When the LP Should Run Candidates for US House and Why

I’m posting this on behalf of Doug Craig at his request.

Stuart – can we get Doug added as a blogger here so he can post for himself? ENM has also asked for a password to the new site. Just let me know if it’s OK to add them if you’re too busy.

This was originally posted at Crazy For Liberty

We are running a candidate for the US House district 10, but why?

Georgia Libertarians has been put into a historical event. Due to the untimely death of Charlie Norwood Georgia will be having a special election to replace him.Here in Georgia we have found a candidate actually a great candidate, Dr. Jim Sendelbach. Because of Georgia ballot access laws we have not been able to run for a US House seat prior to this.This being a special election all rules are out the window.It is non-partisan but the candidate will have his party label next to his name.

The question I have is why should we run in this race.The cost for the filling fee is $4800.00 non-refundable ( in Georgia you get back 75% after the election, normally).We will not win this race ( o.k. money could fly out of my backside).So why should we run.

I believe at the beginning of a race you need to sit down with a group of people and decide the reason you are using your resources on this race.You should also come up with goals for this race.

I WOULD LIKE TO STAY THIS MAY BE THE BIGGEST PROPLEM IN THE LP.You can not say your only goal is to win the race.You will waste resorces,you will burn people out,you will give the voters the impression we never win, you will give the press the same impression which will cause them not to cover our next set of candidates, you will burn out the donors (see Badnarik), you will break the spirit of the candidate which had been a great resorce to the party.So what do you do?

YOU RUN THE RACE.

You are honest with yourself and everyone involved.

You sit down and decide why you are running.If your goal is to set up the candidate in the future for a smaller race than you run this race promoting the candidate.If the race is about promoting the LP than you run the race that way.You have membership paper on you at all eents. When you do interviews you send people to Lp website or a state website.You tell people how great the Lp is instead of the candidate.Also if you are trying to recruit future candidates you need to point out why the should run under the LP banner.In Georgia we can produce Tv ads and place them on cable channels cheaply.Point that out. I do not know how many times I have been told the would run under our banner if we had something to offer as a candidate.If you have people who know how to to do the paper work , point that out.If you have a couple people who like to be campaign managers tell people that.

There are reasons to run campaigns also.You can run one just to train people.Sometimes people need to get thier feet wet.You learn alot when you jump in with both feet. You can learn how to file the paper work.You can learn where to buy yard signs and bumper stickers.When the vote totals come in you can see where your numbers are.In georgia we had some entire counties at 8-9% of the vote.We did not we were that strong in that county.

At the end you need to decide why you are running. The next big thing is to set the goals for this race.These are a few things i believe you shoud set as goals but please add more.

1 Vote total %
2 new members
3 new donors
4 new affiliates
5 interviews
6 TV ads ran
7 flyers
8 money raised
9 radio ads
10 in debates
11 how your marketing changed vote %
12 trained volunteers to become campaign team players
13 total volunteers working on campaign
14 news paper interviews
15 radio interviews
16 event you spoke at
17 bumper stckers
18 yard signs a) random b) in yards
19 mail out
20 phone calls to voters

If you can think of more please let me know.
Doug Craig 770-861-5855

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