[Lnc-business] Controlled experiment of the Libertarian spoilereffect

Fri Dec 5 12:08:24 EST 2014

This concept of being the spoiler is misguided. Messaging is important. How things are said is important. SPOILER. It’s not a positive thing. It’s someone that spoils things for others. SPOIL..read the various definitions of it. We are marketing ourselves as something negative. We are the spoiled brat ruining things for everyone.
I am gonna say at again..this idea of running for SUPREME OVERLORD is NOT how we are going to get people elected. Practicing what we preach, fiscal responsibility is. We need to run for offices within our means. Attempting to run a serious campaign for US Senate as a Libertarian is just misguided. You are talking about spending 5 million dollars just to be competitive.  We are like a person working at McDonald’s attempting to buy a penthouse in Manhattan, now. Its laughable. Now I am not saying to not run uptick races. Having that L on the ballot as much as possible is advertising for the party. It’s getting people more touches with the Party and will get more of them looking our way as they become curious. What I mean by touches is it takes close to a dozen exposures to a new concept on an average before someone becomes comfortable with it and accepting of it.  Having as many people on the ballot helps that. But those people need to be able to articulate the message and they need to be willing to get out and knock doors. PLAIN and simple. And when they knock doors they need to realize that they are selling the party as much as they are selling themselves.    IF evert Libertarian that ran for office did this..and started building a LIST, we might get somewhere. That all takes time…. We are gearing up our candidates for our State House races in October 2015 to start doing this NOW. Our State House districts are about 13,000 households. About 3000-4000 votes wins the race. Are we going to win these races? Probably not..but someone with some latent political ability may emerge and who knows. But what happens if we don’t win? Say we have 10 candidates that do this..and on the average they encourage 50 new registered Libertarians. That’s 500 newly registered Libertarians on top of what we otherwise would have developed. That adds to the statistics to help create belief. It’s all about achieving critical mass. Its going to be a SLOG till we get there. Knocking doors takes away a positive for the party as long as people can largely stay on message and not drift off into Chemtrails and other conspiracies. 
People are NOT going to listen to the golden tones of someone’s voice and have a light shine down from the heaven’s revealing all and suddenly those people are all Libertarians. Its NOT gonna happen like magic..yet… Once we reach a critical mass in a state or two..THEN things will snowball.
I know in my state I use our non-partisan open blanket primary..jungle…we can call it..top two without the drawbacks.. Its a selling point to people on the fence. Their voting for a Libertarian won’t spoil the election. Once I get that explained to them and that they can still vote for whoever they want in our primaries..Many of them switch. I realize others states are different. But maybe instead of investing in states were we have to fight to get nothing our National efforts need to go across states to places like Louisiana were we have the ability thanks to our ballot access laws to get things done. We put way too many efforts into losing efforts. In Louisiana we DEEMPHASIZE any SPOILER effect we have. That is working for us. The Republican establishment does everything they can to stick that tag on us. Its why they said on Fox the La Libertarian candidate  was a potential spoiler..when our primaries don’t really allow for that..and there was a Tea Party Republican in the race that was the one that was really cutting into the establishment Republicans totals. This whole game made people think that OUR candidate was the spoiler for the establishment Republican..when it was really another Republican…and their establishment hack is probably going to win tomorrow in the run off anyway.  Think about it..if the Republicans especially want to call us Spoilers..WHY would we want to foster that idea as well? I fight it all the time..and to have people elsewhere trying to play it up just because they want to come up with some way to make themselves feel relevant is not helpful.

 Need an example of the negatives of the SPOILER tag….Look at what happened to Rob Sarvis in Va.. we had ballot access on the line there in the governor’s race. He was polling in that realm and the Paul’s came in and drummed up the fear tactics of SPOILER regarding Sarvis and we probably LOST a few percent of the vote…maybe enough to have cracked the 10% barrier and gotten ballot access and opened things in in Virginia..
If you can’t win and all you wanna do is SPOIL the election for others..and you broadcast that, people won’t respond well to that..you are showing what you are..a SPOILED sport..attempting to ruin things for others just because you can’t have your way. It doesn’t matter if both the big party candidates are atrocious.. What matters is the perceptions of those people we are trying to win to our side..and if they perceive us in that negative light… They won’t just turn on us for that election but also future elections. It’s not about trying to FEEL relevant..its about becoming statistically relevant so that then we will actually be politically relevant. It’s not about being a SPOILER. That’s just childish.

Daniel Hayes
LNC Region 7 Alternate Representative
> On Dec 5, 2014, at 8:34 AM, Scott L. <scott73 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> When I received the e-mail below from the lnc e-mail list, my copy of McAfee virus protection gave me 
> a warning for ballot-acess.org <http://ballot-acess.org/>.
>  
> 
> I checked ballot-access.org <http://ballot-access.org/>   with scanurl.net <http://scanurl.net/>, and it said
>  
>  
> Recommendation
> 
> <image001.gif>
> It's probably safe to visit the website/URL you entered. None of the services we checked with report it as suspicious.  ( Visit URL . . . <http://www.ballot-access.org/> )
>  
>  
> So I suspect that McAfee is just being overprotective.
> 
>   Scott Lieberman
>  
> From: Lnc-business [mailto:lnc-business-bounces at hq.lp.org] On Behalf Of Scott L.
> Sent: Friday, December 05, 2014 6:27 AM
> To: lnc-business at lp.org
> Subject: [Lnc-business] Controlled experiment of the Libertarian spoilereffect
>  
>  
> In addition to the exit polls that have been done in Virginia and other places, the evidence below strongly suggests that the spoiler effect of Libertarian Nominees is pretty minimal.
>  
> The good news is that this article can be used when lobbying major party state legislators to pass bills that make it easier for third parties to retain ballot access.  We now have evidence that the effect of Libertarians on the vote difference between Republican and Democrat nominees is extremely small.
>  
> http://www.ballot-access.org/2014/12/special-virginia-u-s-house-race-acts-as-experiment-to-determine-true-effect-of-libertarian-candidates-on-outcome/ <http://www.ballot-access.org/2014/12/special-virginia-u-s-house-race-acts-as-experiment-to-determine-true-effect-of-libertarian-candidates-on-outcome/>
>  
>  
>   Scott Lieberman
>  
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