Posted by Jim in Open Thread:
For most states I used numbers closer to the election than those that are in the November BAN. The numbers that I used for the Constitution Party, Working Families Party, and Reform Party are within a few hundred of the number in BAN. But, the more updated numbers that I used I used added 2,300 to the Green Party and 18,800 to the Libertarian Party. Almost half of the difference for the LP came from California. Richard Winger used the 60 day pre-election report while I used the 15 day report.
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It will all go in the same imgur album as before. There will be some new stuff in there, too. Most of it won’t be done until late January or early February.
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The [Libertarian Party] fall in the 1980s is due almost entirely to a steep decline in California’s numbers. A few other states, like Arizona and Nevada, increased during the decade. But California amounted to 87% – 98% of all registrations in the 1980s. It probably had a lot to do with Reagan being Governor there. And Justin Raimondo was publishing letters in LP News asking people to quit the LP and join the Republican Party. Also contributing to about 2,000 of the decline: 11 states reported LP stats in 1980, but only 7 did so by 1990.
The 90s was a reverse of all of those things. By 2000 California had added 44,000, rebounding back above its 1980 level. The number of states reporting increased from 7 to 21. And there were also some states besides California with rapid growth. Pennsylvania added 30,000, which moved it up to 2nd place behind California, where it remains today. No states finished 2000 with fewer registrations than 1990.
California lost about 7,000 between 2000 and 2008, but those came back by 2010, leaving it flat for the decade. The dip in 2002 is entirely explained by the fact that Pennsylvania did not report the LP registration stat that year (it would have been around 32,000.) The dip in 2006 was caused by North Carolina and Nebraska going to zero, wiping out around 18,000. And Massachusetts peaked in 2004 at 24,000 and began a slide that didn’t stop until 9,000 in 2016. The number of states reporting only rose from 21 in 2000 to 25 in 2010, and the 4 added states didn’t contribute much. 6 state parties had a net loss during the 2000s.
The number of states reporting in 2018 was 31. Combined those 6 additional states contributed 24,000 to the 567,000 total. The rest has been pretty widespread growth. Since 2010, California is up 58,000, Colorado 29,000, North Carolina 28,000, Florida 15,000, Nebraska 14,000, Maryland 13,000… Only two states have a net loss since 2010: Alaska and Massachusetts. And those two combined are only down 1,600.
Maine’s losing theirs but they are fighting back.
At the current growth rate it won’t knock them down for long 🙂
Could you cite examples from the California party?
An activist group in California started doing concentrated education and outreach efforts in 2005 called Alive Free Happy. Over the years they have performed tremendously in state wide initiatives for legalizing marijuana and concentrated a great deal of energy in those several campaigns to register new Libertarians. They have also accumulated a small activist army in those 13 years and have been supporting candidates with comprehensive campaign tools including the winning Jeff Hewitt campaign.
There is no other outreach effort in California. The party itself is dysfunctional with Republican saboteurs holding highest offices. The activists tend to do all of this work recruiting, educating and running candidates all the while dodging the LP leadership’s directed destructive influence on its own members.
Yes, x/y divided by 2x/7y = 7/2.
But getting a better per capita factor for a smaller state vs the most populace state is not that surprising. But I am kind of surprised that Cali is beating out New Hampshire RE: the percentage.
Libertarian voter registration percentage by state:
1.30% Alaska
1.21% Nebraska
1.18% Colorado
1.00% Nevada
0.99% Utah
0.96% Kansas
0.88% Idaho
0.85% Arizona
0.79% Wyoming
0.76% California
0.75% New Mexico
0.72% Oregon
0.65% Iowa
0.55% Maryland
0.54% Maine
0.53% North Carolina
0.52% Pennsylvania
0.52% West Virginia
0.49% Louisiana
0.41% Oklahoma
0.35% Massachusetts
0.34% South Dakota
0.27% D.C.
0.27% Kentucky
0.25% Florida
0.25% Delaware
0.19% New Jersey
0.14% Connecticut
0.07% New Hampshire
0.07% New York
0.02% Arkansas
0.50% National
Mike Seebeck says “Now, California has about 7x the population of Colorado, but only doubled Colorado in new registrations. If the populations of each are static (and they aren’t), that means that Colorado outperformed California in new registrations by a factor of 14”
If California has 7x the population of Colorado, and doubled Colorado’s new registrations, it means that
Colorado outperformed California by a factor of 3.5.
Still impressive, but we want the math to be accurate.
I think we can see the power of decent media coverage.
Good thing it’s not, so we can be way ahead of the curve in spotting the trend it will take those folks longer to notice.
If the y axis was 130 million, we could not see these microscopic differences, I’d note.
The problem with doing that for voter registrations is that states report that number inconsistently. If I started in 2006, for example, only 21 of the 31 states that reported LP voter registrations in 2018 did so for that entire time.
Instead I used signature members per million population, for which I have data for all 50 states and DC back to year end 2005. I used the Federal Reserve’s annual population estimates for each year.
This is the per million signature member count in 2017 minus the per million signature member count in 2005:
212 New Hampshire
193 Virginia
159 Indiana
150 Ohio
149 Montana
149 North Dakota
142 Tennessee
135 Maine
132 Colorado
130 South Carolina
129 Alabama
123 New Mexico
122 Nebraska
118 Missouri
118 Michigan
116 Wisconsin
113 Vermont
112 Connecticut
110 Pennsylvania
109 Rhode Island
108 Louisiana
105 Mississippi
104 Kentucky
102 Wyoming
101 South Dakota
101 Alaska
99 Iowa
99 Illinois
98 Minnesota
98 Arkansas
98 Nevada
97 Maryland
92 Kansas
91 Delaware
90 Oklahoma
84 West Virginia
84 Florida
83 New York
83 Washington
81 Texas
81 North Carolina
79 Arizona
78 Hawaii
73 D. C.
73 Idaho
72 New Jersey
62 Georgia
56 Utah
54 Oregon
49 Massachusetts
21 California
New Hampshire obviously benefited from the Free State Project. And the good news is that all states grew faster than their population growth. These numbers are from after the 1st list purge in April, 2017, but before the second one in January, 2018. So doing this again at the end of this year might knock some states down slightly.
You can see the maps here:
https://i.imgur.com/Cd6hX5l.png
https://i.imgur.com/LVE4EYY.png
It would be interesting to a more apples-to-apples comparison between the states by coming up with a rate of increase per population increase to see how growths are happening relative to population growths in each state.
For example: Since 2010, California is up 58,000, Colorado 29,000, North Carolina 28,000, Florida 15,000, Nebraska 14,000, Maryland 13,000
Now, California has about 7x the population of Colorado, but only doubled Colorado in new registrations. If the populations of each are static (and they aren’t), that means that Colorado outperformed California in new registrations by a factor of 14. However, the population deltas have to be factored in to get legitimate comparisons over that period of time. That means the numbers absent those deltas are not accurate.
Where does all of this go? To point out where the registration successes are happening first, and then to figure out why and how to export those messages and methods, if possible, to the lesser states to boost their own numbers and efforts.