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Libertarian Elected to City Council

By wredlich on December 4, 2012 1:41 PM

We just received an announcment that Libertarian Susan Marie Weber was elected to the Palm Desert City Council.

Looking from outside the campaign, it appears to have been a non-partisan race. Ms. Weber’s website mentions the word “libertarian” only once, with a link to the LP for Riverside County on her Links page.

Nevertheless this appears to be a big victory against moneyed establishment candidates, as described by the Desert Sun. The result came after she passed an incumbent in the final vote counting.

wredlich

Warren Redlich is CEO of SpinJ Corporation, which became owner of IPR in November 2012. He was the 2010 Libertarian candidate for Governor of New York, and has run for office as a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, and Liberal.

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12 Comments

  1. paulie December 5, 2012

    I actually have to apologize, that email was not supposed to be public. You are probably correct about Nevada.

  2. Jill Pyeatt December 5, 2012

    Paulie, thanks for pursuing the elected officials topic. I went home to an utterly dead desktop computer last night, and wasted so much time in trying to figure out what was wrong with it that I didn’t do anything I was supposed to do. This morning a genius kid at Best Buy fixed it, so that’s a good thing.

    What I find very intriguing in the above letter from Mr. Johnston is his reference to people being removed in Nevada per a request by the state chair. I need to find out what’s going on over there. I have a feeling that is NOT a good thing.

  3. paulie December 5, 2012

    The positive thing that happened for the Libertarian Party of California recently is that their voter registration numbers mysteriously increased by quite a bit (relatively speaking). I don’t know how this happened (perhaps by people like Ron Paul, Andrew Napolitano, and Gary Johnson increasing name recognition for the word Libertarian?), but whatever the case may be, it’s a good thing, because now the party is just a little bit over the minimum number of voter registrations threshold needed to retain ballot access, but of course since they aren’t over by much this trend of more people in California registering to vote under the Libertarian Party needs to increase so the party can be assured of retaining ballot status.

    Good point. The last part is especially important.

  4. paulie December 5, 2012

    Andy, the gains in California remain dismal, but I’d love to see such a list countrywide. I’ll write to Carla Howell and ask if anyone has compiled such a list yet.

    Bob Johnston is working on it.

    I asked him about that today.

    I wrote:

    While I don’t know for sure, the list of 153 elected officials may have been slightly out of date (I know Wes Benedict had it updated at one point but I’m not sure exactly when and whether it has been updated between then and now), and may have listed people who were either no longer elected officials even before the election and/or no longer LP members (for this purpose, are we only counting current sustaining LP members? All pledge signers who have not revoked their signature and not asked to be de-listed as elected Libertarians? All registered Libertarians who have not asked to be de-listed as elected Libertarians?).

    If only people who were currently still in office right before this election were on the list, it may have been a while since we checked how many are current on their LP dues (if the criterion is current sustaining members). Or, if the criterion is registered Ls or pledge signers, it may be a while since we have contacted them to see how many want to remain listed as elected Libertarians. Many people fall in and out of considering themselves to be Libertarians, and very few of those take the active step of revoking their pledge signature or asking to be delisted on the website if they are elected.

    Another possibility is that the list is being re-compiled from scratch and the compilation may or may not be complete.

    It’s certainly likely that additional LP members have been elected to (mostly local, non-partisan) office that we do not know about, or that some of those existing kinds of elected or appointed officials have become LP members but have not made the list because they didn’t alert us to that fact when they joined. With perhaps 600,000 elected and appointed officials of some sort in the country, at least by one estimate I have seen, it’s not likely that we would have known they are one when they join, and also not likely that they alerted us to their official status.

    I’d like to know the methodology we are using in compiling this list. If we are just going through the old list and seeing how many people got re-elected, of course the list is only going to shrink over time. Or maybe that was just the first step and additional steps to expand the list are still coming up, such as asking states to identify elected Libertarians from their states, sending out an email blast asking such people to step forward and identify themselves, an LP.org blog post and facebook post to that same effect, and so on.

    I’m willing to help with identifying them if we can get a clear explanation of the methodology and where we are in the process, what has been done so far, what remains to be done.

    Reply:

    I have been updating the list given to me by Art Dibianca, who compiled it while working for Wes.

    We are finishing up stuff for the issue of LP News today, and then I’ll contact Art, and find out what was his criteria while compiling the info.

    […]

    We’re in crunch-time, trying to get this stuff out this week. Not to mention, I’m behind in my renewal and fund-raising calling.

    The elected officials list is down to 135. Quite a few chose not to run for reelection, a couple were defeated, and some were removed by the state party for some other reason, such as 2 officials in NV that were asked to be removed by the state chair.

    It’s been extremely time-consuming getting the information and results on the elected officials. Some of the races don’t have results on the internet, and for some reason, quite a few libertarians won’t return phone calls. Don’t know why.

    Next year is an odd year, when most local races are conducted, so hopefully we can get the numbers up.

    We also will be sending out an email to state chairs to verify current elected officials, and any we’re missing.

  5. Gene Berkman December 5, 2012

    Thanks, George, but the credit belongs to the people who have built RCLP.

    Our Vice-Chair Larry Baird provided website and Facebook support for Susan Marie Weber’s campaign as well as for two candidates for Moreno Valley City Council that were elected on a platform of ending Police Traffic Checkpoints.

    And Susan Marie Weber ran her own successful campaign. My part of the organization was busy promoting Gary Johnson, who has received 6,223 votes in Riverside County.

  6. George Whitfield December 5, 2012

    Gene, hats off to you, sir. You have built an impressive team there.

  7. Gene Berkman December 4, 2012

    Local elections in California are non-partisan, but Susan Marie Weber has been active in The Libertarian Party for many years. She ran for State Assembly on The Libertarian ticket in 1998 and 2000, receiving nearly 4% each time.

    Susan Marie Weber served as Vice-Chair of the Riverside County Libertarian Party from 2003 til 2011, and she remains active in our county organization.

    She has run for City Council several times and made her name known as a champion for the taxpayers, finally winning election this year.

    (note:I serve as Chair of the Riverside County Libertarian Party)

  9. George Whitfield December 4, 2012

    Congratulations to Susan Weber. Although she was outspent 37 to 1 she was elected beating an incumbent.

  10. Andy December 4, 2012

    “Jill Pyeatt // Dec 4, 2012 at 2:40 pm

    Andy, the gains in California remain dismal, but I’d love to see such a list countrywide.”

    This is in large part because of Proposition 14, aka-the “Top Two Primary” system that has gone into effect there. Although, somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that Top Two applies to local, non-partisan offices.

    The positive thing that happened for the Libertarian Party of California recently is that their voter registration numbers mysteriously increased by quite a bit (relatively speaking). I don’t know how this happened (perhaps by people like Ron Paul, Andrew Napolitano, and Gary Johnson increasing name recognition for the word Libertarian?), but whatever the case may be, it’s a good thing, because now the party is just a little bit over the minimum number of voter registrations threshold needed to retain ballot access, but of course since they aren’t over by much this trend of more people in California registering to vote under the Libertarian Party needs to increase so the party can be assured of retaining ballot status.

  11. Jill Pyeatt December 4, 2012

    Andy, the gains in California remain dismal, but I’d love to see such a list countrywide. I’ll write to Carla Howell and ask if anyone has compiled such a list yet.

  12. Andy December 4, 2012

    Usually after an election I read a report about a bunch of Libertarians elected to local offices around the country. I’ve only heard of a tiny handful this time, and I have yet to see a report that names all of the Libertarians who got elected to local offices. Was there a big drop in the number of Libertarians elected to local offices this time, or has the party been so disorganized that nobody has yet to compile a list of all of the Libertarians that were elected to local office in the election that just happened this November.

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