Earlier today, Paulie Cannoli wrote to suggest the rather clever idea that the membership figures were probably stimulated when many states adopted a bundled marketing concept, where joining the state party got you national membership at the same time. Apparently, that deal has gone away, and most states are now collecting membership fees independent of the national party.
Another thought that he mentioned was that the Harry Browne campaign may have been counting as members everyone who contributed at least $25 to the campaign, during those tawdry days of corruption when the national LP headquarters staff was nearly identical in material respects to the Harry Browne campaign staff. See my letters and L. Neil Smith’s editorials on this situation during the relevant period (1996-2001 or so) on ncc-1776.org for details.
Here is a graph derived from figures found on groups.yahoo.com/group/lpradicals in their files area. No doubt the party loyalists among the so-called LP Radicals are going to remove those files in order to prevent any further conversation about the figures. But, we have this lovely graph.
Whether I get it to display, I dunno.
Now, Microsoft Excel is not very good at graphing. The data peaks at 33,017 or so in December 1999 and the data set ends at November 2007 with a value of 14,017. That’s where I get my calculations found at http://bostontea.us/node/304 – in case the graphic doesn’t display here.
Since the end of April, when I joined as member 30 on the current site (the 2006 membership database having been lost due to a server problem), the Boston Tea Party has grown to encompass 417 people. During the last few months, 533 people have joined our group on Facebook, which seems to be a major source of new members, alongside the recent addition of Google ads. Many of those Facebook friends were invited by me with the note that “The Boston Tea Party is the fastest growing libertarian party in America. We are adding state affiliates and endorsing candidates from other parties who agree with our smaller government platform.”
But, you know what? It looks like the Boston Tea Party may be the only growing libertarian party in America. The LP is shrinking.
In the last few months, we’ve endorsed or nominated about 30 candidates, most of whom are either members of the LP and running as BTP candidates, or members of the LP running as LP candidates. Some, such as founder Tom Knapp, are doing both – he’s the BTP vice presidential nominee this year, and he’s running for Congress in Missouri as an LP candidate.
We’ve also had quite a lot of enthusiasm for running favorite son vice presidential candidates in states such as Colorado (Dan Kilo), Florida (John Wayne Smith), Arizona where our write-in registration lists Barry Hess, and Utah where our write-in registration lists Marilyn Chambers, the actress who was Charles Jay’s running mate in 2004 on the Personal Choice Party ticket. I should note that our Voter Guide suggests people in states that forbid write-in voting for president choose to write in Marilyn for vice if they seek to protest this limitation on their political sovereignty.
During this same time, we have added twelve state affiliates. In two of those states, Florida and Colorado, we’re on the ballot. In Florida, we are officially recognised as a party, so people living there may choose to register as Boston Tea Party voters. Finally, thanks to Paulie Cannoli, we were able to collect signatures to put our candidates on the ballot in Tennessee, making three states for our first presidential candidate. (John Hospers, the LP’s first presidential candidate in 1972, was on the ballot in two states. We don’t expect our vice presidential nominee to earn any electoral votes, though.) I’ve also been approached privately about several LP state affiliates which would like to consider affiliating with the Boston Tea Party, as well. It has been a very exciting time, and the growth in our party has been fantastic.
My friend Tom Knapp asked me to help him earlier this year, and I admit that it took me some time to find my feet. No doubt, I was helped enormously by a number of events in the LP, such as the choice of Bob Barr as presidential nominee by a narrow majority on the last ballot in Denver. A number of missteps by Barr and his team, as well as the raging controversy over whether Angela Keaton should be allowed to communicate LNC activities to her constituents, have added vigor to our party.
Most of the recognition and credit for the growing membership of the Boston Tea Party goes to the members who have chosen to join us. Membership is free, so it is never an economic choice. It is a matter of choosing to agree with our platform. Or not. And a great many have chosen to agree. I thank them.
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aynrkey
bostonteapartygoer
Kenn Jacobine
mattdharris
Mike Seebeck
Miche
paulie
Jim Davidson
ponggod
Stuart Richards
Todd Andrew Barnett
Tom Knapp makes the interesting point that during the 1990s there was a Project Archimedes to direct mail member prospects for the LP. These people were gleaned from mailing lists, such as Reason magazine subscribers. They “joined” or at least sent in member dues, and maybe got a newsletter in return. About 20% each year didn’t renew, so after five years, those who joined went away. Since the project was stopped for some reason, membership growth fell off.
I don’t know if that’s the only reason for member growth, or decline. I think Paulie makes some excellent points, too.
The membership numbers under the Browne-Willis regime were distorted because Willis was paid on the basis of mempership numbers and he was in control of how membership numbers were computed. I know because I was the person maintaining the headquarters computer systems at the time. I quit when Willis ordered me to implement the “p transaction” which would further dostort the “membership” numbers. George Phillies has written extensively on this.
Thanks John. Interesting stuff.
I wrote about the Perry Willis scandal some years back for The Libertarian Enterprise. Hard to stay scandalised, now that I’m not renewing my membership in the LP (since 1998).
@ Reason mag
“Still, to be sure, a post-platform reform, post-Barr LP has been on the grow in terms of dues-paying national members, according to the LP’s official figures. From December 2007 to now, the party membership has grown by 1,656 members; that’s nearly 11 percent.
But how impressive is this? In 2004, the year of unknown Michael Badnarik as their candidate, with a Party burdened with that crazy-radical old platform, the party grew from December 2003 to December 2004 by 2,814 in whole numbers, and by 14 percent, from a much higher base.
For whatever reason, the Party’s biggest membership plunge of the past few years happened over the course of 2006, the year which, in July, the Party’s platform was shaved in the manner that the New Yorker implicitly credits with the 2007 membership rise. The LP gained 3,313 members in 2007–again, in judging how well the “nominating the successful politician” strategy has done for the LP’s prominence so far, note that that is more than twice the number of new members that nominating Barr has earned the LP so far. Yes, the year isn’t over yet, and the election hasn’t happened yet. But, non-disdainful mainstream media attention or not, I’m not impressed with what Barr has done for the LP so far. “
Dear Paulie,
We should write to the New Yorker with these figures. I think it requires our attention.
Would you like to do the honors?
Regards,
Jim
I sincerely do not see the New Yorker giving a shit.
It’s pretty clear that they fit the numbers to their pre-conceived narrative.
As Wes Benedict points out on Lost Free Voice, both the decline in 2006 and the rise in 2007 were due to nuts and bolts things like sending out renewal notices and inquiry responses (2007) vs. not (2006), and I would add the zero dues nonsense in 2006.
I disagree. The New Yorker is very likely to publish an extensive letter if presented with actual data, especially in the context of someone who knows what went on.
Unfortunately, few of the commentators above have sufficient knowledge of “what went on”.
John Famularo has some back-end knowledge of what went on, but I think he’s wrong in his conclusions and guided mostly by his factional loyalties.
Phillies, who Famularo cites, is well-known for taking facts and re-stating and re-arranging them to look scandalous. Phillies himself has little room to talk about the faults of others.
I have some experience on the other side of things; as I worked at LPHQ from 1989-1993 as well as sporadically (as in a day or two at a time, on ocassional visits, usually totaling a couple of weeks per year, between 1998 and 2003). I have also been the Membership Chairman for the Virginia LP off and on for almost a decade and a half; a position for which I have personally signed up or renewed over 500 members (1998-2008 count). For the most part, I was never involved in any policy debates at the national level; rather, I was simply an end-user who sat at the computers and recorded donations and memberships.
Famularo is simply wrong about the much-maligned “P” transaction.
Famularo, other detractors, and their factional allies on the LNC killed off a member recruitment drive called Project Archimedes. That’s all it was — a recruitment drive. It cost a lot of money, yes — but investment in Archimedes-recruited members always came back to the Party within a year (the average donation from each member of the LP in those days was about $75). The cost of the recruitment being paid for in the first year, every year the new member renewed was a bonus for the LP. Only two of the dozens of recruitment mailings failed to bring in enough new donors to pay for itself.
Detractors of Perry Willis and other office staffers managed to kill off the project at the LNC meeting in the fall of 1999; without creating a new recruitment drive to take its place. The results were predictable: the LP first stopped growing, then a nosedive. The smell was in the air — the Party was not growing any more, and average “length of stay” as a member of shortened. Existing members could see where it was going and voted with their feet. Attrition rates rose to a level where new members weren’t coming in fast enough to keep pace with those leaving.
Boosting the contraction was the utterly insane, phobic decisions made after 9/11/2001. In response, the LP strangely retreated into a shell and didn’t send any fundraising appeals out for months. The slide in membership accelerated. The LP shrank from about 29,000 members to 23,000. One of the best opportunities the LP ever had to make its case to millions, and the LNC chose to “hunker down and wait”; to go all shy about its beliefs, and to “stop making waves”.
The LP basically did NOTHING to fight the predictable attack of jingoism and fear-mongering that was about to be released on the American public. If anything, it adopted a wishy-washy stance about terrorism that pleased no one. Famularo and friends would have everyone believe this was mostly because of all the “faux libertarians” recruited by Project Archimedes. However, there were dozens of Libertarians — many of them long-timers who way predated Project Archimedes — who piled on to Harry Browne for writing and speaking the very same things that Libertarians (and Ron Paul) had been saying for three decades: that militarism and imperialism generates blowback, and the best way for Americans to be safer is by a strict noninterventionist policy and removing all of our troops from overseas.
In contrast to the meek/timid/emasculated LP, in the year after 9/11, the ACLU engaged in an agressive membership recruitment drive. They used Project Archimedes-style direct mail to do it, too. The result? Almost 1,000,000 new members. Other leftist organizations were jsut as agressive. Hell, I have in my files one mailing that simply flabbergasted me — a letter from a Democratic organization, saying (paraphrasing) “see, these horrendous attacks are what happens when you let Republicans run our country!” I received the letter on SEPTEMBER 14TH!
The LP is never going to break out as long as it is dominated by ankle-biters who 1) haven’t recruited even the first new member by their own efforts; 2) could never be bothered to establish and make successful their own precinct organization and county party.
Well, let’s see. I’ve recruited over six hundred people to The Boston Tea Party since the first of May. At least 510 of those people have actually joined our party formally. So, I think that I can comment on the LP’s shrinking membership numbers since 2000, even if Mr. Montoni thinks I should not.
Since I was one of those members between 1992 and 1998, and since I am not one now, I can also comment on why I’m not in the LP.
But, just now, I’m working on the BTP convention. So, I’ll come back to this thread, soon.
[...] Jim Davidson analyzes pre-2008 Libertarian Party membership numbers here. [...]
I agree completely with Marc Montoni about Project Archimedes. Sadly, very few current LNC members are interested in membership acquisition.
Membership acquisition? What a disgusting way of thinking about it.
Members should be recruited. They should join of their own free will. If they are not involved voluntarily, why “acquire” them like some sort of chattel? These are a free people, not slaves.
I’m not interested in “membership acquisition.” I’m interested in finding the people who want freedom and recruiting them to the party – the Boston Tea Party. The party run by its members, not by a bunch of lousy finks who think they ought to run the world.
Membership acquisition is the standard term in the non-profit world. I have no idea how that could connote slavery or involuntary recruitment unless a reader were already disposed to think of people as property.
I don’t see such a connotation either.
Acquisition as an English word does not imply coercion in any way. Members can be acquired in any number of ways, and perhaps some of them could be considered coercive, but then again, you could “recruit” people with a gun to their head, as well. Semantic disagreements are silly.
The term connotes an objectification of people (members) as an asset class, rather than as individuals. I think M Carling is talking out of his @ss. I’ve worked in the non-profit sector for thirty years and have never heard the term “membership acquisition.”
I don’t think of people as slaves. I think of people like Carling as slavers. I am prepared to think the worst of the people who have taken over the LP and are using it to push scum like Barr on the rest of us.
Speaking in terms of running things efficiently from an administrative perspective, members are an asset class. Why beat around the bush with pretty words when that is a simple fact that won’t be any less true no matter what you call it?
There’s a HUGE leap between members being an asset class in terms of an organization’s book-keeping and slavery, though, and I am not really understanding how you’re making that leap.
[...] Jim Davidson analyzes pre-2008 Libertarian Party membership numbers here. [...]