Endorsing Morey Straus was a good thing. he worked hard on his campaign. Funding paper campaigns is a horse of a different note.

Yes, note. C sharp. H double flat.

This proposal is egregious. The LNC are not volunteers working for the national director, they are the governing body of the party. The national director works for the LNC, not the other way around. Asking for confidentiality statements is an attempt to invert the relationship. What a bunch of losers.

$378,700 for Administrative Expense

That’s a lot of money for hand jobs.

Sardonicism is its own reward.

It’s true that they have an adversarial relationship with certain LP staffers, but some of those staffers may be leaving in the near future or may be laid off because of the funding crisis. It’s actually a pretty smart idea for them to try to drum up business among Libertarians, since that party is generally still the most proactive about obtaining ballot access on a national level (the exception being the Nader movement, but who knows if that group will even run a candidate in four years).

Chapter 9

Project Archimedes
…

Project Archimedes was the campaign promise of National Chair David Bergland. As laid out by former National Director Perry Willis, Project Archimedes was supposed to increase Party membership from nearly 28,000 in mid- 1998 to 100,000 or more by the 2000 National Convention. Bergland had promised that if elected he would launch the Project. He was elected. The Project was launched.

To reach its goals, Project Archimedes needed to attract 6000 new members in its first two months, and 6000 or more members every two months thereafter. Project Archimedes failed. Not only did membership not grow 6000 in two months, but membership has never grown by 6000 from the 27,938 it had reached on June 27, 1998. Indeed, after four years of Project Archimedes Party membership is smaller than it was in Summer 1998.

When Bergland became National Chair, party membership was already increasing-up 5000 in the first half of 1998. Project Archimedes was launched. Membership growth immediately slowed. In the second half of 1998, about 600,000 Archimedes letters were mailed (source: December 1998 LNC Minutes) and membership grew by fewer than 2200. In 1999, another 1.7 million or so letters were mailed (We know the number because Willis was paid in total for about 2.3 million letters, of which 600,000 were mailed in 1998). In the first half of 1999, membership grew by another 2300, from 30,065 to 32,377. Tripling the number of letters mailed had almost no effect on the net number of new recruits, raising the question of whether the program was at all effective in recruiting new members. Membership growth then crashed to a halt, and has never reached 33,500. The situation grew worse in the New Year. From November 30, 1999 to December 31, 2000, National Party membership fell by more than 650. For the first time in recent memory, the National Party failed to expand its ranks during a Presidential election year. Party membership went into a steep decline, falling to 24,498 in areas with affiliated parties by the end of July, 2002. ”

NOT TO MENTION

“There is controversy about the financial outcome of Project Archimedes. Some supporters want to claim that the Project was financially successful. It was not. I quote from the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts e-mail list. Massachusetts libertarian activist (and co-founder of the gay/lesbian gun rights action group Pink Pistols) Doug Krick asked: “Does anyone know if the project cost the LP money in the long haul, or did it pay for itself?”

The answer was provided on 14 June 2000 by Mark Tuniewicz, Libertarian Party National Treasurer, writing (note signature block) in his official capacity as the Party’s Treasurer. Tuniewicz’s answer to Krick appeared on the Massachusetts Libertarian email list general@lpma.org, a list since silenced by the LPMA for publishing URLs leading to newspaper articles that were critical of LPMA candidates. Tuniewicz wrote:

“The fast answer is ‘it depends’. Certainly, the project has fallen below most people’s expectations.

Initially, Archimedes was supposed to more than pay for itself—-meaning that every mailing would more than recoup its cost based on the contributions and memberships from that mailing.

This was expanded to include an estimate of what we normally receive as an average contribution per member for the year following receipt of a new membership, the rationale being that those are additional revenues that we never would have had, so should be included as part of the mailing’s return calculation.

More recently, I think some are looking at TWO years worth of returns.

I think that there’s a point at which stretching out those incremental dollars becomes meaningless, though one could approach it on a discounted cash flow basis.

Right now, using the original definition, Archimedes mailings do not pay for themselves. [Emphasis added. GP] But has the project been useful? I think so. We would have been at a substantial membership decrease nationally if we didn’t do direct mail.

The moral of the story is: Archimedes in and of itself is not the answer. Direct mail is just one part of the equation for our success, and we do ourselves a favor by not overly focussing on just one approach.

Best

Mark Tuniewicz

National Treasurer

Libertarian Party”

As of the start of 2000, Project Archimedes was a double failure.

Failure one: National Party membership never reached even 50,000, let alone 100,000 or 200,000. Membership climbed from 27,000 in 1998 to 33,000 members in mid-1999. Membership growth then stopped.

Failure two: Project Archimedes was not self-financing. As witness the above letter from the National Treasurer, the new members did not pay for the cost of recruiting them, even counting the year’s income from those members. Perhaps with two years’ income a membership would pay for itself. But two years’ income from a member (including donations) is more than $100—the cost per member honestly estimated by Gene Cisewski in the 1998 debate. “

Does “Negative” count? There is an identifiable date on which PA was launched, and party growth did not accelerate.

Our little group of REAL Libertarian petitioners has a plan to achieve 50 state plus DC ballot access for 2012.

Pathetic. You guys remind me of an abused wife who keeps coming back for more.

Somethings make me ill and this is one.

I have a file from Richard Winger as to which states don’t have start dates on petitioning. It is slightly out of date, but not terribly. The December BAN has the requirements by state, but it looks like some of those were not updated based on 2008 election results for those states which calculate their petition requirements based on number of votes cast. Hopefully January will have the updates.

A rational analysis would then look at the condition of the Libertarian Party in each state, or the chances of restarting a libertarian party under some name if the local LP has croaked, as it has in parts of America.

You would know that part better. If you would like to work together on compiling that info, I have pieces of the puzzle.

Perhaps you would care to share the plan with the rest of us. Let me try a simple question: What are the states in which we could be petitioning now, and how many signatures are needed in each of them? A rational analysis would then look at the condition of the Libertarian Party in each state, or the chances of restarting a libertarian party under some name if the local LP has croaked, as it has in parts of America.

It is incomprehensible (to me anyway) that there isn’t a process (I’ll accept there isn’t a plan as yet) to game out how to get 50 (or at least 49) state access for 2012. Meaning, who will do what, by when, and what will be needed (manpower, money, etc). And who will be *accountable* for these things. And what will be the consequences for the point people if they are *not* achieved.”

The fact that they are only shooting for 48 states instead of 50 states plus DC shows the Losertarian attitude and it one reason why the party does not get anywhere.

Our little group of REAL Libertarian petitioners has a plan to achieve 50 state plus DC ballot access for 2012. We can begin working on it as soon as the funding becomes available (and we can do it cheaper, and do it RIGHT).

At $84 per new member via direct mail, it takes 6-8 years for donations from that member (remember, many of them leave after each year) to cover the cost of recruiting that member, and that appeared to be assuming a constant dollar. That’s even worse than Project Archimedes, which the LNC Treasurer determined would cost a minimum of 2-3 years per new member to pay for itself.

“$430,000 for membership recruiting and fund raising” Not how, but why?