year. Missing from the report are several numbers that were once reported, namely the count of renewals and the count of new members coming through the door. New Membership recruitment is a test of organizational competence, a test that appears to be lacking.
This problem has been percolating for some years. In my opinion a lack of focus on specific issues didn’t help.
The Mises takeover (Paleolibertarians) truly was a disaster.
They need to put the abortion plank back in the platform as well.
It is all the fault of the Mises Caucus, yet the 2024 Libertarian National Convention nominated a presidential ticket not supported by the Mises Caucus, and that presidential ticket failed to attract new party members as dues paying membership and fundraising went down from the presidential election campaign, which is highly unusual.
(Sarcasm intended.)
Yes, 100% the fault of McArdle, Heise and MC.
For many reasons.
Incompetence and nepotism being two.
As far as the 2024 LP presidential candidate, the Mises candidate lost at convention, the delegates chose Chase Oliver.
So what did Mises do?
Did they support Chase for the good of the LP as a whole?
Nope.
Like whiney little children who didn’t get their way, Mises refused to support the LP presidential candidate and openly endorsed an authoritarian.
Actually, they supported Chase in blue states so Trump could win.
Chase Oliver presidential platform was 100% libertarian.
A presidential ticket that is openly and actively sabotaged by the LNC and several state parties should not be expected to attract new members or fundraise well.
I think the blame for that is with the presidential campaign. There have been past presidential campaigns which didn’t get much of anything from the national office. Badnarik (2004) was barely mentioned on the national site. He was a relatively dark horse for the nomination, behind the better funded Nolan and Russo campaigns. According to Wikipedia
“Badnarik was viewed as unlikely to win the Libertarian presidential nomination, facing challenges from talk-show host Gary Nolan and Hollywood producer Aaron Russo.
…
Some members of the party disapproved of Badnarik becoming the presidential nominee, feeling that he would be unable to draw media attention that many had felt Russo would have.
…
Badnarik’s capture of the nomination was widely regarded as a surprise by many within the party; both Nolan and Russo had outpaced him in both fundraising and poll results prior to the convention.”
End of Wikipedia quote.
Badnarik was also not personally well off, famously having to fundraise for travel costs for his next campaign stop at the previous one when seeking the nomination.
I was in another State at the time and there was an effort from couple of people to do what they could to keep him off the State’s ballot and to limit the Public Relations in the state. It began at the convention when they were concerned that Russo was going to get the nomination.
There’s a huge difference between “… didn’t get much of anything from the national office” and national leadership actively *sabotaging* a campaign, and urging voters to support candidates other than our own.
It’s true that some LNC members, including the chair, wanted to defer to state parties which wanted to have a different candidate or no candidate, but they were stymied in this by other LNC officers. In the end, Oliver ended up on the ballot everywhere except the places the LNC already expected to not make the ballot before it was known who the nominee would be and Tennessee, which at 275 signatures shouldn’t have needed any LNC help. Arguably, Badnarik’s ballot access in New Hampshire was sabotaged by a state chair who supported Bush.
The national office website promoted Oliver as the nominee more than they had Badnarik as the nominee.
I think what’s universally pretty true is that the national office tends to do more on behalf of campaigns which are already raising significant money and getting significant media attention themselves, usually because the candidate is already prominent in some other way – Barr and Johnson as former elected officials, Jorgensen as their own former VP candidate and personally financially comfortable, Browne as a fairly prominent investment author. Those campaigns then tend to do more for the party in return.
Badnarik and Oliver are the outliers in not being personally prominent in terms of background / personal past achievements or personally financially comfortable. Neither one came into the nomination convention as favorites to win. But Badnarik was better at making lemonade out of lemons than Oliver was. The latter campaign was weak and divisive from start to finish. You can’t rightly blame all of that on the national office or committee.
The Mises-driven 2024 Convention came perilously close tho to nominating NO ONE for President, in a fit of pique that their candidate wasn’t going to be chosen. Thankfully, a small handful of decent-thinking people backed away from that disastrous choice and joined the support for Chase Oliver, who was then sabotaged by the Mises-driven party leadership, who actively advocated Libertarians vote for candidates *other* than the Libertarian. I commend him to the heavens for holding his head up high despite all the active sabotage happening to his campaign. I live in a state where the party leadership actively supported someone completely different because they couldn’t bring themselves to support a homosexual. Someone needed to tell those yahoos that it was 2024, not 1924.
Right.
LPNH endorsed Trump, a complete authoritarian.
Trump has said he wants to “execute all drug dealers” and “take the guns first, due process second”.
How any so called libertarian can vote for that is beyond me.
But they did.
Mises actively sabotaged the Oliver campaign and then blames Chase for the current state of LP.
The current state of the LP is a direct result of Mises takeover and Angela’s incompetence.
Bring back Sarwark, I didn’t agree with him on everything, but at least he was growing membership and donations.
Elected officials as well.
My wallet closed when they removed the anti-bigotry language from the platform, and when they came calling for donations I told them so, and that my wallet would stay closed until the platform was fixed.
I told them exactly what I required. I expect a lot of other people have also told them why they aren’t donating. They know what they should do, and have known for years. But they won’t do it. They went anti-woke and now they’re going broke. Delicious.