From Garry Reed at The Examiner:
Shawn Michael Hamilton is so blood-rage pissed-off at the Libertarian Party that he spent four years researching it so he could expose what he calls “the nut cases to the criminals…the racists to the hypocrites” in a big black book titled LIBERTARIANS: America’s Political Terrorists.
“This book will tell the tale on just how crooked and corrupt the Libertarian Party really is,” Hamilton swears.
Hamilton began an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to finance publication of his book on December 17, 2014 with a closing date of February 15, 2015. All quotes in this article came from that source. He shut down his project page on January 17 after raising $0 of his $15,000 goal. But it’s not gone entirely; it’s still cached at the Crowdfunding Centre.
Hamilton’s undeveloped Facebook page is still alive, along with a link to Americans Against the Libertarian Party, a site that makes no distinction between libertarians in general and the Libertarian Party; it attacks all libertarianism via an endless commentary of childish clichés and vacuous stereotyping.
Just what gave Hamilton such a stark raving hate-on for the LP? In his own words: “I fell victim to the persuasive tactics used in order to get me away from the Republican Party to become a member, and eventually a Congressional candidate, of the Libertarian Party.”
If he misunderstood libertarianism that’s on him; if he was purposely defrauded about libertarianism he has every right to strike back at the people he thinks defrauded him. But he actually gives his own game away when he reports this: “I have gone back to the Republican Party.”
Read the full article here.
But, even so, the LASPAC did provide lots of GJ marketing material to VA. I personally made use of a fair amount of it.
Yeah, sorry. I had the names mixed up. LASPAC was the 2012 POTUS one.
The Libertarian Action Super PAC did nothing in Virginia. Libertarian Booster PAC, also started by Wes Benedict, paid $10,000 toward the petition drive to get Rob Sarvis on the ballot for Governor. This was around 40% of the cost of that petition. The rest of the costs of conducting the petition was paid for out of the pocket of Rob Sarvis.
Purple PAC, started by Ed Crane of Cato Institute fame, paid for some TV commercials to promote Rob Sarvis for Governor.
The two PACs run by Wes Benedict did a tremendous amount of good in 2012 and 2013. Of course, that’s Wes Benedict, and a couple of big donors. It may be difficult for others to do as much good.
I credit the Libertarian Action Super PAC with making 2013 such a great year in VA. They provided lots of help to the state house campaigns. Possibly most important was hiring someone to recruit and assist candidates. They also played a huge roll in the success of the Sarvis’ campaign.
Anyway, the LNC has its hands full, and has little money to work with. I absolutely think it would be worthwhile for a Super PAC or two to come about to provide direct assistance to campaigns. Unfortunately, for a PAC to do much good in the long term, I think they need at least one sugar daddy to provide lots of money for a couple of years. After demonstrating some results, they may be able to rely less on the sugar daddy, and more on smaller donations from a variety of sources.
Same goes for a PAC that’s going to focus on just one season, or just the POTUS campaign, or whatever. They’ll need a big chunk of seed money to get rolling.
To clarify, I should have added that there was no benefit in it for Aaron to lie. He could have also deflected it by telling me that he had said there was no money available to help, or a number of other things. Either way, we got no assistance.
Aaron Starr says that he didn’t say what I was told he said. He also said that our person who contacted him was very rude and started demanding things (paraphrasing here). Since I wasn’t on the call and I only have the word of the person and his wife who was listening vs Mr Starr, I have no way to prove what took place.
Either side could be correct, and it also could be something in between, but the end result is that we did not get any assistance. I’ve known the person who talked to Aaron for twenty years, and I’ve known Aaron for ten years. While I disagree with Aaron’s political methods, I would not expect him to lie about a conversation. I would also not expect the other person to lie about it either, so at this point I just have to go with “the LNCC did not assist us in any way”.
I agree that a change is needed. The LNCC is the “official” committee allowed by the government, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have privately run PACs.
I only remember ever hearing your side of it.
Stewart, Thanks for the clarification.
A new PAC may be better. Less bureaucracy, less overhead, more action.
My mind is playing tricks on me. I could have sworn you told me you had been. Sorry.
But going to the LNC should not be a waste of time.
No, we raised five or six thousand for the race. The state party has only so many resources and we could not give all our money to one candidate without giving to the other dozen or so. But I am pretty sure that we gave him a bit more than we gave others. Probably between $500 and $1000 from the state party.
We did try to go to the LNCC, but I’ve written about that exchange enough. Their recollection of the events differs from our’s, and they would only have been able to give $1000 anyway. That’s the problem with campaign limits like this.
That 2012 race in South Carolina was very winnable. The fact that the LP dropped the ball on this illustrates how poorly organized the party is.
What Stewart said above is an example of why there needs to be one or more Libertarian Political Action Committees. Going to the LNC is largely a waste of time.
0 dollars raised…….bwahahahaha
A small correction to a comment above: I was never the state chair, or even a member of the state committee in the Republican Party.
Regarding “I don’t think I know of the AK case. The SC guy….well, he didn’t convince me. It’s bee a while, but, as I recall, he just seemed like lots of other candidates, saying a few dollars will do the trick, with little to back up the claim.”
I had all the data showing what support was needed, as well as what turned out to be an accurate prediction of the chain of events as early as the May national convention in 2012. I later sent more data, but the LNC member that I was required to go through did not even present it to the committee. Later requests for assistance were ignored, until the last two weeks of the campaign, when it was too late.
The 2012 race was very winnable, and probably could have been won if another $2k-$4k had been raised in the summer, when it would have been more useful. Signs, ads, and door to door still works in local elections, but not without some money to run the ads and put up lots of signs.
I agree that the 2014 race was not winnable, at least not without thirty to fifty times the funding (radio/TV ads) that he needed in 2012. My only recommendation in January of 2014 was to hammer her relationship with Bobby Harrell the entire campaign. I believed he would be removed from office in handcuffs near the end of the election period, and he was. But that advise was ignored. It would not have won the race by itself, but I believe it would have narrowed the gap significantly. Regardless, it was not a winnable race. I was not on the state committee from February until September, so I am unaware of what they tried in his campaign. I do know that there was very little door to door in his second run.
South Carolina has very restrictive contribution limits ($1k max). I never asked national for money in 2012, simply for help and exposure to their donors that might help. What I got was an insistence that we run a poll the week before the election to show donors how close we were. A poll would have taken more money than we actually needed — as well as consuming too much time. This is just one more piece of the picture that shows how far out of touch with the reality of political campaigns the national party actually is.
My analysis was accurate, but anyone else looking at the situation and knowing South Carolina politics would have had a nearly identical summation in 2012. It was our party’s easiest state house race to win in the entire country.
well i have spent 16 to 20 grand or so…. over the last decade….. a far smaller sum then what the IRS or california tax board has extracted from me… (here is a hint libertarians tax season is a great time to ask for donations)
I never really expect these candidates to win… I just want them to get out there and make some noise… spread the message….
So I am not disapointed… infact given the changes in public attuitude towards issues such as the dopey war and why people of different sexes get special priviledges from the government I am quite happy….. better then that I am very happy… even today this story appeared upon marketwatch.com
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-hate-the-federal-government-now-more-than-ever-2015-01-27
I know
The 2012 race was the one I was referring to as winnable, not 2014.
He got 20% (19.84%, to be exact) in his 2014 race.
Yep, I was spacing his name. The 2012 race was 47%. The 2014 was substantially lower, like in the 20s iirc (I’d have to check), because by then the establishment figured out the new paperwork requirements and were back listed on the ballot with a party straight ticket, so that kills us.
If you’re referring to the guy named Jeremy Walters from SC , I do think his state house race was winnable this time. His last time around he received over 47% of the vote, I can’t remember off hand. Unfortunately, I believe he got 44% this time (certainly less than his first race).
What gets me about “winnable races” is candidates and their supporters misleading new people to the party about their actual chances of winning in larger scale elections such as US House, Governor, etc. Of course, we want Libertarian candidates to win. But saying “we are going to win” shows one of two things. A. That they actually think they are going to win, which shows they don’t understand LP history nor the entire purpose of the party (and may in fact be delusional) or B. They are engaging in fraud by saying they will win when they know they have no chance.
I call it the Saturday afternoon softball problem. Imagine you are new to the Libertarian Party and you spend your Saturday morning and afternoon campaigning for an LP candidate. You sacrifice your entire day, skipping your (or your child’s) Saturday afternoon softball game. When the election rolls around, and the candidate gets 3% of the vote, you think why did I waste my entire Saturday for nothing. Why would you ever want to be involved again?
Now, contrast that with “It would be nice if we won the election, but 5% is a great goal and we would like to reach every potential voter with the LP message”. Well that changes things. You’re probobly not going to skip your Saturday afternoon softball game, you’ll just spend the morning doing campaigning and outreach. And, you won’t be let down on election day because the bar was never set too high.
Candidates and LP activists need to do a good job of explaining LP candidates and elections. With that, people are more likely to stick around after election day — which means more activists for the long term and less “the LP are losers”.
Did they have polling data? If someone was pitching me that a race is winnable I would like to see some polls. Ds and Rs don’t usually spend a lot of money on a race they haven’t polled.
The race in SC was close, and they had polling. The polling was on the money too, in line with eventual results. The only opponent had to run as a write in because of a paperwork quirk. Flood was trying to generate national interest for it and couldn’t do it. He had previously been the Republican state chair so he knows what a winnable race is and isn’t. They ended with iirc 47%, only a few hundred votes short.
The Alaska situation was less clear cut, but it’s a state where we have won legislative races before, the districts are lower population than most other states, the candidates were crossover with experience and decent support levels from when they had run as Republicans, and they ended up (without the support they sought from out of state) in the 20s/30s. What they wanted to use the money for was to hire experienced door to door sales people who were LP supporters, including the state chair, to go door to door for them. I don’t know if that would have put them over the top but it may have.
“Claims that there are mechanisms for identifying winnable races are a bit limited.”
Well, there’s no such thing as a sure thing (unless you’re running unopposed).
But I’d say there are mechanisms for distinguishing between “this race just might be winnable under the right circumstances” and “not a fucking chance.” And there have been a number of races advertised as “winnable” that clearly fell into the latter category (anyone running against Ted Kennedy is, indeed, a great example).
If you’re an unknown, running against a popular incumbent major party candidate in a district gerrymandered to ensure that that incumbent’s party always wins it going away, well, that’s clearly toward the “not a fucking chance” end of the scale.
If you’re running for office in a fairly small polity (like, say, a New Hampshire state legislative district), if you are reasonably well-known, well-liked and involved in your community, if there’s no popular incumbent to run against, and if your campaign is moderately well-run and you don’t get caught in bed with a dead girl the week before the election, your race just might be winnable under the right circumstances.
If a race is close, money can move a few percent of the vote. However, you cannot buy elections. If you are running a decade ago against Senator Kennedy for Senate, no amount of spending will give you the victory.
Claims that there are mechanisms for identifying winnable races are a bit limited. Actually, honest polling works. However, polls showing Libertarians in the lead are not common.
Well, one problem with raising money for “winnable races” is that there was a fairly long string in the late 1990s and early 2000s of candidates claiming “winnable races,” raising and spending substantial money, running campaigns that weren’t necessarily bad campaigns even from a “mainstream politics” perspective … and coming up embarrassingly short when the votes were actually cast.
I’m not saying that any or all of them were dishonest in claiming, or even foolish in thinking, that they had winnable races. But a string of such occurrences tends to make it harder to get donations for the next possibly winnable race. Some donors think they got scammed. Some donors just get tired of throwing money and not seeing results, even if it’s not the candidates’ fault. It takes awhile for the “winnable race” approach to find new takers or for old ones to get re-energized about trying.
Money is the lifeblood of politics. Don’t expect any LP candidates to win when they do not have money to run campaigns.
I don’t think I know of the AK case. The SC guy….well, he didn’t convince me. It’s bee a while, but, as I recall, he just seemed like lots of other candidates, saying a few dollars will do the trick, with little to back up the claim.
Both the SC and Alaska candidates made a pretty good case.
There are lots of candidates that *think* some, often small, amount of money will do the trick. I’m saying, if a good candidate could make a convincing case, show some evidence of such, and the like, that a reasonable amount of money *will* put them over the top, they will likely be able to raise that money.
Yes, I agree with all of that.
Absolutely true that Ds and Rs rely on their party line to get them their “base” votes. The problem is, that doesn’t work for us. I’d say you have two things true in isolation:
1. All else equal, you want as many candidates on the L line as possible, because even a good candidate looks bad on an empty line.
2. All else equal, you want the people sharing the line with you to have equal or better name ID to you. (You also don’t want someone with high but bad name ID.)
Sometimes, these are competing demands. In that case, you need to balance them out. At the extremes, one predominates. In the middle, it’s a judgment call. If I can fill all but one spot with people who will campaign heavily and do a lot of door to door (in an area where that can work) I don’t want to fill that one extra spot with someone who says they won’t campaign. If there’s one candidate, yea, I want to get that up beyond that on every ballot, so long as the people being added won’t actively hurt the candidate already there. In the middle…it’s in the middle.
Since very few of our candidates are celebrities, incumbents, or both willing and able to sink a lot of money into advertising (or time to meet most of the voters in their district personally), their name recognition will be low. The typical voter doesn’t know who most of the Democrats and Republicans running are either – in many cases not even the incumbents. Their party line communicates more about them, for most offices to most voters, than their first and last name does.
Well, we can agree that all else being equal, candidates do better on fuller lines. Granted, of course, if you run only a few lines and no one has name ID, that’s worse than running many lines with no name ID.
Vote results show that we do better when the ballots lines are closer to full, and since virtually none of our candidates have much name recognition that is almost beside the point as far as we are concerned at this stage. In other words, yes, we do better with a ballot filled with people few people have ever heard of than we do with only a tiny handful of candidates (who are usually people that few people have heard of as well).
Sometimes, candidates who start out running with no intention of anything more than a paper campaign end up doing a lot more than they planned, while others do a lot less than they promise or intend. Sometimes it’s just a way to get their feet wet and pave the way for a more serious run later. And sometimes “lightning strikes” in a good way and they find themselves in an unexpected position to do a lot better than anticipated through the actions of their opponents. Besides, it gives people a Libertarian option for more offices, which is a good thing in itself.
All else being equal (which it rarely is) I think the same candidate, with the same campaign, will perform better appearing on a full, or near-full, line, than appearing on a near-blank line. However, I’m not convinced that’s true if the other names are all names the voter hasn’t heard of (pure paper candidates) – in that case, an empty line may be better.
Also, running 100 local candidates gives the party a chance to identify strong campaigners, people with natural charisma and political ability, and people who work hard (among them, hopefully, some with all 3 traits) and then run them for state legislative office – with, for those selected, good campaign experience – whether they won or lost.
Among other things, it puts us in a position to take advantage of unexpected opportunities created by the establishment parties. A purely paper LP candidate in a 2-way race a couple of years ago almost won that way for legislature in CO when his only opponent was caught in a scandal. The more races we run in the greater the chance of sooner or later winning like that.
I think paulie is right. There are probably many races where a relatively modest push could have put a candidate over the top. I don’t think we need as much money as major-party campaigns to win, I think more often what we see is a candidate’s support snowballs once they get over some critical mass of visibility and viability. But there are a lot of small-district candidates out there who probably could have won with $5-10,000, and didn’t raise more than a few hundred. (and there are others who wouldn’t win if they had half a million to play with). Put another way, a dollar put into a Libertarian campaign will translate into more votes than the same dollar in a major-party campaign.
Having, as Nicholas put it, “orders of magnitude” more candidates is certainly good for its own reasons, but aside from the general effect of seeing a full Libertarian slate on the ballot and the growth for the party that having more candidates campaigning generates, I don’t know that it really does much to the specific issue of us not having any elected state legislators. I’m not someone who says we should run fewer candidates to focus resources on them, so to be clear that’s not what I’m saying, but I do think the proliferation of Libertarian candidates can have the effect of making it difficult for anybody to stand out at the state legislative level, where we both really need a win and one could be within our grasp. The candidates that do get national attention, are typically running for federal or statewide office, which is inevitable, and even they are a small subset of those running for such offices.
I don’t know that I really have a solution, but I think we need to not only need to increase the number of Libertarian candidates, we also need to decrease the proportion of them running <$1k effectively unfunded campaigns. I do think it's a source of much the complaints about the LP being ineffective, or over-promising to recruit candidates, etc.
In 2012 we had a LP legislative candidate in SC who believed he needed only a few hundred dollars to push him over the top and couldn’t get it. He fell just a few hundred votes short. In 2014 we had a couple of Alaska candidates for the legislature that thought they needed, I believe, 20 or 30k to put them over the top, and they couldn’t get it.
We need to run more Libertarian candidates (like an order of magnitude more in some places) to have the opportunity to focus money or energy on an individual statehouse race. If we telegraph ahead of time which race is the best opportunity to win, we insure that those who do not want us to win can prepare and counter our efforts.
The old parties can’t defend every race.
Of course, much depends on the individual candidate. A good candidate needs a lot less, a bad candidate won’t be saved by ten times as much. It’s not a simple question of money in, victories out. At the state rep level, it’s more a matter of being a known and active, and respected, member of the community, and an effective campaigner. Only at that point is serious money worth considering.
I dropped a zero on my original comment: that was supposed to read $100k. Though I don’t doubt that $10k is certainly plausible for some states with small districts, like NH. You only need a couple thousand votes there to win a state rep.
I’m fairly certain that if a state rep candidate could make a convincing case that $50k could win the race, he’d be able to raise that money. I think that $50k is far short of what it would take to win most state rep races though. I seriously doubt that $10k will do it anywhere.
There was this group called Libertarian Victory PAC or Fund several years back. Its purpose was to direct money to Libertarians who were in winnable races. Unfortunately it went defunct a while ago.
Anything’s possible, but I see no reason to jump to any such conclusion. Hoping to get paid, certainly. But being paid? Pointless speculation unless you find evidence.
Andy,
Wisconsin State Rep races are truly winnable with $10k? That amount would buy about one direct mail piece in an Oregon state rep race. In my most recent race here, my major-party opponents spent slightly over $1 million combined.
Might be worth a try.
Though if we’re going to talk party failures, I think the lack of a single state legislator and what we can do to change that (we’ve had them in the past), should be near the top of the list. It would be a huge morale boost for their party, and we’re long overdue. The problem is of course, out of several hundred Libertarians running for state legislature, it’s really hard for one to stand out and attract even statewide, much less national, support. Here in Wisconsin, we’ve estimated the cost to win a state representative race (assuming a good candidate) as starting at around $10k. Which is hardly out of the question for the LP, and WI is one of the states with relatively larger lower house districts. But it’s also a good deal more than any of our candidates actually raise.
Of course, I say this as somebody who has my own reasons for twice running for higher office and declining offers of a state legislative candidacy. So maybe I’m not the one to talk. 😉 I’ve kicked around the idea that some kind of PAC specifically dedicated to supporting a short list of viable Libertarian state legislature candidates, is something that might pay off.
It’s not exactly unheard of for a candidate (usually but not necessarily somebody who isn’t that ideologically libertarian to begin with) to come to the party with totally unrealistic expectations about both their own skills and being a Libertarian candidate, and then leave in a huff blaming the LP when they didn’t instantly start their unbroken string of electoral victories on the way to winning the White House. It’s why I always try to be realistic about what we have to offer, and what the chances of success are, when I talk to potential candidates.
Gotta wonder if this clown is getting paid to do this.
I have also heard Florida at some point under a different name.
In any event, it’s too bad he took his crowdfunding page down, he might have gotten past $0 in donations with the increased exposure from IPR.
Thx.
Texas IIRC.
Hardly the first to think of the LP as a way to make money.
I prefer to have a day job.
Where was he involved?
He did contribute time and alleged talent, but as for money, he was seeking it not contributing.
Who is this turd? I never heard of him, but that is no doubt because he never contributed anything to the LP (time, money, talent) so it’s no loss for him to disappear from a non-existent screen..
See previous comments thread at https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2014/07/shawn-michael-hamilton-libertarians-helping-libertarians/
I think the far left and right are equally capable of nasty attacks.
I’m sure there are individuals who really don’t understand libertarianism.. or genuinely believe it can’t work. I tend to think the majority of haters, though, are terrified of us..
The Republican Party will eat this guy alive.
That anti Libertarian facebook page left me disturbed with all the hatred being spewed. Even if you view the Libertarian party as full of cranks, some of the things they advocate on the civil liberties/ foreign policy front are right there with the Greens or socialists in this country. Instead of acknowledging these agreements in good faith and critiquing the rest of the platform, you get lots of hate and lazy attacks( some guy who said he was a Libertarian on his facebook page did something awful!!!) spewed your way. It’s something I’ve seen a lot of when it comes to far left individuals and their views of Libertarians. Though to be fair, the far left seems to be equally uncompromising of differences in its own ranks, as evidenced by the innumerable marxist parties in this country.
Good riddance! I’ve blocked him on Facebook.
There certainly are a lot of angry looneys out there.