Last updated on October 4, 2025
Hello Libertarians. This is the eighth of a series of opinion articles I’ll be privileged to write for you once per month on an “inside baseball” topic for the Libertarian Party. I encourage everyone who has an opinion on whatever we’re talking about this month to comment or send phillies@4liberty.net your longer editorials, which may well be published.
Grossly oversimplified, here is the history of the Libertarian Party:
The 1970s were very good for the LP
The 1980s were very bad for the LP
The 1990s were pretty good for the LP
The 2000s were pretty bad for the LP
The 2010s were very good for the LP
The 2020s have been very bad for the LP… so far
It’s actually more complicated than that if you dive deeply into the numbers, and none of the turning points happened on exactly January 1st of the new decade. But the pattern is there. Overall our history has been a sine wave, with a good decade regularly following a bad one.
[Addendum:
Regardless of our actions, will the future follow the same course as the past?
No, probably not. But we can look at this pattern and observe something useful. Even if it doesn’t happen as regularly in the future as it did in the past, I think we can predict going forward that there will again be very good times, and that at some point bad times will return. It’ll probably never be as bad again as it was between 1984 and 1987, the true dark age of the Libertarian Party. And hopefully the national party will never again be as dysfunctional as it is right now, in the “little ice age” of 2021 to 2026. But there will be triumphs and disasters in the future, and sometimes those triumphs and disasters will have effects that linger for years.
Over the decades the Libertarian Party has had many people who came in during the good times, gave us time and energy, and then walked away in disgust when things got either rough or ridiculous. Those people are good, and they have contributed the majority of the effort toward the heights we have achieved when things were going well.
But there are also those who have stuck with us when times were tough, and when we look at the totality of the history of the Libertarian Party, they deserve the larger part of the credit for our overall success. Our endurance through difficulties sets us apart from most other political parties, and it’s only because of that endurance that our future victories are possible. We certainly need more all-weather Libertarians now.
It’s possible that we will eventually get to a spot where we are a major political force in the United States. That might happen because a fortuitous set of circumstances makes us a viable option for voters at the right time. It might also happen because of the sheer amount of effort we put into it. But it would not be possible at all if it had not been for the people who kept the lights on when our prospects looked doubtful, and at some point in the future we will be able to look back and count ourselves among them.
Maybe some day the LP will decide it needs to develop some brochures that can be used as handouts to people. The party is like a car dealer who advertises cars for sales but does not explain what the models are? I have spent over 500 hours working booths for the LP and when I say we do not have adequate material it is based on that experience and my 55 years in retail.
Women vote more than men but we do not try address any issues they might be interested in especially reproductive rights. Maybe promoting the idea of allowing women to have more opportunities to use midwives for births will be a benefit.
The website has a point on “Property Rights” and next to it is a comment on “End the War on Poverty”. The zoning laws and related regulations are one of the biggest violators of property rights in the nation and an expensive one as well that contributes to the poverty issues. Getting rid of zoning should be something we focus on.
If, and when the LP ever does decide to improve and explain in a few words some of the details, it might prove to be more interesting to others and that in turn will improve donations.
We used to have 6 or 7 brochure we could handout but they were done away with about 2006 and nothing has replaced them.
End for now
Agree. You worked endlessly on Tri-Met! I think I still have one of those bumper stickers in my collection. We need to focus far more on pocketbook issues, basic issues that voters can feel and understand. Bla bla bla about cryptocurrency, no one except a few esoterics care. I asked LP leaders in my (now former) state a few years ago, “how about campaigning against the new grocery bag ban?” and the response was “we don’t want to be seen as anti-environment”. So they’d rather be green than advocate freedom of choice at the checkout stand! My current state taxes groceries and the Democrats, bless their hearts, want to abolish it – but the Libertarians are silent, ignoring all sorts of local issues and choosing instead to obsess about Epstein and bitcoin.
Mr. Scott; Thank you for the compliment.
Scott are you the Scott who plays a guitar and was working in the medical insurance field when I lived in Portland and helped at the Saturday Market in Portland the two summers we had a booth there?
No, I’m pseudonymarific here, but I was active in the olden days of you and Bruce Knight and the Bucksteins.
Regardless, Thank you
I was on LNC 2016-2020 and it was well ran and funded.
The 2016 numbers I have show some 19M votes nationwide, 4M of them cast in the presidential campaign. Those 4 million covered the gap in 13 states casting 127 electoral votes. After that 2×4 upside the haid, the Dems quit promising to keep cops shooting kids over plant leaves and sth like half the states have since either decriminalized some substances or made them into bribe, tax and ransom bait. Because the entrenched, Nixon-law-funded parties are so alike, 3% of the vote suffices to repeal the bad laws we vote against. THAT is winning. Losing is what you get when you trash your vote for what you DON’T want.
What are the criteria being used to decide whether a decade was good or bad? Votes for President? Contributions? Member numbers? Any of all of those?
All of them. A good proxy is “How close were we generally to bankruptcy during this decade?” and “How much did membership increase or decrease during this decade?”
Info about more recent decades is easier to find than about earlier ones.
Having said all of that, in the 80s we had more electoral success at the state and local level than we ever had before or after, although that had almost nothing to do with how well the national party was doing. No group has ever matched the energy and success of the Liberterian Party of Alaska from 1978 through 1987, despite stuff blowing up elsewhere. Nationwide we were healthiest and steadiest from about 2016 through 2020.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
Upward trend = June 1971 through 1983 (explosive growth through 1981, positive though leveling off through 1983)
Downward trend = 1984 through 1987 (sharp!)
Upward trend = 1988 through 2000 (gradual and bumpy path upward, though the hype said otherwise)
Downward trend = 2001 through 2008 (a big hit, followed by limping along)
Upward trend = 2009 through 2020 (everything seems to be going steadily up, and we hit a really excellent stride after 2016, until…)
Downward trend = 2021 through now (the Mises era ruins a ton of progress, starting when JBH writes a letter to Jiletta Jarvis)
If you want the raw numbers, I can give you what I have, but I think I’ve already maybe given too long of an answer.
Tom, I have been compiling spreadsheets of LP votes for a long time–with rate-of-change slopes–and am willing to swap data.
The standard of value for a libertarian vote is BAD LAWS REPEALED. If someone other than a looter actually gets elected, that’s icing on the cake–mainly because they deflect money away from the entrenched whatchamacallit.