 Here we are. This is the Reason Livestream. I'm your croaky voice host, Nick Gillespie, joined by my colleague, Reason TV, Zach Weismiller. And today we are talking with Angela McCartle, who is the national or the chair of the National Libertarian Party. We're gonna talk about how the midterms were for the LP, the political landscape in general. And we're gonna go through Libertarian Party successes and failures and what comes next between now and the 2024 election. So Angela, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. Great, you are living in Texas now, right? I am, I have been here a little over two months in the great state of Texas in the city of Austin. And do you find it freer already than California where you previously resided? I do, I also find there to be less traffic. It's more affordable. I'm sure that everyone in Texas disagrees and says Austin is the worst place I could have picked, but I'm loving it so far. Well, I hope you turned out the lights in California because I think you might have been the last person living there. It seems like everybody's leaving, so. Yeah, I wish that the people who turned California into what it is now, I wish them a lot of success staying exactly where they are. Let everyone else be the ones to leave. So you wanna build a wall. That's what I'm hearing between California and all the Eastern states. Yeah, I think that the best argument for closed borders is not Mexico to the United States. It's California to anywhere else. Fair enough. Okay, so let's talk about the midterm elections that are still unfolding because there's a number of major races. We don't know what's gonna go on. That's gonna take a while. But as far as you can tell right now, were the midterms good for the libertarian party? I think it's a mixed bag. We had some really exciting wins. We have made some gains with ballot access. We got some people elected at the local level. And most importantly, I think we are part of the national conversation in a way that's incredibly profound and meaningful. Not just a handful of hit pieces here and there on one state affiliate. We are the talk of the town and I think that that's really good. What are some of the wins, the kind of local races and things like that? What are the ones that you're most excited about? Bill Schult in Kentucky, I think is a really great one. It's an interesting juxtaposition over to some of the conversations that have happened and unfolded over Arizona. Bill Schult ran for city council and he was, I don't know if he was the top vote getter. There were seven candidates running, I believe for six positions. And last I saw he was at the top. He was endorsed by Thomas Massey. So that was a really fun one to watch the wins unfold. We've had someone get elected to the board of education in Nebraska. I believe his name is Jeremy Dick. Had a couple of magistrate slash justice of the pieces in Kentucky, Shannon Deniston, David Harriman. We had a mayor elected in Colorado, Aaron Lam. So congratulations to him. Several more city council wins in Nebraska and Kentucky. What else, what else? More wins, I believe we had a Tulsa city councilman elected in Oklahoma, Grant Miller. So that's really notable. Still waiting to see what happens. Oh, go ahead. Still waiting to see what happens with Jeff Hewitt's race. Yeah, so I noticed that there was a lot of Kentucky and Nebraska represented there. Are those just particularly fertile, is that particularly fertile ground for the libertarian party for some reason? I think it is. I think there's a cultural issue there. And I think there has been a shift where we've been able to capitalize and sort of fill a vacuum. One of the things that I'm gonna be working on with our state affiliates over the next three to four months are really detailed granular postmortems to understand the political landscape in all of these areas and to see what we did right and what lessons we can use to transfer and share with other state affiliates. What is the benefit of winning races at the local level? A mayor, it seems kind of self-evident or maybe a city council, but things like Board of Education or whatnot. Cause a lot of people are attuned to thinking about, okay, the LP will matter when it is placing people in Congress or the Senate or whatever. So there's a couple to unpack here. One is that I do not believe that past administrations at the libertarian party at the national level have done the work to get a long-term strategy in place. And it is really important for our candidates and members to understand that if you want to be taken seriously at the state and federal level, you need to have political experience. You need a resume. Just like if you were, you can't walk into JPL or NASA and say, well, I've been waiting tables a long time. Let me at the controls. You've got to start. You might be able to do that at the FDA or the CDC, but not NASA. Yeah, if you have a good friend. So we've got to start at the local level. And another thing that many of us learned during lockdowns when we were in blue states with red areas or libertarian areas like Hanford, California is that you have the opportunity to stand down and essentially nullify tyrannical edicts that come at the state level. And so you can make a profound change. Another thing you can do is you can save taxpayer money. You can change policies and you can start to really get grass roots, involvement, engagement. These are also the places where you're much more likely to engage with people who are passionate and interested in engaging in the political process. And I love all of our philosophical libertarians to death, but the reality is people who are very well read and sort of play the role of pundit are usually less likely to be politically engaged. Political engagement, you need to go and meet it where it's at. So having said that, and thank you, that really clarifies a lot. Let's jump to the higher level races where the libertarian party is in the national conversation. First and foremost, let's talk about Georgia where Chase Oliver in the Senate race has more than covered the spread between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker and has forced a runoff. Chase got about 2.1% of the popular vote there of the vote there. Is he simply a spoiler? This is what you're hearing. I'm sure you must get this in spades. But when I posted a couple of things about, hey, look, Chase Oliver, like Shane Hazel, another Georgia libertarian a couple of years ago, who helped force a runoff in 2020 in a Senate race, like look at this, he's really making an impact and everybody's like, no, this guy is just a spoiler. He is making sure that a Soviet communist is now going to be the Senator from Georgia. How do you respond to, or I guess first, what did Chase Oliver do right to get to a point where he's impacting that race? So I believe Chase Oliver spent a lot of time walking his district and talking to people. So that might be a good place for us to start, actually engaging with the people who are supposed to vote for you and not just assuming that you'll have their vote. Let's see here. So the reality is he was running against two terrible candidates. Warnock is, from a libertarian perspective, the man is a hardcore socialist. Maybe he's a sweet guy, he's a pastor. It's nothing personal, but he does not represent anything that I would identify on the freedom scale. Herschel Walker's whole campaign was just full of incredibly unpalatable personal controversies. You've got someone who's espousing conservative talking points with a rumor that he got his girlfriend an abortion. So that's gonna be a strike. Well, at least he did pay for it. So at least he's a gentleman, right? Yes, yes. Kind of goes maybe along the lines, with all the allegations that his son aired with him abandoning his family. So not getting the family man vibe and for conservatives, that's gonna be a huge turnoff. There were also allegations that he lied about military service. It's just a never-ending mess. And I've looked into it and I can't really make sense of what's true and what's not. And he has zero political experience. Yes. So maybe he should, you know, I don't think that he's, he hasn't got much of a competitive edge over Chase, definitely. Right. But how do you respond to like this tweet that I pulled up from the redheaded libertarian who is the co-host to Tim Pool. She says, this is why everybody hates libertarians. It would be funny if Ralph Warnock were not a communist. And so, you know, first of all, you buy that Raphael Warnock is a communist. And if so, you know, are you enabling kind of the worst of two evils as she puts it there? Sure. So I don't know if he's a card carrying communist. I'm sure he is trying to push the Overton window in that direction. No confusion there. But this whole spoiler talk in Georgia really doesn't make any sense because they literally have a second bite at the apple. Chase Oliver is not gonna be in the runoff election. They get to go at it again. And what's really incredible about this is now they have to compete for libertarian votes. And there's a couple of ways to look at this, right? What values does Chase espouse and what was his race about that are going to actually appeal to those voters? And then are people gonna actually try to pull that? So it might have been that Chase was more culturally progressive and that people were turned off by Herschel Walker. I don't actually know yet. We won't know unfortunately until we get the results. We also don't know if people will simply stay home because there are a lot of people obviously who didn't like either candidate, hence they voted for the libertarian. And I think that's really important to recognize that we don't know that Chase actually pulled votes from the GOP. We will know, we will find out. I think it's also kind of communist vibes to say that one party owns the votes of another group of people. You don't own anyone's votes. That's one of the GOP issues is, you know, when it comes to certain policies and certain thought processes, they get it just as just as socialist as the other party does. You know, part of Chase Oliver's appeal or at least the way he talked about it. And I spoke with him a fair man at the Reno Convention which where you became the chair where the Mises Caucus did the Reno Reset you took over the party. He was critical of the Mises Caucus rhetoric and in his campaigning, he talked very much from an older script to kind of Gary Johnson, Joe Jorgensen script to saying, you know, libertarians, when we're talking about retail politics are basically socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Do you think that is, I mean, does his success such as it is, does that show the power of that message, particularly when you're at the point of an election where people are trying to make sense of, okay, I know what Republicans are, I know what Democrats are and I find both of these parties contemptible. And then here's this guy who's saying, you know, I'm socially liberal and I'm fiscally conservative and he gets enough to throw the election into a runoff. I think it did have brought appeal to the voters in Georgia. And so I'm really happy that it did there and we'll dig into the metrics afterwards and see how that worked out in other races, like the Pennsylvania race, for example, where you had a hardcore Mises guy do something similar, although maybe that one's even more controversial since it doesn't look like that's going to a runoff. In the Senate race or the governor's race. Yes, the Senate race in Pennsylvania, Eric Gehrer. Again with just two truly awful major party candidates. And I realize we're talking about the LP here, but you know, God damn it, if the Republicans or Democrats are gonna bitch and moan about LP candidates not being serious when you have John Federman, who I know a bit and I'm friendly with, but really should not be running for office and Dr. Oz, who is not even a good fake doctor on TV, for God's sake, you know, there's something there. It's shocking that someone who is a literal TV personality for many years gave such an incredibly poor performance on TV, I just going out of that, I thought, you know what, I feel so encouraged. There is hope for the Libertarian Party because the quality of candidates coming out of the GOP and the Democratic Party are in such incredible decline, like that we can only go up, the bar is low. You know, let's talk about Arizona, which is another state where the Libertarian in the Senate race between the Republican Blakemasters and the incumbent Democrat who had won to fill the end of John McCain's term a couple of year and a half ago or so. Mark Kelly, the astronaut. Mark Victor was the Libertarian Party candidate and he dropped out of the race a couple of weeks ago and said, you know, I offered to talk to both candidates and Blakemasters called me and I dropping into the race and all of my people who were gonna vote for me should vote for him. How do you feel about that as the head of the LP? You know, how did just that decision sit with you? Well, one thing I'd like to see going forward is more communication between some of our candidates and state affiliates and in states like Alabama and Illinois and Indiana and Pennsylvania, the candidate affiliate relationship is very tight, very solid and we didn't really see that in this particular race. So that's a lesson that we can learn going forward. Are you gonna require, if I may, like, I mean, and I realize, you know, no political party has control over their members and the Libertarian Party probably doesn't wanna exert total domination, but are you going to try to, you know, extract promises and commitments to Libertarian Party candidates that they are not going to drop out during the general election and say, oh yeah, vote for this fucking asshole. I think a better way to approach that would be to just ask them what their plans are and then everyone can be prepared accordingly. I'm not gonna be able to nor do I desire to control everything that everyone does, but one of the things that I can do as a national leader is just set an example and also provide resources and an incentive for them to be in better communication with us. What do you think? I'll head back. Yeah, I was just gonna ask, you know, what do you think that the function of the Libertarian Party is in a race like that? Because, you know, you had somebody like Dave Smith throwing his support behind Blakemasters and then shortly after. And calling the Libertarian candidate a clown, actually. Right, right. And then shortly after, Mark Victor drops out, you know, I think we might, you know, Dave and I might probably would disagree on whether that was a good move for the Libertarian candidate, but in principle, the idea of using your leverage as a third party candidate to kind of get some concessions from one of the major candidates doesn't seem like a terrible idea. How do you think about that? When is that appropriate? And was it done the right way here or could it be done better in the future? I think it could be done better in the future. So I don't like to lean into the spoiler strategy. I think the way we need to approach that is to just deal with it on an individual case-by-case basis. My personal goal is to become the minor party in states like Alabama, where one of the two major parties just basically abandoned it and walked away and said it's a lost cause. But if you're going to have two tight races, I think that it presents an excellent opportunity for Libertarians to push the Overton window in the direction of freedom and make that part of the national conversation. So that's really what happened in Georgia. So let's say that in Georgia, Chase had decided not to run at all. There would be no conversation about libertarianism. There would be no conversation about freedom or about trying to actually get what voters want. It would just be the same tired red versus blue argument with two rotten candidates. Arizona was a little bit more unique because Blake Masters is someone who's associated with the Mises Institute and had an endorsement by Ron Paul and pays a lot of lip service to a lot of Libertarian policies, not across the board. Yeah, he also specifically said at a national conservative conference just a couple of months ago, libertarianism doesn't work. And he seemed to get Mark Victor's commitment merely by kind of saying, oh, and I carried a copy of Mises' human action around when I was in high school or something. So you're not, I mean, to Zach's point, you're not saying that there are in times where it might make sense for the libertarians to say, I will push my voters to go with the candidate, the major party candidate. If they say this or that is going to be my first legislative ambition. You know, I'm not ready, I'm not ready to commit to that yet. I think that this is a situation where it's sort of worked out accidentally, but again, I didn't endorse like that. Yeah, would you say, and I'm sorry to speak over you, but that in this instance, Mark Victor gave it away without even getting a ring or something like that or a promise of a second date. He basically was just, whatever. Well, did you watch his interview? Cause he did, he did have a conversation with black masters. Okay. Right. And Mark Kelly did not respond to that. Right. I think it remains to be seen. Just to get on the record, Angela, there was, was there any back channel pressure from people within the libertarian party to facilitate that? Just because the timing raised some eyebrows in that this prominent spokesman for the Mises Caucus says it, and then I don't know a week or so later it happens. Right. Yeah. There are no back channels that I was involved in and I don't want to speak on behalf of the Arizona libertarian party, but as far as I know, there were no back channels there and they were not happy with the outcome. So I did not endorse Blake masters. I am critical of his comments that he's made about the drug war and kind of suspicious about some of the stuff with the border wall. Again, these are just, I'm just sort of speculating on some of that stuff, but, you know, I'm sure he's, I'm sure he's better than, than a Democrat, but that that's not the standard that I personally hold myself to. And that's not the standard of the libertarian party. Can I ask just very quickly to follow up on that? You know, that, that's kind of true in a lot of races, right? That or in almost every state where people will say, well, you know, I don't like the Republican, but they are so much better than the Democrat. Why, you know, what's the role for the libertarian if that's kind of a generally agreed upon understanding? Well, we need to be there advocating for individual liberty and for better economic policies and better done rights, especially at the federal level. I mean, we saw a lot of that stuff decay under Trump's administration. He did not follow through on his promises. I think, you know, different arguments have to be made at the state and local level, but at the federal level, my goodness, like Republicans have grossly mismanaged our finances and we saw federal gun crackdowns increase under Trump's administration. So, you know, I'm very happy that Republicans are less engaged in lockdowns and mandates. They certainly came out of the gate at the same pace as the Democrats and they improved, but there's a long way to go between the libertarianism and just like standard Geoke. Can we cycle through a couple of these questions that have come up that I think are relevant to what we've just been discussing from the audience? One, does Mark Victor's move to, this is from Chuck G, does Mark Victor's move to drop out and endorse masters portend any further defections of LP candidates? I don't know. I don't know how the candidates are gonna approach that. It's been a real controversy within the party. I just hope that there's not somebody who's like, hey, you know, I read the moon is a harsh mistress. Give me a vote. I really hate the giving tree. I deserve the libertarian candidates votes. Nice dream asks or says Chase Oliver had the most success and yet the LP Mises Twitter calls him a hater and a leftist, what a joke. That kind of goes to Nick's question of there's this division here between the faction that just took over and a kind of irony that the most talked about libertarian from this cycle is a guy who kind of went in the other direction. You know, how do you feel about that? Is there some sort of reconciliation that is possible between the factions? Well, let's unpack that question a little bit. The most success, so that metric is arguable, quite honestly, he had the most media attention. Eric Gerhardt produced a similar outcome in Pennsylvania except they didn't have a runoff. Obviously, I don't run the Mises Caucus Twitter. So I don't know how recent that comment was. I didn't see it. I think that what we're gonna have to see is that we need tailored strategies for different states and different areas. And I've always been very open to that. And I think that it has been a failure of past administrations to not be open to the fact that different states need different tactics. Is it true too? And Zach, you might know this off the top of your head because you've been looking at different races, but does it seem that the Senate is kind of the place, and we're not at a point yet where the libertarian candidate is gonna win, but that Senate races seem to be tailor made for this kind of edging your way into the conversation in a way that congressional districts aren't usually that close. And governor's races typically aren't. And the presidential race can be, but it's kind of interesting that, because Shane Hazel two years ago in Georgia forced, and I still see people saying, the reason why we have communism under Joe Biden is because Shane Hazel pushed one of those, Senate races in Georgia in 2020 to a runoff, thereby screwing it over as if Donald Trump and the Republicans themselves running shitty candidates, you know, they don't deserve any of the responsibility, but is the Senate like a place to put bets on how to get more media attention for the libertarian party? Yeah, I mean, I'll just say I was looking through the races and Chase's was the one where, you know, the libertarian candidate was the quote unquote spoiler. I think there was one house race in Montana where the LP candidate covered the spread, but the Republican one in that case. So I don't know what the pattern is there, but Angela might be poised to answer that question. So I think the Senate is more of a zero sum game and it's more transparent than it is, because it's not, there's 435 congressional representatives elected. You've got a hundred senators. And it's interesting that you would bring up Shane too because Shane ran for the same position, right? In the same state, just a few years ago, same outcome. So maybe it's not about socially, liberal, fiscally, conservative. Maybe it's that people genuinely have contempt for this two-party process and don't like the candidates, the state of Georgia keeps putting up. It's interesting though too, because he was running for governor this time and the governor's race, which was supposed to be super tight. So you're like, okay, maybe we're gonna have this again. It was not, Brian Kemp has won pretty easily over Stacey Abrams and I think Shane was polling around 1% or so. So it might be a function of timing, of messaging, as well as the particular race. Yep, it's very possible. So this does, to go back to what Zach was talking about, but there is this kind of ongoing, yeah, I don't know that it's a conflict exactly, but like there's this question of what is the party for? And is the party, Justin Amash in a series of tweets within the past few weeks said, you know, the function of a political party is to run candidates for office and win office. And he was responding to various people, including Dave Smith, who were saying, no, you know, the Libertarian party is really about growing a constituency for freedom or for libertarian ideas. Zach, do you have a clip that you wanted to run that relates to this? Or, okay, because this kind of goes back to the, okay, go ahead, sorry. Sorry, I think you're breaking up for a second there. Okay, yeah, this is from when I spoke to Angela Beck in 2020 when she announced that she was running for the national chair position. This was on the heels of the Joe Jorgensen campaign where she got about 1% of the national vote. And this was Angela kind of laying out her vision for the Libertarian party. When you try to water down your messaging to appeal to everyone, I think that when you try to water down your messaging to appeal to everyone, you sort of appeal to no one. Angela McCartle is the chair of the Los Angeles Libertarian party who plans to run for chair of the national party in 2022, which she says should be less Gary Johnson and more Ron Paul. When you look at the general composition of the Liberty Movement, not just the Libertarian party, it looks a lot more like Ron Paul than it does Gary Johnson. And I don't know a lot of Libertarians who tell me that they were inspired by Gary Johnson. Did he let people know the party exists? Yes. But did he light a fire in anyone's heart? No. Yeah. So the question out of there is just what is the, what do you view the function of the party as? There's a question in the comments that kind of cuts to the chase here. Please weigh in. This is from Matthew Geisler. Please weigh in on if the LP is a party first with the goal to win races or if it is a pack first with the goal of education and advocacy. So we're not a pack. Or is it not a binary choice? Yeah. And it's not a zero sum game. We exist to win elections and to push the Overton window in the direction of Liberty. And so I take more of a by any means necessary approach. So at the local level, please get elected. At the state and federal level in most circumstances, we are not there yet and we don't have those capabilities. So we have to operate within the framework of reality which is that first of all, set up a long-term strategy to get there and have the humility to understand that we're not gonna get there in two years. I'm so sorry to anyone who thinks we're gonna win the presidency in 2024. It's not happening. Please come back to planet Earth. In the meantime, we can use that platform to advance our strategy, grow our movement and help people understand the atrocious threats that we're receiving from Democrats and Republicans when it comes to inflation or good grief. We've been threatened with nuclear war in Europe. That is not something that I thought that we'd be seeing over the next couple of years. Gun rights, civil liberties, lockdowns, mandates and so on and so forth. We have an obligation to speak out about that stuff, especially when we think that we are not gonna be able to actually win at a national level. But I wonder if you know, is that in a way not ambitious enough or maybe not taking the current reality seriously enough because you mentioned things like the Ukraine war, the economy, I mean, the kind of state of our political, our political institutions, it's pretty dire in certain respects. And to say 2024, forget about it and we're not even gonna worry about trying to be a contender. Is that giving up too easily? I mean, you think back to, you know, Ross Perot's kind of the famous example of like, he actually was swinging for the fence as he came out of nowhere and he made a splash and we're now in 2022 after, you know, the Trump phenomenon, people can kind of like come out of nowhere if they have the right message. So are you setting your sights too low? No, we're not giving up. We're gonna go as hard as we possibly can and you'll probably see much more coordinated work and strategy and enthusiasm come out of the national party this year than you have in previous election cycles, at least in the past 10 years. But I'm looking, I'm taking an honest look at historical trends, at membership, at our budget, at ballot access requirements, things that we have had to wrestle with over the last 20 years and I'm looking at what is a realistic goal for us to achieve? We can go higher. I believe we can go higher than 2020, absolutely. I'm not convinced we're gonna get 51% of the vote. I'm not convinced we're gonna get all those electoral votes. I want us to be absolutely savage when we engage in the political process but also connected to reality. To talk about the differences between being an advocacy group and a political party and granted, they're not mutually exclusive from one another. What does it mean that, I think everybody agrees, broadly speaking, that over the past 20 years that Ron Paul's presidential runs as a Republican, as a sitting member of Congress, running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2012, that sparked the fire that is still kind of glowing in the contemporary Libertarian movement but he did it as a congressman, as a successful politician and in the Republican party. And somebody like Gary Johnson, a two-term governor of New Mexico, ran, he attempted to run in 2008 as for the Republican nomination, ended up becoming the LP candidate in the nominee in 2012 and 2016, setting records at each of those. I mean, does it complicate the question of growing the Libertarian party that Ron Paul, first off, was a congressman with decades of experience and he was running as a Republican? Like, how do you take that in his messaging and then say, okay, forget about the Republicans usually running for a Libertarian? So what we saw, let me unpack a few things. I think part of Ron Paul's incredible success as getting elected as a congressman is that he was a doctor who delivered all the babies in his district. So I haven't seen anyone else replicate that yet. If everyone would go out and become OBGYNs, that would be fantastic, great for the party. But then let's look at what happened once he got into office. He was able to maintain office, that's fantastic. He was kind of a lone wolf and we've seen other Liberty-minded conservatives have to contend with similar issues like Thomas Massey. The advocacy work that he does is incredible. Doesn't necessarily mean that all of his bills get passed and the same happened with Ron Paul. Then let's move beyond that to the presidential elections, right? Ron Paul is running in 2008 and 2012. What does the GOP do? They block him, they try to humiliate him and they wreck his campaign. So it's a great springboard but I don't actually see the GOP being a real means to an end when it comes to Liberty. And so what happened is that everybody who was part of that movement or nearly everybody became incredibly disenfranchised with the Republican party and dropped back down to the LP and said, at least here I know, I can trust that these people actually care about libertarianism, not like the GOP who would rather put up Mitt Romney, the author of like a socialist healthcare policy from his state than Ron Paul in sanity. So choose sanity and go the LP route. For the presidential candidate of the LP though, you know, and Ron of course was the nominee in 1988 after having been in Congress for about a decade, did not do particularly well back then. But, you know, Gary Johnson, you know, leaving aside the question of Bill Weld his running mate who was also a two-time elected governor of a major state but does it matter to have somebody who has actually served in political office? Because I know, and actually I'd be interested if you're willing to talk about this, that the two people who seem to be, you know, at the front of people's minds for the 2024 presidential nomination are on the one hand, Justin Amash, 10 years in Congress, so principled that he voted to impeach Trump, he disaffiliated what the Republican party became an independent and then affiliated with the libertarian party, you know, philosophically, absolutely, you know, hardcore, worked within the system and became a libertarian within the system. So you have that and then you have Dave Smith who is a podcaster and is very funny and has a following and things like that. But, you know, does the lack of running or holding office matter when it comes to the presidential nomination? I think we're gonna find out. So it looked like it mattered in 2020, or I'm sorry, in 2016, but then what we also have to take into account and honestly, I've not been impressed with the data analytics I've seen from past libertarian party administrations, so I'm gonna do my best to uncover what I can from those past years, but he was running against two of the worst candidates that could have been put up possibly. You have Donald Trump who people either love him or find him to be the vilest human being on the planet and Hillary Clinton, who is referred to as a lizard person and a perennial loser. That's not- And those are actually just descriptive terms. They're not even moralistic, yeah. Yeah, that's just, so, you know, when you're running against that, I had a lot of friends in LA who were very, very far left who voted Gary Johnson because they just couldn't stand Hillary Clinton. They would never join the party. They have no interest, but they do feel like a lot of other Americans a compulsion to check a box on their ballot and they did so. And to that extent, you know, I certainly appreciate that we got their vote, but it didn't necessarily mean lasting growth for the party. Didn't necessarily mean membership and it didn't translate into an additional vote for us in 2020. Can I ask very quickly before we go on to talking about your, you know, how the LP is doing under your management now, it's been about six months. You mentioned Ukraine and nuclear war and this is kind of an interesting issue. You know, part of what we saw in the midterms this time, everybody, certainly I was predicting, you know, a red wave based on historical patterns as well as, you know, indicators of only 24% of the country thinks it's going in the right direction. Biden is an ineffective president in his first midterm elections. You know, the Democrats should have lost, you know, something like 30 to 50 seats in the house. That didn't happen. But one of the things that is interesting is that in cases like Ukraine, you are seeing the old alliances break down where there are a bunch of people in the Republican party and in the Democratic party who are saying, why are we sending so much money without any seeming responsibility or accountability to Ukraine? You know, and you see this group in the Republican and the Democratic party joining on that. And then there are Republicans and Democrats who are closer to each other saying, no, we have to defend Ukraine or we have to support Ukraine. Is when you look at the broad midterm outcome, you know, one way of looking at the midterm elections is that neither party got a vote of confidence. In past, for the past 20 years, basically every two, four or six years, one party would gain control and force the worst version of their platform. And then voters would say, I'm out. I'm going to the other party. And, you know, we've had the C song back and forth of House, Senate, White House. And this one is kind of interesting where they were like, no, I don't like Joe Biden, but I'm not giving it back to the Republicans. How does the Libertarian party perhaps exploit, you know, the crack up where at least on foreign policy, you know, these parties are not what they used to be. There are at least large segments of that. I think it's on us to really distinguish ourselves. So generally, we're viewed as taking more votes from Republicans or diss, let's call them disenfranchised Republicans. So we're not like taking their votes, but we're presenting ourselves to them in a way that is more appealing to people on the right. What I am also seeing though is that there is a large chunk of the dissident left who is flipping out and saying, what happened? We're supposed to be the anti-war party. Or did that just, does that not exist anymore? And so we are doing actually quite a good job of appealing to people in that small niche section of the left. I think it's just really important for us to stand on our principles at this time. You know, it's also true. And I'm thinking back a few years to when Robert Sarvis was running for governor of Virginia, I believe it was, polling day, I mean, it's hard to get exit polling on this, but he was a libertarian candidate who did very well and he seemed to have drawn more votes from Democrats than Republicans. So that is certainly kind of interesting to think about this bromide that, you know, and I mean, we've all gotten this in our, you know, the different fields that we toil in for the libertarian movement, but that, you know, libertarians are the little brother little sister of the Republicans where Republicans who smoke pop, blah, blah, blah or who are gay, who are openly gay rather than in the closet, that type of thing. But that may be a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of libertarians, which is that it is not, you know, an epiphenomenon of conservatism, but it, you know, and I mean, I think we all agree. It is something distinct. And it's a question of how do we make that more, you know, there must be a lot of people on the left who, you know, when they saw the progressive caucus send a letter saying, you know, why are we doing this in Ukraine without any accountability? And then immediately got smacked down. Like some of those people probably are like, oh, you know, by the way, occupational licensing, zoning, school choice, these are all things that libertarians have equally interesting things to say that actually represent me. Absolutely. So one of the things I'm really excited to share is that we've been working very closely with the leadership of the Movement for People's Party, which I affectionately refer to as ex-Bernie Bros. They are definitely on the left economically, and they are very outspoken about their anti-war position. We're working on a giant anti-war rally together on January 14th, and there's a handful of Green Party members and independents who lean, they kind of skew left. So that's something we're all collaborating on together. We have also pulled other people from the left actually into our parties. Some of the hosts of the show, the ConvoCouch who are big Jimmy Dore fans, they've joined the party. I got to meet them in person in Freedom Fest. It's because war, nuclear annihilation, kind of freaks people out. And so when they see someone taking a strong position on that, they want to get on board. So I'm excited about that. The same goes in Alabama. We've been working on criminal justice reform. That affiliate has been doing a phenomenal job. And they have pulled a lot of people from the left, the Black Caucus especially, which is historically associated with the Democratic Party. They've gotten a lot of support. And like these are human issues. These are human issues, and they're also libertarian issues. And we're the ones who show that we care and we're spearheading the effort to make change. Can you talk a little bit more about the Alabama affiliate? And that's working on prison reform and criminal justice sentencing reform. Who are you working with? Because politics make strange bedfellows, maybe. But I mean, this is interesting stuff. It does. So the evil, far-right, Mises Caucus elected chair has been working very closely with Reverend Al Sharpton's brother, Pastor Kenny Glasgow. He is someone who is really passionate about prison reform and criminal justice reform. He's been helping to lead from the outside of prison strike, because I don't know if you guys are aware, but the conditions in Alabama's correction facilities are atrocious. There's about eight prison guards per 23,000 inmates. The prisoners are expected to run everything. And a lot of them just keep their head down, do their job. They just want to get parole. They want to get out. But obviously there's going to be violent offenders in there who harm other people and murder people. I spoke to one of the prison guards who he just, you know, older, conservative, white gentleman, complained that he had to drag bodies out. And he didn't know how long people had been dead. It was just atrocious. So we've been working really closely. I mean, I was introduced to him through the state chair, Gavin Goodman, who has been working his butt off to try to get ballot access. And it's really unprecedented the work that Alabama has done, not just on the ballot access front, but to really engage the community in a meaningful way and show that we're not like the stereotypical monopoly man, you know, oh, I'm going around kicking orphans and widows. Like we're actually doing good work for people. Zach? Well, should we move to some discussion of the kind of the state of the party at this point? Like what have you seen? Like what have you seen since the takeover of the Mises Caucus? Or the takeover of the party? Have you seen any positive metrics in terms of growth, revenue, so forth? Well, our earned media engagement has quadrupled. So let me start with earned media and go into membership and finances. 2021, we had a little spike with the New Hampshire scandal and then a spike with the national convention. But we have been consistently up with earned media engagement, like in a way that's really incredible. Would you just explain what you mean by that for people who are not conversant in kind of PR speak? The news, the mainstream news, my frenemy, the mainstream news has been covering us a lot, not just hit pieces, not just internal party drama, but you know, we got an op-ed published in Newsweek. We're getting quotes out about the war. We're getting quotes out about inflation. They're interested and they're engaging with us and that's really good. Can you just say like from, you know, in 2021, we had X number of media mentions. This we're now at some level. I don't remember the number in 2021. I just know that it has literally quadrupled and it was very low. Yeah, okay, great. What is the press piece that you've been involved in that you think is, you know, that showcases what you're up to? Is there one that comes to mind? We had a piece in Newsweek about opposing the death penalty. That was very polarizing. It did not sit well with conservatives. So I really liked that one. It got us quite a bit of attention and we've had coverage from the New York Sun that's been positive as well. So I like that. We had some quotes go out that made all over MSNBC about opposition to US funding for the Ukraine-Russia war. So that was really good as well. Great. What about membership? How do you go about accounting, you know, for membership because there's the national party and then there are state parties, but are there more members now than there were when you took over or how do you count for that kind of stuff? Membership has had a slight decline since I took over. But overall, we are still on the up and up. That's generally how it goes. You'll see a spurt in membership after the midterms, historically speaking. And the membership means somebody signing up and affiliating as a libertarian and paying dues or is it just voter registration? $25 a year is the minimum. So there's some interesting stuff to unpack about this. What it looks to me is that for the past at least six years, the only major driver for membership in the party was to motivate people to see a change in leadership. And what that shows is that past administrations did not push membership, did not seem to value it significantly and did not have a plan beyond internal fighting to actually grow the movement, not really ideal. So what we're doing now is, you know, I've been referred to by some as a peacetime general, right? We've done the takeover, now we're doing the thing. We're looking very carefully at our metrics and data to see what historically has driven membership besides internal fighting. What are people excited about right now? We're obviously going to be doing a ton of research on the midterms and candidacy and what happens there and we're going to be developing a strategy so that we maintain more long-term growth. And I think that we have done actually a pretty good job of managing our monthly recurring memberships and recurring revenue. So that's a really good sign that you're actually seeing some more stability but I want to see that stability like expand. Zach, do you want to put those numbers back up or those charts and kind of walk through and ask any questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's these numbers? Yeah, this is just from the LPs latest financial report in September that the Mises Caucus takeover was in May or at the end of May of 2022. So you see there's in terms of active donors there was a spike in June and then a slow decline. If you look over the past 20 years it's pretty much flat revenue up a little bit although it's not clear to me if that's inflation adjusted or not, I assume not. So I don't know, it seems mostly everything's like kind of flat right now. Do you, you said you expect that to change after the midterm and then what do you hope to, like what is the plan as you look ahead to 2024 to try to ramp up for that? Because right now, I mean, one thing I assume that you have to take out of the midterms is the Libertarian Party kind of has to calibrate based on what's happening within the GOP and within the Democrats. And it was kind of like the GOP did not sweep in the way that they hope they did. Things are not looking great for Trump. Things are looking rosier for DeSantis. So if there's a DeSantis future for the GOP, what does that mean for the Libertarian Party going into 2024 and how do you hope to build momentum going into a fight like that? Like a DeSantis fight and fight type fight. So this strategy is a little bit of a moving target. So we're gonna have to make adjustments. Obviously I'm still like waiting for those ballots to be counted that might be sitting, I don't know, in a shopping cart in a Florida parking lot, you never know. That is gonna be really telling and revealing for us, but we need to distinguish ourselves very strongly from both parties, especially going into 2024. If it's DeSantis, that might be a strong anti-war policy. He has historically been in favor of dumping tons of money into Israel. No offense to the people living in Israel. Your government is not where I want my dollars to be going. If it's Donald Trump, well, that makes it a lot easier for us. I can tell you that, like, because running a campaign based on Trump's revenge, that's gotta be the worst political strategy that, I think we saw that in Arizona, right? The master of controversy aside, Kerry Lake didn't win. People need to let it go, just let it go. No one wants to hear about how Donald Trump is still as mad that he lost the 2020 election. And would you say just for the record, I mean, like he lost, right? Because that's one of the takeaways of the midterms was that the election deniers, the people who at the behest of Trump were saying loudly, Trump actually won the presidency and it was stolen from him. You don't believe that, do you? I think there was election fraud and that he still lost. I think there's election fraud in almost every election. I think there was probably more in this one and I think that he still lost. And that's really unfortunate. That's just how it is. So sorry that you got ripped off and you lost. That's like a double bird that sucks, but gotta let it go. Where, talk about the youth appeal of libertarianism or the eternal appeal of libertarianism to youth. You hear this a lot of people say, I was a libertarian when I was younger and then I had kids or I got a job or I bought a house, blah, blah, blah. But it's also true that historically, libertarianism has always been pitched and reason has 50 plus years of coverage of kind of talking this, The New York Times Magazine in 1971 or 72 published an article by the future founder of Wired Magazine about how libertarianism was the next big youth movement. Are you seeing any movement among young people because the discussion of younger millennials and Gen Z is that they are either hyper conservative and traditionalist or they are totally socialist and collectivist. Are libertarians, are you reaching out to young people and is that successful? Well, I'm really excited that I'm gonna be working with the new youth caucus chair to roll out youth engagement and have college libertarian programs going that also feed into internship programs for the national party. So I think that there hasn't been a very strong concerted effort to engage with the youth in the past 10 years and that's just really unfortunate because young people are generally more open to new ideas and new experiences. And I think that's why we harness so many of them or at least we have in the past. So it's just, it's gonna be on me to make sure that the national party is working closely with people who are interested in youth engagement. Zach, do you wanna run the clip about the embarrassing social messaging of previous, help me and then we'll talk about that. This is from the documentary that Nick and I produced on the takeover in Reno. And this is just Angela's section from the beginning of the doc. Libertarian party is under new management, tweeted Angela McCartle shortly after she became the national committee's new chair at its 2022 annual convention in Reno, which was attended by more than a thousand delegates from around the country. And I hate making promises because I sound like a scumbag politician, but I will move heaven and earth to make this thing functional and not embarrassing for you. We are going to change the country. What did you mean by that when you said we're gonna make this thing functional and not embarrassing for you? Oh man, so much. So I wish we could, I wish I had the screen cap of the social distancing tweet from the party in 2020 that I could share with you, but that's gone. So no more apologizing for the regime. And when I say that, I mean, no more telling people that they need to mask up in social distance, no more silence on lockdowns and mandates. That stopped right away. We're gonna build actual infrastructure for our candidates and affiliates. Cause I feel like a lot of attention gets thrown at social media and I understand why Twitter is important in the political world, but we have candidates and state affiliates who message me all the time and they're like, what can I get? I think it's embarrassing the lack of resources that we have provided for our candidates and members. When you say infrastructure, what do you mean? You mean like signs, door hangers, people to go out and walking around like, what is that infrastructure consist of? Training, how to run a campaign, how to be a treasurer. This is like nuts and bolts stuff that is not that exciting, but it's really critical because when we go and how to recruit a candidate, right? We end up with whoever is willing to run. And I appreciate those people so much, but the reality is we need to hone our craft and understand what it takes to recruit someone who is going to be electable and win a race. Beyond that, policy positions. You can't just get up there at your city council meeting with a copy of man economy and state and expect to appeal to people. But if I'm asking people to run, please literally anyone run and the only people who are willing to run are people with no experience and they're just well-versed in the philosophy. What do I do with that? I have to make the most of it. So we've got to push past that. Fundraising, how to fundraise, how to use tools, how to get earned media. That just hasn't been there in the past. It just doesn't exist. The thing that I heard a lot about during making that documentary was the emphasis on messaging. We're going to change the messaging. And you alluded to that a little bit earlier. We're going to have bolder messaging, more libertarian messaging, embarrassed messaging. That's not cringe. Are you, do you feel like you're succeeding at that so far? Because it is true that at this point when there's not a big presidential election or anything like that, probably the vast majority of how people are exposed to the libertarian party as an entity is just through its social media messaging. So what do you think of how that's going? I think it's going very well. And I believe that our specifically our Twitter has gotten us a lot of earned media engagement. I have people asking me about our position on inflation and war all the time. I think that's a really good thing. Are the numbers up for like the Twitter account or for the amount of reach per month or via Instagram or Facebook? Or do you have metrics that you can share to say, we're putting out more tweets and they're reaching more people or anything along those lines? It's all up. I don't have the numbers in front of me. I could certainly send it to you postmortem, but it's up like across the board. Our Instagram doesn't get enough love and it's like beautiful and engagement is up there too. What is the Instagram is, what's the handle? I think it's Libertarian Party official. Right. I wanna ask you- Because the Twitter is LP national, just for people that are looking at it. Yeah, we'll put this all, we'll try and put this in the share notes, but Zach. Yeah, no, it's, you know, the messaging is something that is controversial within, I'd say even within the Libertarian movement. And I want to have you talk about kind of three different aspects of the messaging that I've noticed and I just pulled some example tweets. So this is one, these three tweets say, you know, the IRS, Federal Reserve, FBI and CIA are all wicked and beyond repair. Instead of reform, we seek to abolish them all. There are many things that separate us from other political parties, but perhaps the most important distinction from the unit party is we do not hate you. We love the American people. We oppose the American empire because it's the enemy of the American people. And then last one here, pro-lifers, why share a country with those who just support the dismemberment of babies in the womb? Pro-choicers, why share a country with those who would take a woman's right to abort away? Hashtag national divorce. And the connection that I see between all of these is it's very like moralistic and strident language who are wicked, evil, they're the enemy, they, we hate you, we need a national divorce. As positioning yourself as a, if you're a national party that's competing with the Democrats and Republicans, how much do you think that kind of, I guess strident and moralistic language is going to resonate with just the average American coming across it? I think it's strong and aggressive. I mean, moralistic, let's see, let's break this down. I guess we could say that it is moralistic to call alphabet agencies wicked and beyond repair. But yeah, I mean, they murder people. They murder innocent people. And I think that it's okay for us to call that out aggressively. And I think that Republicans are finally, finally understanding the dangers of the FBI after they see they're one of their favorite guys being targeted politically by the FBI. I think that this is the sort of messaging that does appeal to libertarian voters. And I absolutely stand by it. And when we get into the abortion thing, I mean, I think we're really seeing that that's, it's an area where unfortunately people have just really got their heels dug in and they're not inclined to change their positions. And as moralistic as the pro-life language might sound, the pro-choice language is just as strong. I mean, they compare us to a handmade and stale, like we're living in that sort of world. There's a lot of fear mongering coming from the left. So we're just simply acknowledging it. So who is your intended audience with this? Is it people who are already hardcore libertarians and you're trying to fire them up? Is it people who are just kind of disaffected politically? Like who do you have in mind that you're trying to reach with this sort of messaging? I think that we have several demographic buckets. We've got obviously people who are already libertarians or liberty inclined, people who are disaffected and burned out by the political process, people who are feeling like they're just now awakening to the evils of government. And there are people like that who come from the left and the right politically. Is the national divorce language, is that gonna be part of the kind of official Libertarian Party discourse? Cause I'm curious, I'm not a fan of that concept and Zach did a phenomenal long interview and peace about that with Dave Smith about the national divorce. But when you say something like to people over abortion, it seems like if you're pro-life and you consider abortion murder, abortion from the moment of conception on murder or you are pro-choice and you believe taking that away is taking away a fundamental right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of the woman involved. Is that going to lead to people being like, okay, we should divorce as opposed to we should kind of take over the country and force people to live under our set of rules because we are absolutely right whether we're pro-life or pro-choice. Well, when you have gridlock like we do, I think separation is the most peaceful sane response as opposed to civil war. Like that's one thing that as, the Libertarian Party does not advocate for is we don't wanna see a bloody conflict in our streets over these sort of issues. We'd rather see people peacefully separate. And that can look like a lot of different things. When we say national divorce, that's just a really loose talking point. It could be federalism. It could be people just moving into different states and having nothing to do with each other. And I'm sure there will be legal battles over abortion and other controversial topics. But I mean, my perspective is that people need to just, you just gotta separate from the people that you have those levels of fundamental disagreements with. So when you say national divorce when you say national divorce and secession, you're not saying the complete dissolution of the U.S. government. That's not the official like position of the Libertarian Party. It depends. I mean, if you talk to anarchists who are very staunch anarchists, of course that's gonna be their position. If you talk to people who are just more small government, they're gonna look at federalism. So it's just really open to interpretation. Like we don't have an official position on national divorce. Is there room in the Libertarian Party for non-anarchists or is it at this point an anarchist organization? No, we've got something from years past called the Dallas Accord that makes our official position that there is room in the party for people who are anarchists and people who are advocates of small government. And it'll probably always be that way. And it'll certainly remain that way under my leadership. I wanna ask in the national divorce, who gets custody of the national debt? Oh, right. That would be a fun thing to fight over. Nuclear weapons are a more interesting question to me, but yeah. Right. Yeah, we don't have terms are not settled yet. I feel national parks would be the easiest fight. I don't know. I think everybody wants them, right? For whatever reason, if only so the other parent doesn't get them, you know, that's another set of tweets that I had here have to do with, you know, so-called wokeness, diversity, equity, inclusion is a racist Marxist scheme made to divide people along imaginary lines of privilege. It's Marxist class consciousness applied to the modern workplace. And you shouldn't have to deal with it to provide for yourself or your family. There's no place in the Liberty movement for woke Marxists or cathedral centrists. So this, there's clearly an appetite within the new leadership of the libertarian party to go after this broadly defined concept of wokeness. How does that relate to libertarianism and just advancing Liberty in the United States and in your mind? So there is no room for communism in the libertarian party, spoiler alert. And I think that- How do you define communism? I mean, is it actual state ownership of the means of production? Or what is communism in that sense? State ownership of the means of production, the orchestrated plan to remove individualism and individual liberties and replace it with government. Like the whole spectrum of them. My personal view is that wokeism is mainstream Marxism. Okay. So would a diversity seminar in a workplace constitute Marxism or communism? Is it required? An employer required diversity seminar. Is that something that the libertarian party should be concerned with? Well, to the extent that it's shifting the direction of public policy, yes. And there, you know, not everyone in the party agrees on this, but we all kind of see it for what it is and we're alarmed and we're like, that's not good. That's not the direction we wanna go in. And we have to thread the needle carefully and sometimes we can be heavy handed about it when we talk about it, but we don't wanna see individualism crushed under the guise of equity and fairness because that's what happened in communist China and that was obviously disastrous and you had millions of people die. We never wanna see that repeated. This category I would just call kind of, you know, the juvenile type trolling. I mean, I don't know about the Epstein didn't kill, we are the Epstein didn't kill himself party that maybe is its own category, but you know, replying to Elizabeth Warren with this picture, promoting Jeremy Kaufman's Wars Gay video. I mean, I guess that the general concern here is like, is this kind of a professional serious image or is that just not, is serious just the wrong way to think about how you want the libertarian party to come across is kind of the humor and a little bit of juvenile trolling part of the strategy. I mean, you could do both, right? We can be serious and professional and occasionally have a little bit of fun. Elizabeth Warren has made herself a joke. She should not have leaned so heavily into the race narrative. And so I think she's fair game. Jeremy Kaufman, we're certainly not retweeting everything he says, but he has put out some really polished and impressive videos. And I appreciate a lot of his video content. What does it mean to say? And I've seen a lot of quotes from the LP national account about Epstein, about Epstein's black book. I mean, it just, what is the interest there in terms of from a national party? Some of those tweets, and just to be a little bit harsh, I guess, I mean, that's like, those tweets are something I expect from the Stakums account or Arby's. I don't know. Like it seems odd coming from a political party. I don't know about you, but I'm kind of concerned that we might have a giant government APC withholding information on sex trafficking of children when it's an international ring and no one has been provided with the list of clients. Like that freaks me out. I think it's okay for us. I think we should definitely talk about that. If the government is covering up an international sex trafficking ring and child abuse, I wanna know. And tons of FOIA requests have been filed by people from all different political backgrounds and they haven't been forthcoming on it. I think that's really low-hanging fruit for us. Okay. Let's talk about the LP strategy for the next two years. You know, and obviously, I mean, you've talked about elections matter and that's the organizing principle or the kind of calendar of the LP. But what are you hoping to accomplish between now and 2024 when the presidential elections get under what? So we adopted a strategic plan a couple of months ago and essentially what I wanna get is I wanna recapture the numbers that we had in the late 90s and early 2000s. There was a strong emphasis on membership and I think that that's important. So we're gonna have some inside baseball tactics on accomplishing that over the next couple of years. Why is it important to have, I mean, numbers and active members, like can you just talk a little bit about why that's important and why did that decline? Members are donors, they are candidates, they are volunteers, they're campaign volunteers, they're volunteers that run state affiliates. Membership is really important. That declined because for whatever reason, past leadership stopped emphasizing it. And I think there was also a real struggle around September 11th, 2001, when people freaked out because we were staunchly, we were supposed to be very strongly anti-war and people were terrified. And so we did see lapses in membership as people jumped on the, blow up the Middle East train, unfortunately. So we are, I think it's important for us to regain membership because I think it's very healthy for the party. Okay, so you're gonna work to increase membership and make people more active and part of the group. What else are your big plans? Obviously increase our finances. So we're taking a very conservative approach right now because I want us to have a balanced budget and I want us to have a budget that we stick to and that's not something that the party has been good at over the last 10 years or so. So we did note in one of the slides that Zach had put up, it looked like revenue and outlays were converging again, which is a good sign, right? Yeah, yeah, it's stable right now. I wanna see continued incremental growth. So we don't have any, no disasters right now. We're gonna make some very conservative projections and then obviously I wanna go above and beyond that but we're not going to bake on something that isn't already within our sights. What about things like ballot access? That's always been a big issue for the Libertarian party. Are you still concerned about it since you're kind of throwing in the towel on a presidential election? Like does ballot access fall off from a priority standpoint? Why spend money getting on the ballot if you're not win it? Okay, so we're not throwing in the towel. No, towel is very much with us, not being thrown anywhere. Ballot access is essential if we wanna get the message out from the presidential platform, but that's really essential. Can you talk about, I'm talking to you from New York City, the New York LP and actually all third parties in New York really kind of got screwed over in the past couple of years. This was one of the things before Andrew Cuomo was agnominously kicked out of office for sexual and proprieties as opposed to killing people. But I guess any means necessary, right? Anything that works in the amount of office but he changed the ballot access requirements. Like how do you deal with that? Because it does seem, and this is certainly something, every time Libertarians do well and say like you get 100,000 votes and the line for standing ballot access was 90, they'll be like, oh, it should be 120 or 150 or whatever, like how do you work to actually make ballot access ubiquitous and regular? So I am literally working on ballot access in New York right now by working with some staffers for Republican legislators. So I think a big shift that needs to happen in the ballot access conversation is lobbying. Every state is different though. So in Arkansas, lawsuits are effective and lobbying is not in a lot of other states we've seen that lobbying is more effective. Tennessee last year they had a bill that died on committee, died on the floor, but was arguing, but was being argued, but it made it out of committee to get ballot access. Cause Tennessee has not had third party ballot access since the 1960s. So we saw some progress there. I believe in Georgia where it's probably gonna take the same thing and in Georgia where it's gonna be a tough battle and it's probably gonna be tougher right now, but we're just gonna suck it up and do it. What happened to Larry Sharp in New York was incredibly frustrating. And I've also been in talks with other minor party leaders to collaborate on that. But Angela, I guess the reason I was asking I was asking that question is you said earlier that the idea of trying to run, to compete in 2024 is ridiculous. And I mean, you talk a lot about the Ron Paul campaign as an inspiration. I mean, when Ron Paul was running in the GOP, the people who were behind that, they believe that you had a shot and he almost won one of the early primaries when he was running, but if you're going in from the beginning saying this isn't really about trying to win. First of all, what is the point in spending a bunch of money on ballot access if it's kind of just more a message campaign? Why not just write like a write-in campaign? And then secondly, why would people want to vote? Like what's the selling proposition for someone to vote for a candidate who's not really seriously running? You are seriously running. This is a total false paradigm. You can be absolutely serious while understanding that your chances of winning are astronomically small. You have a lot more credibility when you're on the ballot. People take you more seriously. There is a drive and a motivation to go. A lot of people want to have a protest vote. Write-ins is really challenging to do a write-in campaign and it just does not have the same energy as a campaign that is official. When it's official, there's just like some more magic there. Not just for the voters, but for the people running, for the campaign volunteers. Like it's very important for morale. It's also important for down ballot tickets as well. So there are people who want to run at the federal level and the state level and they want to do it for many of the same reasons. And it's important to try to make that possible. And if we let it slip away for too long, it makes our long-term game much harder. So we have to sort of be paying attention to things in the here and now while also planning for our long-term future. And if I want to see the presidential numbers incrementally grow over the years, so let's say we want to take a modest growth approach. I want to get 3% this time, then 5%. If I want to grow up by 2% and then eventually start growing it by fives and tens, we've got to start somewhere. So we're going to start with the low numbers. We're going to have the humility to recognize the difficulties that are set before us, but the determination and long-term vision to see it through. That's what I intend to do. We're going to start wrapping up. But do you have a preferred candidate for the 2024 presidential race? Do I have a personal preferred candidate? Yeah, I'd like to see Dave Smith get the nomination. But as national chair, I'll be really open about the fact that I'm going to work with whoever gets it. And I'm going to make sure that that person gets just as much attention, whether it's ballot access, retweets, national appearances, I will make sure. And I think that that's something that did not happen in the last administration, and that is really frustrating. Why do you think Dave Smith would be good at accomplishing these goals that you set out, or good for that purpose? I think he's a very skilled messenger. And I think that we're going to need someone to really make us like clearly the alternative to the others, not just the lesser of three evils. One other just structural question that someone brought up, or a few people have brought this up, is will there be a push from the LP? This is from Libertarian Dave for alternative voting methods such as Ranked Choice Voting. I think it's gaining momentum among the people. We did see a number of Ranked Choice Voting Initiatives do well this election cycle. Does that factor at all into your strategy? Yeah, Ranked Choice Voting did well in Colorado, I believe. I don't know if it was a state or a local measure, but one of them passed. And the Libertarian Party of Colorado had been advocating for that. We actually had a Ranked Choice Voting Speaker at our LNC quarterly meeting just a few days ago. So my personal attention to focus has got to be on our candidates. I am probably going to constitute an alternative voting ad hoc committee soon to make sure that that issue gets attention and that it's not something that's left by the wayside. A related question from Chuck G is, do you think Chase Oliver would have done better in a Ranked Choice Scenario? Do we think he would have been second choice for most Walker or Warnock voters? Yeah, I think so. I think that Chase, I think that Shane, I think Ryan Graham, Eric Gerhardt, everybody probably would have done better if they could have been a second choice. How do you feel about that? Yeah, one more I just want to throw up. This person gave us $10, so why not? Brock last name, Angela, what candidate support resources does LP National have for state and local affiliates? So over the last few months, we doled out some dollars to candidates who asked for it. So that was nice, which is not something, believe it or not, that the LNC does normally talk about some confusion about what the purpose of the party is. I came under fire for donating to candidates, whatever. Big Bad Angela, who hates candidacy in elections. Beyond that, we are working right now with the candidate support and affiliate support committees to put together much more meaningful trainings. I appreciate all the trainings that we've had in the past. I want to make trainings even more accessible and really emphasize treasurer trainings. We're going to also work on helping state affiliates understand how to cultivate and recruit candidates. We're going to work on inter-party communication. We're going to be rolling out this aggressive post-mortem after the elections and providing our candidates and affiliates with that data. I think one of the- Will that be public? Will you share that with the public as well? I don't know yet. I have to wait for the results to come out. So we're in sort of an interesting situation, right? Which is I want to share all of our success and information, but then I don't want to make it so open to the public that we just blow our entire strategy for Republicans and Democrats. So there will probably be portions that are redacted and portions that are available publicly. When the Mises caucus took over, when you became chair, there was a lot of bad blood. And some affiliates have disaffiliated, I guess with the Libertarian Party, the National Party, et cetera. Do you feel like that bad blood is receding or is coming back? Or what steps are you taking to kind of stitch together a bigger constituency? Or have you reached out to people who are like, Angela, you taking over is the worst thing that's ever happened? How was that going? So I haven't reached out to a lot of people who have expressed intense hatred for me personally. I think that's probably not a shock. New Mexico, we've already got a new affiliate affiliated. So that's kind of handled itself. I think things are settling down. What I had hoped and what I think is happening is that my commitment to candidate support during the election has smoothed over a lot of people who were skeptical. So I've poured a ton of attention into states like Alabama. I've tried to give a lot of attention to Indiana and Illinois and some other states that don't have a strong Mises majority to show them that I actually do care about your candidates. I wanna make sure you guys are getting promoted. I wanna make sure that you're getting attention and also that we're learning from you because you know how to run a strong campaign. And I think that that's gonna be the glue that holds everybody together is my commitment to people who are serious about elections. Great. Zach, do you have anything else that you wanna ask or raise? I just wanna point out, there are some fans of Angela's strategy in the comments, Bob Wildfish win local spread message at National, that's the plan and it's a good one. And there's one last good question from the comments here that I think would be my final contribution here, which is Brian Sutton, Angela, what do you think of the idea of focusing a presidential campaign on one certain states? Utah, Wyoming are similar to turn it gold by winning in that state. What would be the effect over the following four years if that happened? That's kind of the strategy that Evan McMullen pursued in Utah. He was like, I'm gonna put all my resources into Utah, didn't work out that great for him, but I don't know, have you ever thought about that? I mean, it's an interesting thought experiment. I can tell you that the rest of the state affiliates would be incredibly offended if I did that. So I've got to manage a lot of people's different needs, different personalities and resources. I do think though, what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be working really closely with state affiliates who show the energy and enthusiasm and say that they wanna work closely with us. And then I am optimistic that it'll sort of look like a bell curve, right? There we'll grab the early adopters over the next election cycle and then we'll see others start to follow in the same pattern and finally we'll get to the stragglers at the end. And I think that- Sorry, there is one last good question here that I think gets to the root of some of what we've been talking about in terms of audience from free men die free, reality check for the LP. Progressives are entirely indoctrinated into totalitarian thinking. They view conservatives and us as equal enemies. They answered that question for who to bridge with. Is that how you think of it in terms of building coalitions as well? When I talked to you back in 2020, you basically did say much of the progressive left is like wasting our time trying to reach out to them. Is the Mises Caucus strategy really more of a kind of coalitioning with the disaffected right? And if so, how do you compete with the GOP on that kind of playing field? Well, there's the disaffected right and there's the disaffected left. So I would say that the only change I would make to that statement is that it's mainstream progressives are entirely indoctrinated. And then I think a lot of people would you... We would have administrations with these people up against the wall holding guns to their head and they would still believe in the system. It's very much like the people in the Google log that Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes as saying, if I'll just be good, then they'll accept me back and I'll go back to my little job within the Soviet Union. There is a breaking point for a lot of people though. And I saw it during mandates. I saw it with people who had adverse effects to the vaccine who were 100% on board and like the first people to get vaccinated. And then when they had a reaction and they were ridiculed by family members and friends for experiencing a very real medical crisis, they started to question everything else that they had learned and they had believed. And I think that while I wanna say on the one hand, like some of these people are just a lost cause, the reality is I don't wanna look at any individual as a lost cause. And so I think that there's just much further out there with our ability to reach than some of the other people. Do you think though generally, and I mean, I've heard this a lot over the years that there is more of an affinity between libertarians and conservatives or right-wingers generally speaking. And this is why Ron Paul, for instance, was a Republican as opposed to a Democrat or something. And on election night, I went on Compound Media, which is a right of center group. And there were no results, it was early in the evening, there were no results to talk about yet. So it just became kind of, okay, let's shit on the libertarian because libertarians in their mind only exist to take some votes from conservative Republicans and give elections away. And in a world where somebody like Aranda Santas seems to be winning a lot of the culture wars that some of the Muses Caucus people are interested in and advancing a variety of kind of corporate regulations and other things, like is it, you know, how, you know, who on the right do you pick off? I guess is what I'm saying. Because I think you're right, you know, there's certain people on the left, they're never gonna be libertarian no matter what. And it's a waste of time to try to talk to them. There are some people who are there. Who are the people on the right? Because there's a lot of Republicans, you know, forget, you know, they're just not changing their brand. Right. What's the sweet spot on the right? I think, so I think the reason that we tend to skew right as libertarians is because we are more rational and there are people in the GOP who generally behave with higher degree of rationality versus emotionality. Now, obviously when we get to certain topics like the border wall, you see emotions get really hot. But generally speaking, that's how it goes. I think that when you lean into that really hard, then there are people in the GOP who are willing to take rational views on their policy positions and say, you're right, this is actually not libertarian. This does not serve the best interests of our nation. War is bad. Inflation is bad. And I have the self-awareness to recognize my party has failed in those areas. I think that those are the people that we pick off from the Republican Party. Can we just, as a final question unless Zach has something, Angela, I don't know that I've heard this story from you, but how did you become libertarian? I was just thinking, you know, while you were talking, and when I first read the political science literature how people form a political ideology, I was stunned to learn most people kind of believe what their parents believe. Because when parents were not political, and I was like, no, I mean, they had no idea what libertarianism was, but how did you become a libertarian? My parents were very political and they still sort of are. My father growing up was a pastor, a Christian and missionary alliance church. And so I grew up in a traditional conservative home with the exception that I was exposed to people from around the world all the time. And the framework that I was exposed to those missionaries and people who came and visited from other countries is that most of them had stories about being horribly persecuted in communist countries. I met people as a child who crawled out of Pol Pot's killing fields after being attacked and shot and ran across the border and survived. I met people who survived the Cultural Revolution in China and survived Soviet Russia and had been oppressed and thrown in gulags over there. So I have always been suspicious of government, but just more from a Christian perspective. Now, I decided I was a libertarian when I was a teenager with a very, like low information awareness of what that was was a Republican who was okay with weed and gay marriage. And then I read G. Edward Griffin's book The Creature from Jekyll Island a few years after that, which gave me a worldview including paranoia and painful awareness of the dangers of central banking and the Federal Reserve. And then a few years after that, Ron Paul ran and I realized lo and behold, there's a bunch of other people who are paranoid about central banking. I'm not the only one and saw that the GOP was not the path forward for getting that message out. And that's when I started to look more into the libertarian party instead of just, like, well, that's a box I check occasionally. Now it was like, oh, it's a thing, you know? So that's sort of an act in three or four plays, I guess. Thank you. That's really interesting. Thank you. Zach, you have a final question. Yeah, and it's interesting to hear your kind of ideological background there. And I can see how this kind of suspicious view of the state has grown over time and probably with a lot of justification and that comes through in kind of the messages that are coming out of the libertarian party now. And I think it's good to be suspicious and even a little paranoid about creeping authoritarianism. The final question I want to ask you just and I'll give you the last word here is there's that side of it. There's the identifying the problem. There's calling out the authoritarianism. There's criticizing things, even sometimes yes in starkly moralistic terms. But then there's also in politics, like I said, you have putting forward a positive vision of the future and what are you going to offer that the Democrats or the Republicans aren't and how is life going to be better if libertarians are running the government? What is that vision? Like how would, what's your kind of grand vision for the libertarian party and like the positive vision that you would like people who are absorbing messages from the libertarian party social media accounts or candidates to take away? Well, we're still working it out, but right now it's that individualism matters and we want people to be prosperous and have the opportunity to thrive. And so when we talk about how we hate inflation and we're afraid of war, what we really are is we're pro prosperity and we're pro peace. And we want to see a world where your children have a safe and healthy place to live in the future. Like we want there to be hope for the future. And so that's what we want to convey. All right. Thank you so much, Angela McCardle, the chair of the Libertarian National Committee of the Libertarian Party. Thanks for sharing your view of the midterms and your hopes for the next couple of years with us. It's really a pleasure. You're so welcome. So that was Angela McCardle, Zach Weisbiller. Thanks for joining me and we will see people again next Thursday for a reason live stream. Thanks.