Well, it’s the day after Labor Day in the year before a federal election — historically considered the unofficial kickoff for the coming year’s political campaigns. This year it’s the official kickoff for my own political campaign.
I’m pleased and proud to announce my write-in candidacy as a Libertarian for US House of Representatives from Florida’s 3rd District*.
Over the coming months I will do my best to articulate many compelling reasons for the 3rd District’s voters to choose me as their representative in Washington. For now, I’m just going to offer, as simply as possible, my reason for running:
I’ve looked at the major party candidates for the seat, incumbent Republican Ted Yoho and Democratic challenger Ed Emery.
Given their stated positions on the issues (and Yoho’s performance in office thus far), I can’t imagine myself voting for either of them, nor do I believe they deserve your vote, nor have I heard of any credible alternatives declaring for the office or even “testing the waters” for a prospective candidacy.
That leaves me with the choice of either not voting, or voting for myself. And if I’m going to vote for myself, I might as well ask you to vote for me too. So that’s what I’m doing.
I look forward to a lively discussion of the issues over the coming 14 months, hopefully culminating in your own decision to write in “Tom Knapp for Congress” next November.
Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Libertarian for Congress
* As of my campaign announcement, my US House district is currently designated the 3rd. Due to ongoing issues with the Florida legislature’s redistricting actions, that may change. If it does, I’ll update you 🙂
Fair enough. I hope it works. If you try to register a lot of people to vote, many of them will raise the jury duty objection. That’s a good opening to talk about jury nullification/autonomy. As you get new folks on board, ride and room share to the national convention may be an issue to discuss with them….some may go but only if they can split costs. I know you’re doing the bicycle thing so it wouldn’t be rideshare with you, but I’ve been surprised to hear how many people over the years – even people who are not new to the party – have told me they can’t afford it, because they are thinking solely in terms of paying all the gas and room costs by themselves, plus the convention packages, eating out for a long weekend etc.
Yeah — I’ve got looking into historical problems with that in this area on my “to-do” list.
But, once again, vote totals are a secondary consideration for me.
There are 13 whole or partial counties in my district. To the best of my knowledge, none of them have active LP affiliates.
I will consider the campaign a success if it allows me to identify at least a couple of people in each county, preferably 5-10, who are willing to do the work of creating a continuous LP presence that can field future candidates and support future campaigns.
Hopefully you can also get an accurate tally of your votes, and get it before it becomes anything except a historical footnote.
“I didn’t realize, or forgot, that paid for disclaimer requirements even apply to write-in campaigns at all.”
I’m not sure that they do, but:
1) Better safe than sorry with respect to the election laws; and
2) While I don’t think disclaimers and disclosures should be legally required, I think they’re a good and laudable idea in general.
I’ve only run one write-in campaign in the past (as campaign manager). That was a short, sharp, oddly circumstanced, and by some accounts dirty campaign, with no time to have signs printed. But the fliers I put on every door in the election area had disclaimers on them. And my candidate won the election.
Having looked at the numbers for both balloted third party candidates and write-in candidates in this area, I’d be blowing smoke up people’s asses if I tried to characterize it as a “winnable race.”
On the other hand, I have good reason to believe I can out-perform most historical write-in candidates, and likely even perform on par with most balloted third party candidates.
Like I said, I have 100 signs on the way. In my admittedly anecdotal experience, that’s about 100 more signs than most write-in candidates procure or use during the entirety of their campaigns.
In my experience, most write-in candidates file their declarations of candidacy, maybe show up as one-liners in a newspaper account or two, and maybe blog every now and then during the election cycle. They get their five or fifty votes from family and co-workers and that’s the end of it.
I have a plan to be VISIBLE, both personally and in terms of sign/literature/advertising/web presence. In fact, if last year’s congressional election was an indicator, I can quite possibly be more visible than the Democrat challenger, and competitively visible (apart from large billboard signage and TV advertising) with the Republican incumbent.
I didn’t realize, or forgot, that paid for disclaimer requirements even apply to write-in campaigns at all.
Quick campaign update:
Thanks to Steve M, who just ordered the first 100 signs for the campaign! They’re high-contrast, purple background, white text.
At the top in large letters:
WRITE IN
TOM KNAPP
FOR CONGRESS
Then below, In slightly smaller, but still very readable, font:
YOUR LIBERTARIAN CHOICE
FOR FLORIDA AND FREEDOM
At the bottom in small font, the usual “paid for” disclaimer.
The campaign also has a Facebook page and Twitter feed now. I’m making progress on the FAQ and issues positions section of the web site.
Well, I do care about jury nullification and I do what I can to support it (I wrote a column advocating it a few months ago that got picked up by newspapers in Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana and Missouri).
If I can find effective ways to work my support for jury nullification into my congressional campaign, I will. I’ll probably include a jury nullification pamphlet at any literature tables I do, and so forth.
But a political campaign isn’t about the candidate yammering on this and that thing that HE cares about. It’s about the candidate appealing to voters on the issues THEY care about.
At any given time during the campaign, my stump speeches and conversation starters will center on two or three topics that dominate the public conversation in the election cycle, with likely occasional additions for big topics in the shorter news cycle.
If I’m lucky, one or more of those topics will provide openings to talk about jury nullification. Otherwise, I’ll have to hope that at any given event someone asks a question or brings up a topic that lets me address the subject (and I’m not above asking someone I know to be that questioner now and again).
I was going to roundly insult Tom Knapp for being delusional, but then he agreed with Andy to hand out jury nullification information to people, so instead, I wish him well.
This is the thing to hand out if you want to prevent tyranny:
Surviving Voir Dire by Clay Conrad
All jury rights strategies that don’t focus on inoculating the public against voir dire are a waste of time, because there are hundreds of thousands of libertarians who get kicked off juries right now. There are more than enough potential independent jurors, but, quite simply, they never get seated. Therefore, they fail to independently judge and strike down bad laws, as was intended by the Founders. Now, I don’t personally care whether the Founders intended this, or whether they intended to rape their slaves: I just care that Joe Sixpack cares about what the Founders intended. (So don’t encourage them to ignore you by calling yourself an anarchist.) These citizen-jurors often(not always!) need to be inoculated to resist the judge’s false authority by reference to the Founders. This may require setting aside your ego, a bit. But the result of a successful nullification of tyranny is very much worth it.
Notice how I didn’t say “jury nullification” much? It’s a bad term. It encourages the superficial to think the jury is being nullified. The better term is Conrad’s “Jury Independence.” Remember: most people are superficial, and have been indoctrinated by the government youth propaganda camps (Vin Suprynowicz’s term). The more you attempt to introduce them to unnecessary legalese instead of focusing on “what will happen,” the less success you will have at “stopping tyranny” or producing a “citizen’s veto.” It’s good to point out: “Voting ‘not guilty’ is a right. There’s a reason the judge can’t follow you into deliberations. His words have no authority in the deliberation chamber.”
For virtually everyone, you need to explain to them what will happen when they are called. (The judge will try to remove them if they answer the questions differently from the other veniremen, or even look different than the other veniremen in any nonconformist way. This is where the trial is won or lost.)
I sincerely hope Tom does more on the jury independence front than on the futile not-even-electoral-participation and self-promotion front, as that at least has the chance of interfering with actual tyranny.
Good luck, Tom!
PS: Hey Joe! Remember, …you have two choices when it comes to sugarwater! But one of them is too sugary, or too watery, or too slightly different, there’s really …only one!
“Thomas L. Knapp
September 9, 2015 at 10:16 pm
Andy,
I’m actually planning some jury nullification activity in the near future, but probably not specifically as part of the campaign. IMO, that’s better done in courthouse areas, so I’m going to try to identify cases and trial dates where it will do the most good. We have a federal courthouse in Gainesville for the northern district of Florida.”
I think that you should make jury nullification activism a part of your campaign, and I actually do not consider courthouses to be the best place to do jury nullification activism. Why? Because most of the public has never heard about jury nullification, and it can take a new idea a while to be accepted by a person. If somebody is walking inside a court room, they are already under some pressure, and they probably do not feel like being there, and if some person that they do not know presents them with a new idea as they are about to walk in the door, it is not likely to sink in right away. Also, the people who are most likely to even be at a courthouse in the first place for jury duty are more likely to be unthinking conformists, as a lot of the free thinking individualist types are more likely to have found a way out of jury duty, such as by not even responding to it (jury duty notifications can be ignored, and since there is no proof that a person received since they are not sent via certified mail, the government can’t do anything to them).
I think that it is much better to educate people about the right of jury nullification before they ever get called for jury duty. I’d bet that if more people knew that they had a right to nullify laws as jurors, that more people would be willing to serve on juries.
Another problem with doing jury rights activism outside of courthouses is that you are more likely to be hassled by the police. People should have a right to do this outside of court rulings, and there have been court rulings that have affirmed this, but even so, jury rights activism outside of courthouse can lead to the jury rights activists being hassled by the police, and even arrested, and like I said above, I think that is much better if the public already knows about jury nullification before they ever get called for jury duty.
I think that all Libertarian candidates should include jury nullification as a talking point in their campaigns, and as it specifically relates to the office for which you are running, US House, you could say that if elected, you will put a bill in Congress that would require information about jury nullification to be posted on the wall of every court room in big bold letters, and that you will also put in bills to require that judges have to inform jurors about jury nullification.
Libertarians really need to get a lot more vocal about jury nullification, because this is an issue where we can really make a difference regardless of whether we get elected to office. It only takes one out of twelve people to hang any jury. If a majority of the public knew about jury nullification, the government would have a really difficult time prosecuting people for victimless crimes.
We should have teams of people on the ground every day working to inform the public about jury nullification. Heck, if I was really rich I’d offer to pay you $50,000 a year just to go around and spread information about jury nullification on a full time basis (say for a minimum of 40 hours per week).
there ya go Tom. Find me a sign maker that will allow me to order 200 signs. Then can you pick them up for me?
Yes, good luck. Any media sympathy or contacts? Seriously, raise money if you can. ES
Best wishes Tom. It sounds like a good plan.
Andy,
I’m actually planning some jury nullification activity in the near future, but probably not specifically as part of the campaign. IMO, that’s better done in courthouse areas, so I’m going to try to identify cases and trial dates where it will do the most good. We have a federal courthouse in Gainesville for the northern district of Florida.
Richard,
I appreciate the “if I was rich enough” offer, but as I’ve explained elsewhere, I think getting on the ballot would be a malinvestment. There are parts of Florida where the LP is strong enough to make that kind of investment pay off, but right now this isn’t one of them.
My electoral goal is to exceed usual write-in results and get results typical of balloted third party candidates, but I will be happier, regardless of vote totals, if my campaign ends up identifying and activating 25 people in the district who are willing to form active affiliates in two or three of the counties, including Alachua.
Alachua County in particular should be an LP stronghold in Florida. There’s an active student libertarian presence, and while the rural areas of this part of the state are diehard Republican, Gainesville strikes me as sort of culturally left with a libertarian streak in the way normally associated with, say, the San Francisco area.
Steve,
Once I have my yard signs designed and priced by a good provider, I’ll get back to you. In terms of campaign contributions, I don’t plan to seek cash, but specifically to ask for in-kind contributions of signs and so forth. My first thing to either purchase or get donated is an inexpensive bicycle trailer. I’ve got a decent bike — I bought an old Trek 7000 last year. It may be time for a tuneup and/or new brakes, but I’d be doing that whether I was planning to campaign or not. I’m hoping my shoulders will be in good enough shape to get back on the road later this month (torn rotator cuffs — this time last year I was putting in 100 miles or more per week on the bike, including some 40-mile rides, and I plan to work back up to than and then some starting soon, with an eye toward riding the 150 miles from my home to the national convention next summer).
Matt: see https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2015/09/augustus-invictus-official-response-to-the-criticisms-of-chairman-wyllie/#comment-1234432
Why aren’t you going to try to get on the ballot?
go for it Tom….
I will buy you 200 yard signs (max $200) if you think you can get 200 houses to plant them out front.
“WRITE IN
TOM KNAPP
LIBERTARIAN
FOR CONGRESS”
Yes, it would be annoying if people thought your last name was “Libertarian” and voted accordingly.
Tom, while you are at it, you ought to carry some information to hand out about jury nullification as well.
Oops, I meant there have been 8. Murkowski was the 8th.
There have been more write-in candidates elected to Congress in the general election than the list above. The first one was in Massachusetts in 1918, Peter Tague. He beat President John Kennedy’s grandfather, John T. Fitzgerald. The second one was in 1930 in Sacramento, California, where Charles F. Curry had died just before the deadline for removing a dead candidate from the ballot, but it was too late for anyone else to get on the ballot, so the ballot had no names listed. Curry’s son won as a write-in; his name was also Charles Curry.
In 1946, William F. Knowland was elected to the US Senate for the 3-month term on write-ins. Again, no name was on the ballot for that race.
Also Dale Alford was elected as a write-in from Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1958. He beat the incumbent, Brooks Hays, the Democratic nominee.
So there have been 7. I hope Tom gets a good write-in vote. Opponents of write-ins in Florida are forever claiming that write-in candidates never get more than a handful of votes, which is true. We need an example of someone getting a good number of write-ins in Florida. On the other hand, I wish I were so rich I could pay Tom’s filing fee, which is about $10,000.
Andy,
Good suggestion — I’ll probably get some forms to carry with me.
tk, good luck with your tactic. Sounds like a great way to get in shape!
Packard, it seems, had lost the R primary in his 82 effort. I recall that was the case with Murkowski, too. According to Wiki:
“Packard was only the third person to be elected to Congress as a write-in candidate, a victory later documented in Campaigns and Elections and due in part to the efforts of Russell Reed Benedict. The two previously successful congressional write-in candidates were U.S. Rep. Joe Skeen (R-New Mexico 2d Dist.) in 1980 and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S. Carolina) in 1954.”
Skeen’s and Thurmond’s situations were also a special cases, Skeen being the choice the R bosses in NM who’d previously not challenged a sitting D MC who died before the election. Thurmond, recently a guv, threw in to a Senate race as a write-in also in the wake of an incumbent dying months before the election.
So, trying to best indie/3rd party results seems a more reasonable goal for you.
Tom, you should carry a bunch of voter registration forms with you while you do this. When you are around the college you can tell students that they can register at their college address so they can vote for you, or, if they have family in Florida, they can register there, but they will have to drive there to vote, or request an absentee ballot to send in the mail. You could ask everyone who you give a voter registration form to if they would fill in the word Libertarian in the party box.
“when was the last time a write-in candidate won a seat in Congress?”
2010 — Lisa Murkowski for US Senate.
For the House of Representatives, it looks like the last candidate to win the general election as a write-in was Ron Packard in California in 1982, but there have been several write-in primary winners since then who went on to win the general election.
But of course I have no illusions about winning. I looked at some numbers from around Florida, and my general impression is this:
* The AVERAGE third party or independent candidate whose name is on the ballot gets 2-3% of the vote.
* The AVERAGE write-in candidate gets less than 1/2 of 1% of the vote … but some write-ins do as well as those AVERAGE balloted third party candidates.
My goal is to outperform the AVERAGE third party candidate, as a write-in.
My “strange ideas” aren’t about the issues — I’ll be running on a fairly straightforward libertarian platform — but about campaign strategy.
I have a bicycle. I’ll be buying, or finding a supporter to donate in-kind, a trailer to pull behind that bicycle. I will adorn the trailer with campaign signage, and store literature and yard signs in the trailer to use and hand out.
I plan two types of “bicycle campaign” activities.
One will involve spending weekends on long rides to the far-flung areas of the district. The district, unless it changes in the current redistricting controversy, includes part or all of 13 counties. I intend to visit each of those 13 counties by bicycle, planting signs as I go (I’ve noticed that there don’t seem to be any restrictions — or if so, they are not enforced — on putting signs next to the road). If I can identify supporters in towns along the way, I’ll see if they’re willing to set up little meet and greet events.
My signage plan is to go for a very readable, loud color scheme, signs that say:
WRITE IN
TOM KNAPP
LIBERTARIAN
FOR CONGRESS
(I may move the word “Libertarian” out of the center there, perhaps off to the side and diagonal where it remains very visible, but leaves the straightforward “WRITE IN TOM KNAPP FOR CONGRESS” as a unitary message)
The second bicycle plan involves the way roads are set up in this area. There a couple of main traffic conduits feeding out into the district from Gainesville and within an easy ride from my home. They get LOTS of traffic coming in to town in the morning and leaving town at night. These are people who clearly live in the district, and there’s great bike access for me to ride up and down the road with my signage very visible to those commuters. At the right times of the day, I can put myself within sight of several thousand cars per hour.
I’ll also do as much of the conventional campaign stuff as I’m allowed to do — interest group surveys, candidate forums, etc.
Last year, I made it a point to do some riding around the rural areas of the district within 30 miles or so of my home, and I saw LOTS of retail politics occurring — candidate standing in a parking lot, waving a sign and talking to passersby. I think it’s a great district for a write-in campaign, properly done.
Curious, when was the last time a write-in candidate won a seat in Congress?
TK, what sort of ideas were you thinking about?
Eric,
Assuming that the LPF runs a US Senate candidate next year, that race will be the party’s marquee race, and the idea will be to build on an incredibly well-done set of 2014 statewide campaigns (Wyllie for governor, Wohlsifer for AG). Neither my personality nor my intended strategy fit into that plan.
If I lived in, say, the 13th district, where Lucas Overby polled nearly 25% in 2014, I wouldn’t be running for Congress — or if I did, I’d run a more conventional campaign to build on Overby’s good results.
But I am off in a corner of the state where the LP has not done well, or done much — at least not since I’ve been here, and according to election results I looked up, for years before that. In my opinion, this gives me the freedom to try out some ideas that interest me. If they work, they’ll help the party. If they don’t work, well, it’s not like I’ll be wrecking a record of past success.
To the extent that the LPF runs statewide candidates or issues campaigns in 2016, I’ll do what I can to help; conversely, I don’t intend to ask LPF to invest resources in my strange effort. In my opinion, it is my job to create success for LPF here, not LPF’s job to create success for me.
Why not the Senate seat? Aren’t the current nomination choices equally questionable intra-LPFL?
Good luck.
I’ve been hoping to find a picture of Yoho getting drunk with a prostitute, so that I can have the photo published with the caption “Yoho, ho, and a bottle of rum.” But no dice so far.
“Republican Ted Yoho ”
When I first looked at the last name I thought it said Yoyo. This is a name that is just asking to be made fun of.
Thanks for the write-up, Jed!