I pause to present two images from my book Libertarian Renaissance. They have been used elsewhere.
The first is a plot of membership in various years around 2000. You will notice that there is a peak near the year 2000. That’s when the LNC voted to adopt Project Archimedes. Membership never climbed a great deal. Soon thereafter, membership began to fall, finally bottoming out in 2007.
We also have a plot of party income for the same period. There is a peak, over $4 million, but income then fell rapidly until it reached close to one million dollars.
Marijuana started to become legal in some states. Those who were primarily interested in that issue may have dropped out. Then Washington and California adopted the top two election and that caused others to drop out since people would not be in the general election, Then the Iraq War followed. which lost a few more. These changes in the 5 to 10years around 2000 had an impact in my opinion.
This is why I think the LP needs to post a list of ten or so issues that are important to moving ahead on the website can can also be cut and pasted for handout.
The final Project Archimedes mailings went out in mid 2000. Without checking, I think it was enacted in November 1997. Around 2016 I read the executive committee emails discussing it from 1997 – 2000. I wish I saved the link because I’ve never found it, again. They canceled it because the response rate to the mailings was miniscule. Again, going from memory, on the order of 0.25%. And that may have been falling as the lowest hanging fruit was gone for in the early rounds, aside from some test-mailings.
So, the new members from the mailings were not covering the cost of the mailings. That was made worse by the Unified Membership Program requiring the money be split with the state parties even as the national party funded the entire cost of the mailings. The national party was relying on those new members renewing for multiple years. By 2000 it had become extremely clear that those PA members were one-and-done. Very few renewals. Which meant, the longer it went on, the more money they would lose. So, it was canceled after only sending out around a quarter of the number of the initially planned for mailings.
Membership did increase substantially but, there was the confounding variable of the Unified Membership Program. States did not all join the UMP at the same time, when it began in, again going from memory, 1995. I found one state, Alaska, I think, which only joined in 1999 or 2000. And I don’t know if others joined later than that.
We will cover all this in my book, which has been available for many years.