Election 2024: A post-mortem for the Libertarian Party’s performance

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There’s a lot of failure to go around.

By Thomas R. Eddlem

Chase Oliver ran the worst Libertarian Party presidential campaign in history. I know this sounds like sour grapes because he was never my candidate, but I really did want to like the guy. And I still have nothing against him personally. He was last among my choices at the national convention, but he is nearly alone among political candidates in that I never noticed him lying to anyone.

And sure, he worked hard traveling around the country during his campaign. But what’s memorable about his campaign?

His best line was the response to the question “If you had to pick, a Democrat or a Republican, a Joe Biden or Donald Trump, gun to your head, who would you vote for?” He replied:  “The gun would go off.” It’s a good line, but never really made a powerful case for ditching the Uniparty and its Deep State overlords that gelled with voters. Trump actually talked more about the Deep State than Chase.

The main problem was he had nothing but the most banal libertarian talking points and he did nothing to stand out. His bravest anti-war comment was a Tweet against Bill Kristol for the Iraq war, a tweet that would have been edgy, apropos and generated interest in the party back in 2004. But in 2024 it just seemed like weak sauce and playing it super-safe. 

Even his anti-war campaign memes are so unremarkable in their language that I get bored and stop reading them half-way through: 

His platform was actually good on war and economics. The problem was his inability to motivate followers and convince the masses that their leaders hate them and want them propertyless, poor and dependent. Instead, he spoke like a member of the Captive Media with a gently different take on war and taxes. Gentleness gets you absolutely nothing in politics today.

In the end, his hard work amounted to nothing more than traveling the country as a tourist. He has built no organization for the future (not even to self-promote, which buttresses the idea his candidacy wasn’t a grift). He has no campaign warchest, no giant mailing list of donors and supporters of any significance, and no issue on which he stood out to make his own or brought anew to the national debate. 

Nothing from his campaign will be significant by next week.

And while that is a shame, it should be no surprise. He virtually ignored media, or was successfully ignored by it in the case of the Captive Media (i.e., the “mainstream” corporate media towing the official line of US intelligence agencies). All his efforts to make his speech palatable to Captive Media organs were brought to naught, as they successfully built a border wall to keep him out their fiefdoms all but entirely. And he bizarrely left the alternative media almost exclusively to Trumpers. Chase’s media engagements were limited to an NPR interview, an Al Jazeera interview, another by the regime libertarians at Reason, a statement about the greatness of the Cato Institute (whose slogan should be “the poors are not taxed enough”), and several dozen local newspaper, radio and television shows and a few small podcasts. 

You don’t build a political party with that media exposure; you bury a political party with that media exposure.

Thus, it’s no surprise Chase didn’t build up the Libertarian Party. Typically, the Libertarian Party grows during presidential years, but that didn’t happen this year. Even his own small base of support left the Libertarian Party for more comfortable homes in the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party … during the campaign! We won’t miss those who left, as most of those who left take the view “if you disagree with me on one issue, it’s because you’re a bad person.” 

You can’t build a mass movement with people like that. 

And I should stress I’m talking above about a segment of Chase’s support which has left the Libertarian Party, and emphatically not Chase himself nor his followers still in the party.

I’m not saying it’s all Chase Oliver’s fault. It isn’t. Not even close.

There’s a lot of failure to go around.

Mises Caucus failures

The Mises Caucus failed to deliver a candidate at the convention that could change things, and I’m not just talking about Dave Smith backing out. Michael Rectenwald, nice enough a guy as he is, would have brought the party problems with his unfiltered social media and remarks. And the Mises Caucus failed to bring in enough delegates to the convention to get Rectenwald the nomination anyway.

And many of the Mises Caucus members never gave Chase Oliver a fair shake. I heard a lot of “he’s a woke candidate,” and “he’s in favor of transing kids.” And yes, while he said that he was against surgery for trans kids, when asked he acknowledged he favored letting parents give kids hormone blockers (which I think is horrific). But Chase didn’t run on social issues, and I doubt he would have given more than a moment of thought to trans issues before or during the campaign if he wasn’t constantly asked about them (like here) and let himself get distracted by them.

The Mises Caucus was founded to take the focus off social issues and put it on war and economics. And while Chase ran a campaign (admittedly a terrible campaign where he did nothing noteworthy) on economics and foreign policy, many of the Mises people could only talk about how he was bad on social issues, even though Chase didn’t run on those issues.

In the general election in particular, Chase focused on taxes, guns and war. Among some of the Mises guys there was that same attitude of “if you disagree with us on one issue, you’re a bad person.” It’s the same attitude among the woke crowd that makes it impossible to build a large political party. 

It’s not 2022 any more, and the Mises Caucus no longer commanded the 60% or more dominance among the Libertarian Party delegates nationally. Again, it’s not that Libertarians want to go back to the Nick Sarwark way of messaging, saying “mask up responsibly,” and ignore both the forever wars and inflation by the Fed. The membership doesn’t want that, as far as I can see.

The Mises Caucus has also found internal controversy; many of the people who were once sympathetic with its mission can now be counted among its dogged opponents. And these differences are not about public policy or how the party should be messaging. These rifts need to be repaired, and the attitude of “so-and-so was never any good anyway” needs to be discarded in favor of a wider view of every person — or at least most persons — as flawed but possessing valuable qualities. People can be wrong on one issue, or even more than one issue, or disagree on tactics, and still have value to an organization.

These splits will either mean a renaissance of the Mises Caucus or the demise of it. And if the latter, it will mean the flowering of new caucuses (such as, but not limited to the new American Liberty Caucus, or, dare I predict creation of a Blue Collar Caucus?). I’m kind of hoping for all of the above, a Mises Caucus renaissance and a dozen or more sensible but zealous new caucuses that will guide and grow the Libertarian Party nationally in the coming years.

The Libertarian National Committee’s failures

The LNC has failed at fundraising over the past two years, and there’s no way to sugar-coat it: The buck stops at Chair Angela McArdle, and the entire LNC shares in this failure. 

Sure, it was certain the party would take a fundraising hit after Reno once the bribe money from the Intelligence Community-friendly donors and the uber-woke sin lobby hobbyists dried up. The party has been under coordinated attack since Reno by the Deep State as well as by all the losers who have since left the party for other parties (parties that pledge fealty to the global US empire and/or want to focus on less important, niche social issues).

But that should have been expected back in Reno. It’s more than two years later, and a fundraising corner should have been turned by now. The LNC has failed to find either new super-wealthy donors (something that’s admittedly very difficult) or better yet widen its base of smaller donors (something they should have succeeded at by now). 

The joint fundraising agreement with the Kennedy campaign, which has helped our state party significantly in the financial department, is a band-aid that cannot be relied upon going forward. A party limited to siphoning money off a real grass roots phenomenon like RFK2 is one headed for eventual extinction.

The national Libertarian Party improved its messaging measurably since the 2022 Reno convention, but it’s still not speaking directly to America’s largest voting base (more about that below). And that’s a big part of the reason the party hasn’t had more small donors sign up as members.

So what’s the good news?

It’s actually good news that those infected with the woke mind virus have left the party for the Democrats and Liberals; it gives the Libertarian Party a chance to appeal directly to the masses. The only people we don’t want in the party, other than outright socialists, are the people who say “If you disagree with me, it’s because you’re a bad person/ Russian agent/ Anti-Semite/ Racist/ Nativist/ Nationalist.” And most of those annoying people are happily gone forever. Their sniping from the outside can be safely ignored, and perhaps their hate can even be monetized.

We can start from scratch with a solid base of people who are really cool, fun to be around and are wise to all of both Washington and our state capitals’ tricks.

And looking forward, there are probably two dozen libertarian superstars who, if they could be persuaded to run for president in 2028, would change the game for the party and appeal to the masses: Spike Cohen, Dave Smith, Jeff Deist, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and many more.

The votes are with working people

But the focus, both nationally and locally, has to be brought to bear on bringing working people into the party — people punching a clock or earning a salary. That’s the only way to appeal to the great masses of voters. We can’t limit our marketing to, or even focus it upon, entrepreneurs any more. The latter are too small a demographic, and too many of them are bought off with contracts from the state.

Working people are the largest voting bloc, and no other party is appealing to them directly.

The Democrats literally offer them nothing but a fake pledge to punch the rich with higher income taxes. You don’t heal the poor man’s jaw by saying “I’m going to keep punching you in the jaw every day, but your jaw will heal because I’m going to punch the rich guy’s jaw too.”

The Republicans offer them nothing but scraps, a few hundred bucks in a massive income tax cut. 

The Libertarian Party has a lot to offer working people if we start speaking to them directly, rather than listening to the regime libertarians who crap on railroad and auto unions every time they threaten a strike and tell the poor it’s their own fault they’re poor (instead of pointing out the Fed and the IRS stole their wages). 

We need a model for how to make a mass appeal to voters, especially working people, and we have one. Whatever his flaws while serving in office, Argentine President Javier Milei has shown the path to take a party from being virtually non-existent at a national level to the presidential office: 

Appeal to the masses of working people directly by telling them the truth that the permanent bureaucracy doesn’t care about them and in fact hates them, wants them poor and propertyless, is happy so long as their rich cronies benefit from subsidies and inflation, and the bureaucrats are parasites who produce nothing of value for society. The Libertarian Party is the only party that will bring workers fairness and an end to the theft of their wages.

If the Libertarian Party puts a laser focus on that attitude in this current American economic environment of a stagnant middle class and struggling working poor, the party will prosper and be nationally significant within months. The working poor and middle class are a spark about to ignite. We Libertarians can unite them.

Thomas R. Eddlem is Treasurer of the Massachusetts Libertarian Party, the William Norman Grigg fellow at the Libertarian Institute, a freelance writer and an economist. The views here are his own and do not necessarily represent the official view of the Massachusetts Libertarian Party.

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