From: mikec@calvin.tcs.com (Mike Curry)
Subject: Re: No LP Presidential Candidate in '96!
Organization: Teknekron Communications Systems Inc.
Distribution: usa
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 03:46:55 GMT

In article <1992Nov8.051943.18011@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>
sconley@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Stephen M Conley) writes:
> Why not take the resources that we're dumping into pointless Presidentia
> campaigns and devote them to Congressional candidates?  We might actuall
> be able to make a difference that way.  I mean, if we *must* have a
> presidential candidate, let's just make it a paper candidacy and utilize
> our resources more efficiently.

This makes a tremendous amount of sense to me.  One of the things I
was most struck by in the recent elections was the consistency of the
results obtained by Libertarian candidates in congressional, state and
local races, to wit: 3-6% of the vote in 3+ way races, and around 15%
in 2-way races.

Now, I have no sense of the amount of campaign money spent by any of
these candidacies, but I believe that for the Marrou presidential
campaign I've heard a figure like $3 million.  For that $3 million,
Marrou was able to get less than 0.3% of the popular vote.

I think it's safe to assume that few or none of the other Libertarian
candidates had anything approaching that amount of money to work with.
So I'm forced to conclude that the return on investment for congressional,
state and local campaigns is better (maybe *MUCH* better) than it is for
the presidential campaign.

The reason for this seems fairly obvious: in a smaller race, you
simply have fewer voters to reach with your message, so a dollar's
worth of media spent in a local or state market gets you a larger
percentage of the vote than it does in the national market.

(It would be interesting to hear from anyone having information
correlating campaign dollars spent by other Libertarian candidates
with the results they achieved.  If anyone would like to e-mail
this kind of data to me, I will summarize and post.)

There's a lot of fairly conventional political wisdom that says
that the way to building a strong base of support is by winning
elections at the "grass-roots" level.  And the standard "baseball
analogy" says that you don't need to hit a home run if you can
consistently hit singles and doubles.  Once you get a runner or
two on base, you can bat runs in...

In article <1992Nov12.072323.12680@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>,
mlinksva@nyx.cs.du.edu (Michael Linksvayer) writes:
>                                      I think running people for
> president and VP is useful, if only for exposure. We can get on a
> lot of talk shows with a presidential ticket that we couldn't
> get on otherwise.
>
> I agree that the resources need to go to winnable races (that
> means state legislatures, Congress is too expensive for us at
> this point). So send your money to candidates that have a chance
> of winning, and encourage others to do the same rather than
> donating to the presidential effort.

In some other article that I can't find any more, someone else wrote that
the Congressional campaign of June Genis for the "long" Senate seat for
California was "one of the great missed opportunities of Libertarian
politics", because so many voters were so appalled by the choice between
Barbara Boxer and Bruce Herschensohn.  The writer went on to say that he
or she had personally convinced several people to vote for Genis, and
alluded that, given the odiousness of the two major-party candidates,
this wasn't particularly hard to do.

The result of this race was particularly telling: the number of votes
that Genis received, around 230,000, is about the same as the number
that Andre Marrou managed to get *nationwide* for his $3 million!
Again, I don't know what kind of funding was available to the Genis
campaign (anyone...?), nor do I know what Boxer or Herschensohn spent
(I think it was in the single-digit millions for each...).  But it's
tempting to speculate on what would have happened if a sizeable chunk
of that $3 million had been injected into Genis's effort.

My point is that it may not be strictly true that "Congress is too
expensive for us at this point".  Although there's no guarantee
that we'll find a Congressional race that presents such a good
opportunity as the one Genis ran in, I think that when we *do*
find one, we ought to pump into it most of the money that would
have gone to the presidential candidacy.

This kind of strategy would certainly solve the "exposure" problem for
the state in which that particular congressional race was being run.
It would probably also draw enough national media attention to help
address it nationwide (in a sense, the presidential candidate could
ride the media coattails of the congressional one!).

And consider the effect on the "exposure" picture if a Libertarian
congressional candidate actually won.  The floor of either house of
congress would be an unbeatable "bully-pulpit" for promoting the
Libertarian program.  Does anyone out there remember when Paul
Wellstone was elected Senator from Minnesota?  The improbability of
his election, coupled with the extremity of his views, made him a
celebrity among the Washington media for many months.  And while he's
not getting the play that he was back in the months immediately
following his election, I think that the national press would not
exactly stay away if he were to call a news conference tomorrow.

...

Well, anyway, I'd like to see more discussion on this issue.  In
particular, if someone thinks I've missed anything obvious in my
analysis or gotten any of my figures wrong, please point it out.

And remember, if you have any data on campaign expenditures vs.
election results, please send them my way.  Thanks.

mikec
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Michael A. Curry                       | mikec@tcs.com
Senior Software Engineer               | 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704
Teknekron Communications Systems, Inc. | +1-510-649-3856
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        Once upon a time, in a little directory, there was a bug.
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