Chapter Sixteen
August 2000—The Fundraising Crescendo
August was the Campaign’s best single month, with close to $260,000 raised and almost $230,000 spent. Despite record one-month fundraising (and, in the end, strong cash-on-hand at the end of August), the Browne campaign continued to experience critical financial difficulties. In his article for Liberty magazine, Sturzenacker reports that on August 29 Willis emailed the campaign’s ‘key volunteers’, reporting that no TV ads had been purchased in several weeks “because we ran out of money”. The campaign had regularly heralded ad purchases in LibertyWire. True to Willis’s word that available cash was short, no ad purchases are noted in FEC reports for the several weeks before August 29.
One of the Campaign’s difficulties was that the number of donors was much fewer than the number of party members. Browne had set an objective of 200,000 Party members on the grounds that 200,000 donors would be enough to make a sizable national impact. This assumed that the number of donors matched the number of members. In 2000, there were 33,000 members, but nothing like 33,000 donors. In mid-September Willis said in LibertyWire that ‘there are nearly 30,000 LP contributors who have not yet given to the campaign’. By inference, barely 3000 Party members, 10% of Party membership, had donated to the Presidential campaign. Some were quite generous; 300 donors, equivalent to 1% of Party membership, gave Browne the legal maximum $1000.
The television campaign crept ahead. More National Party advertising for the Browne campaign, another $20,000, came on August 3. On the same date, LibertyWire reported ‘We have spent another $40,000 of time on MSNBC and CNBC.’ The Browne campaign did spend $11,750 on August 10, and another $10,000 on August 30, which it heralded in LibertyWire as ‘we are now up to $131,750 in ad buys. Counting National Party spending, actual ad purchases to date were over $150,000, but 2/3 of that spending was by the National Party.
Reports of ad purchases sometimes created confusion with Party members. Advertising space is sold by priority. You pay a lower rate if you allow your ads to be bumped by higher-priority ads. Your lower priority ad will be shown, eventually, just not at the originally scheduled time. The author has seen eyewitness reports of political ads bought this way—for which party’s candidate is not the issue—appearing one after the next the day after the election. To make scarce money go further, Browne 2000 largely bought low priority ads, which in some locales were bumped by higher priority ads. Low-priority Browne ads were shown at times later than originally announced. Had the ads been broadcast or not, wondered many members?
Television ad production also continued. Much more money was spent producing the ads than broadcasting them, the reverse of the situation in normal political campaigns. Normally spending for ad delivery outweighs ad production by a ratio such as 10-1. In the Browne campaign, production got higher priority. California Libertarians drew a contrast between Browne’s methods and the advertising campaign of David Nolan, which by report produced superb television ads and spent most of its money transmitting those ads to the public.
