From a Free and Equal Elections Foundation email blast:
Everyone needs an excuse to come to Vegas, so blame it on LPEX and the Free and Equal Elections Foundation.
The Free and Equal Elections Foundation is encouraging our members to attend LPEX 2015. LPEX, the Libertarian Political Expo, is a major non-partisan conference created to connect people, organizations, technology, and ideas. LPEX provides vital leadership training in the form of workshops, panelists, and speakers. LPEX takes place at the Tropicana Las Vegas May 28th – 31st in Las Vegas, NV. Currently there are more than 30 organizations and companies involved. The Free and Equal Elections Foundation will be hosting an informational booth at LPEX to discuss a wide variety of subjects related to electoral politics.
The Free and Equal Elections Foundation has a special promo code for a 35% off discount. Please enter promo code LPEX2015 when you are registering www.LPEX.org/register.
Featured Speakers + Panelists
There are currently over 40 speakers, trainers, and panelists with a wide variety of backgrounds ranging from elected officials to national radio personalities to successful entrepreneurs, including United We Stand Festival 2015 speakers Judge Jim Gray and Christina Tobin. LPEX has the following elected officials from Nevada: 3 State Senators, 9 members of the Assembly, Secretary of State, Treasurer, Controller, Assistant Controller, Las Vegas City Councilman.
Visit LPEX.org/speakers for a full list.
Professional Training
LPEX has secured some of the top political trainers in the country to facilitate training and workshops. The Free and Equal Elections Foundation has been invited to join these workshops in the future which will focus on inspiring people to vote, run for office, and become engaged in the electoral process.
Please visit LPEX.org/training/workshops to view some of the workshops.
Featured Sponsors & Exhibitors
Please visit LPEX.org/sponsors to visit the sponsors.
Register Now
LPEX has created multiple conference packages to suit the needs of everyone.
Get trained to become an effective leader. Become educated, engaged, empowered! Over 4 days you will gain more knowledge, make more connections, and take more actionable steps towards becoming an effective leader than ever before! Get the tools, resources, and strategic insight you will need to achieve your biggest goals.
Receive a 35% off discount, enter promo code LPEX2015 when you are registering www.LPEX.org/register.
LPEX is an official sponsor of the United We Stand Festival 2015, hosted by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation in Colorado this fall. The goal of achieving liberty and equality through political education is a virtuous step towards a more honest political process, a goal shared by both the Free and Equal Elections Foundation and LPEX
Sure, I’ll grant that they have unfair advantages, and that imitating what they do exactly is kind of like ‘copy the dealer’ in Blackjack – a sure way to lose. But so is running poor campaigns, or expecting policy wonkery to carry the day, or failing to campaign, or running a campaign with the goal of getting 1% of the votes.
I’m much more interested in the PR firms hired than in hearing from the Republican Congressmen and others – I’ll likely skip most of those, go to the workshops with the PR firms, and spend the rest of my time exploring Las Vegas.
I’ll also add, again, that I wish more Libertarian officeholders were speaking at this event. Surely I have something to learn from people who have won office as Libertarians, or at least from some of them. Clearly they know something about winning and campaigning – and about doing it under harsher conditions than the Republicans.
I’m afraid I can’t follow your last sentence. I’d say I oppose the Stupid Party precisely because of ideological differences – I have a different belief than them, want a different world, and choose to do it through involvement in politics in order to move public policy in a direction closer to my ideology.
You mean where PR firms are hired to come to a non-partisan event?
I think you misunderstood my point. My point was that we shouldn’t assume that we have something to learn from the Stupid Party just because they win. For one thing, the Stupid Party has quite an unfair advantage.
Aspiring Libertarian candidates and campaign managers would do well to not seek “vital leadership training” from the likes Republican Congressman Joe Heck. The reason 3rd parties oppose the Stupid Party isn’t because of ideological differences. It’s because their ideology and leadership is lacking.
But learning doesn’t need to involve participating in their events and building up their image – it can involve, instead, having an event like LPEX where PR firms are hired to come to a Libertarian event.
In fact, though, I’d say the average Stupid Party candidate (by which I mean any of the old parties) does have a superior campaign to the average third-party candidate. Many third-party candidates are inexperienced both in governing and in campaigning, and it shows in a lack of consistent messaging and branding. With some notable exceptions, Stupid Party candidates manage to stay on message, decide what image they want to project, and project it. Many third-party candidates do not, either because we believe that the innate goodness of our policies will get us attention or because our sights are not set on winning.
As for the final paragraph, I’d think some Libertarians wanting to run professional campaigns would like to hire Libertarian campaign managers, so it behooves us to have Libertarians trained to be campaign managers.
No. I’m saying establishment parties don’t win elections over third parties because they have superior campaign techniques or organization techniques. so that should not lead us to assume that we have anything to learn from them.
Especially if:
* they have a vested interest in our failure,
* its unlikely that we’ll beat them by employing their tactics,
* learning involves participating in their events and building up their image,
* it would lead a casual observer to question why we are running against them in the first place.
Regarding learning campaign techniques or organization techniques, it all depends what kind of campaign you want to have. For the type of campaign where you need to know all of that, you’d need your own professional campaign manager who is already skilled in those areas anyway.
So you’re saying there is no such thing as campaign techniques, or organization techniques, that are not ideological or partisan in nature?
The only thing Democrats and Republicans are going to teach is us how to be more like Democrats and Republicans. The sad part is that some on the list of speakers actually had Nevada LP candidates running against them in the last election cycle.
>I guess with so many republican organizations and speakers on the agenda they couldn’t get >enough libertarians to register.
I will be attending. I know that many speakers will be Republicans and Democrats, and I’ve asked many times, in many different places, without getting satisfaction, how it can be that out of our 144 elected Libertarians, only one was selected as having sufficient knowledge to teach people how to win as Libertarians, something you’d think elected Libertarians would be somewhat expert in. However, I also know that there are plenty of non-ideological techniques and tactics one can learn at a workshop, regardless of the identity of the presenter, and that’s why I am excited to go. Well, that and it being held in Las Vegas – although I suspect that the latter may be holding attendance down. Here on the east coast, certainly, I’ve had people asking why they would fly to Vegas to learn campaign tactics when they could go to Leadership Institute in Virginia, or the upcoming campaign school in Maine.
I really doubt, though, that the presence of non-libertarians among the attendees is going to cause Libertarian attendees to suddenly become Republicans. A Libertarian who spends the money to attend is likely pretty engaged.
When did this become a non-partisan conference? The LSLA, a partisan entity, sank all its hard earned resources into this and now it is no longer a libertarian party event, but is non-partisan?
I guess with so many republican organizations and speakers on the agenda they couldn’t get enough libertarians to register. By making it “non-partisan”, they can appeal to republicans to register and help them convince libertarians to convert. Wow. Sure glad my state decided not to send anyone.