They have started. Speaker on real estate. Arguing for a building near DC as a status symbol. Discussing the agenda. Announcement of Bylaws committee. Regional reports 3, 7, 8. Florida Resolution. Market Institute Proposal to candidate support. Passed without objection.
Results of bylaws committee election. Move to elect Harlos as interim chair. Passes on voice vote. Elect seven alternates via OPAvote. Die roll to break ties. Ballot closes by 11AM Tuesday. Approved.
Region 3 report: LPIN ballot access suit is needed. LPKY preparing for KY statewide elections. LPMI is replacing its Treasurer. One Congressional candidate is getting $225,000 in support from a PAC. LPOH working on ballot access.
Region 7 report: Good news on candidates. Texas has 53 candidates. Some 2-way races. Oklahoma — good candidates.
Region 8: RI governor candidate in debate. NH Senate candidate doing well. Speaks highly of Free State Project. Vermont has come together again. Notes New England is deeply blue. Claims LPNH is running 12 candidates with fusion in some cases with Republicans. Maine: Need 9000 registered candidates New York: Sharpe is running a writein campaign. New Jersey: candidates in every Congressional district except one. Connecticut: sued unsuccessfully for ballot access. Seems to have skipped Massachusetts.
Challenge in CT: Not enough volunteers collecting signatures. CT period for signature collecting is 6-8 months. Need a pipeline. LPNH is not getting 4%. it appears.
Florida Resolution on one-note. The resolution, which is extremely long, calls for referenda to improve ballot access. Author of resolution speaks by phone in favor. Referendum would enshrine ballot access as a matter of right. Harlos suggests resolution is way too long. Nanna: need operational steps not just resolutions. Florida used a Constitutional Report Committee. Roll-Call vote 2/3 needed. Passed 14-0. Staff Reports next after 5-minute break.
The break continues.
Staff Report: Executive Director Objective 1) We want to grow. Membership. Income. A lot of adjectives.
Other parties have corporate ladders. We have volunteers. Try to be more efficient. Our main priority is to prioritize things. Many adjectives.
Repeats bring in money, bring in members,…
Development Director: Gabby Cordova (I think) Pledge income up.
Treasurer Hagopian. Revenue target 1.7 million. Members give ca.$100 per year each. This number is 13% higher than this year. Revenue expenses will not be straightlined. I have draft budget. I will adjust it based on the concensus. Auditor helped us to adjust categories. There are salaries and professional supporters. Affiliate support will go into core services. Categories may change. We can only do some things at some times. If we do not do something this year it does not mean we do not do it next year. 13% revenue growth is based on historicals. New budget categories discussed with auditor.
Executive Director: More adjectives.
Membership recruit and retain. #1 reduce friction on web site. Hard to hear. add (I think) multiple landing pages that correspond to campaigns. Simplify membership tiers. Retention: need focused campaigns. Get members to become recurring donors. We want to eliminate the option for people to pay for one year at a time. Recapture members who lost. Improve things to do this.
Executive Director: Remove the one-time donation option from the web pages. We want people who donate to us regularly. Q: How much does this scare people off? We review every week what has happened and compare with new approaches. We just want to make it easier for people to become monthly donors.
Hagopian: There are bylaws issues with one-time donations. Oklahoma eliminated one-time donors in favor of monthly donations.
Harlos warns that caution is needed. She recalls the LNC zero-dues period, which did not do well.
Executive Director — we do not want people to donate less often.
Q: Are we making the subscription service the default, but single donation should remain an option? Yes.
Hagopian: Monthly subscription for $5 causes fewer complaints than $25 annual, but brings in more money.
Executive Director: Robert Krauss gives us good institutional memory. More adjectives.
Andrew Rhea: How do we determine what our members want. Membership input on strategy. Build relationships with members and find out what brought new members to us.
People give because there is something they are passionate about. We are doing issue-based fundraising.
Candidate support: Candidate support. Close to 700 candidates. 100 county, 300 state legislature, rest are statewide and Federal. Recover precinct data. Wants to target where we re strong. In 2020 458 candidates and ca. three dozen wins. Last step…preparing poll standers. Will do on-time data collection to support an election-eve live stream. Will then do thank-you calls and thank-you cards to our candidates. We are already in the 2023-2024 election cycle. Will do a post-election candidate survey. Candidate recruitment generates 30-60 new members a year, because we tell people we only support national party members.
Tuniewicz: How many elected and appointed officials do we have? A: We have about 320 at the moment.
Executive Director: We are expanding our communications effort. Communications Director: We rely on volunteers to advance. We have doubled earned media in fact from 600 in July to over 2000 in October. Working to make it more likely that media shows Libertarian positions such as Angela as a talking head. Stay on top of the media cycle and release events in a timely way to a large number of locations. When McCarthy questioned Ukraine aid, we got much attention for our position. Work to get our positions out to the media, which is complicated. Want to reach as many Americans as possible.
Want more members to help us/ Will add a portal for volunteers to reach us, especially political issues. Core operations needed all the time are operations for paid staff.
Objectives: Regain the Project Archimedes membership level. Expand the donor base. Expand our affiliate and candidate support. Survey and supply data to committees. Market research to understand our target base and also survey people who are not our usual base.
Q: How are we defining overall earned media. A: This is important. We have paid media, owned media(that we control), earned media is what other people say about us. Executive Director dodges an actual answer. McArdle: I get a request for comments on an issue. I get it back to HQ within an hour. eventually may hear from Associated Press. Claim from someone: We have had far more inquiries in the last 4-5 months than in the last ten years. Use these for first-person fundraising requests.
Do we have a membership in the National Press Club? It was cancelled. Mentions a service called Meltwater that gives feedback.
Q: Do we turn news cycle comments into fundraising appeals. We want to turn our reactions into fundraising appeals.
Request to automate joint fundraising appeal cash transfers from state to national. Krauss: Wants money to flow from us to them rather than the other way around. Working on automating this.
What have people talked about? People are really excited and want to get involved. We are doing surveys to quantify what people are interested in.
Caryn Ann Harlos: In the past there were talks on how to call, do a poll, whatever. Notes her original reason for joining was to get a T-Shirt, and things advanced from there. Someone proposed welcome hangouts.
Comment: Local government is where we often have winnable opportunities. Other issues are national. Attempt to get volunteers.
Speak up for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. outreach. Break for lunch for an hour.
They’re back. Affiliate Support Committee. They are discussing Executive Session.
Affiliate Support Committee. Pat Ford reports. We broke down to three working groups. Want Libertarian Rapid Response Committee. Compare with juke box. Have responses in place and a single point of contact. Scheme: When a Libertarian candidate is blocked from a debate, large numbers of volunteers will send complaints to the sponsors. We want prearranged contacts between states and national. Wishes we could have hundreds of volunteers to visit from their states to e.g., New York, to help with petitioning. Wants it in place in two years. ‘we need a structured approach’.
Linnea Gabbard: We need to plan ahead and target objectives. We want our own college libertarians that are clearly libertarian. We need support for college students who are trying to do groups. Support Liberty Youth Caucus. ID known college groups, reach out and build a backup. Democrats: College Democrats branch out from the DNC. College Republicans are a completely separate group. Liberty Youth Caucus wants to do its own fundraising. Concern expressed that they would get involved with party political caucuses. Claimed that this has been tried several times before. Debate about print or electronic publication of LP News recalled.
Chair proposes internship program to involve students for the Summer. Speaker regrets that we ceded youth program to YAL, which is a Republican front. Proposals to launch these at HQ and for the historical preservation committee.
Proposal: Want job descriptions for volunteers, something that each state can use. Proposal: Humanitarian aid coordinator in each state.
IALP update: International Alliance of Libertarian Parties. Members are said to be activists around the world. Have not been very active in recent years. They would appreciate us being active internationally. Could use help, e.g., relaunching their web site. Concern that we are being attacked for circulating Kremlin propaganda. Speaker urges that our topic is how NATO escalated tensions in Ukraine. We are not seeing peace negotiations. “The Ukraine war is a racket for international corporations” the speaker says. IALP wanted our messaging to change to be more supportive of Ukraine. Speaker claims we are in World War 3 with Russia. Other issue from IALP: Concern with messaging from LPUS, in particular messaging from New Hampshire. Speaker said that he felt that LPNH had attracted unproductive social media. Speaker claims we have mobilized. Speaker proposed that the people in Russia and Ukraine are held hostage by their governments, which started wars. Perception is that we are carrying water for the Kremlin and echoing Russian propaganda.
Harlos complains that foreigners are criticizing our New Hampshire affiliate. I do not want our messaging to be determined by the international community.
Policy: We do not, a strict rule, echo the regime. IALP speaker: We should say that the US and NATO wanted this to happen. LPNH representative: if they do not like our messaging we should double down on it.
The left-leaning groups are just as anti-war as we are. Claim: Our antiwar rhetoric is bringing people in. MA antiwar group loves Scott Horton.
Discuss overview of budget process, and then executive session. Hagopian: I will find the competing interests and generate a draft budget for the Executive Committee. There will then be an online meeting ca. December 11. Chair says she we will go into labor before December 5, so she should be free by the tenth or so of December.
Chair moves for executive session, keep executive director in, and invite other staff as needed. Agreed that we may want just the board at some time. Passed without objection.
His plan was to have NY Libertarians re-register in the old parties and then enter their primaries. This would give them a public forum at least as broad as running as a Libertarian in the general.
Not necessarily. I’ve experience in NYC politics. Yes, the Democratic Primary is usually the Big News Event, because the Democratic candidate usually goes on to win the general election.
But that doesn’t mean that all Democratic Primary candidates get media coverage. I remember primaries in which the media decided who were the “serious” Democratic Primary candidates, and ignore those who weren’t.
The “non-serious” Democratic candidates suffered a media blackout as complete as any third party candidate. The average voter never learned about those candidates, who went on to win low single digits in the primary.
The claim that NATO escalated tensions in regard to Ukraine is tendentious. Russia is the clear aggressor, and its claims of “NATO encirclement” – a retread of Stalin era propaganda from the USSR – without actuall aggression against Russia, its invasion of another country is the first use of force.
It is too bad that the people who dominated the LNC have a tendentious view of the history of this region, which could clearly at odds with the facts of reality.
Why spend a dime or an ounce of effort toward the “International Alliance of Libertarian Parties”? Hey, if some private person wants to donate their money and time, good for that individual. But we’re a national party that is not rich either in funds, workers, or volunteers, and supporting such an enterprise does not gain any Libertarian candidate running for office a single vote while also taking away funding and resources in that candidate’s desire to gain votes.
Someone earlier mentioned it would cost $500,000 to get the presidential candidate on the ballot in New York.
That is nuts and would be a waste of money. If the two old parties don’t want democracy (more than two choices), then take their hint and join their party. That’s what one NY Libertarian told me a few years ago. His plan was to have NY Libertarians re-register in the old parties and then enter their primaries. This would give them a public forum at least as broad as running as a Libertarian in the general. Then show up and voice the most “outrageous” libertarian views, telling the voters and the media, that these views were Republican or Democrat views. Wear a rubber boot on your head, rock an orange mohawk, advocate for legal heroin, stand for immediate abolishment of social security, demand the U.S. let in 100,000,000 immigrants by next year, ban all fossil fuel vehicles. Soon, I was told, the two old parties would beg such folks to go back to a Libertarian Party with much easier ballot access laws.
Thanks for such a complete and timely report.
Regarding the comment about the increase in earned media, was there any discussion of how much of the increase was positive or negative comment? Complaints that the LPNH posts are anti-Semitic or anti-LGBTQ (whether one agrees or not) are earned media, but likely not particularly helpful.
Thanks for doing this!