A Presidential Campaign of Principle
A brand new Wall Street Journal presidential poll states that the Libertarian Party presidential candidate receives 1 percent from voters. This matches a similar poll by the Journal three months ago. One percent is essentially what our 2020 presidential candidate received three years ago.
If things haven’t changed over the last 3 years and over the past few months, it is a virtual certainty that they aren’t going to change over the next 11 months. In other words, we already know the results of the 2024 presidential election insofar as the L.P. presidential candidate is concerned —1 percent of the vote …. unless, that is, we change direction in a very dramatic way.
There are those within the L.P. who claim that the reason for this tsunami-sized rejection rate from the electorate of 99 percent is that we just “haven’t gotten our message out.” As I recently said to L.P. state conventions in South Carolina, Maine, and Connecticut, I have a different explanation — we’ve been giving voters a bad message.
In fact, I have a confession to make: I stand with the 99 percent who reject the reform-oriented, Republican-Lite message that has come to define our presidential candidacies for the past 20-25 years. I vote Libertarian to get our numbers up but I am as opposed to this message as much as the 99 percent are. It’s a bad message, especially for a political party that purports to stand for liberty and free markets. It deserves to be rejected.
A campaign of principle
If we are going to achieve a breakout of 10-15 percent of the national vote — and, more important, if we are going to lead America to freedom, which is our job in the Libertarian Party — we need to change direction completely. We need to run a presidential campaign that is based totally, 100 percent, no exceptions on true, pure, genuine libertarian principles.
There are those within the party who claim that a campaign of pure principle cannot garner votes. Actually, as we see from experience, it is the the other way around. It is the reform-oriented, Republican-Lite message that garners only 1 percent of the vote, max. And if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., gets on the ballot in all 50 states, which is likely, there is a good chance that he will relegate another reform-oriented, Republican-Lite L.P. presidential candidate to .05 or .03 percent, which used to be the standard for L.P. presidential candidates.
My 2002 race for U.S. Senate
Twenty years ago in 2002, I ran for the U.S. Senate in Virginia. I was running against John Warner, one of the most popular governors in the history of the state. He was chairman of the Armed Services Committee. This was right after the 9/11 attacks and I was pointing to U.S. foreign policy as the motivating force behind those attacks, a point that Ron Paul would make six years later when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination. You can imagine the adverse reaction I received from Republicans. I knew that I wouldn’t get one Republican vote, especially with my position favoring the end of America’s socialist system of immigration controls and an immigration police state along the border. I didn’t care.
The Democrats weren’t running anyone because they knew that they couldn’t beat Warner. The Larouchies ran a candidate and she undoubtedly received all the Democrat votes. I knew that there was no way that any Democrat would vote for me, especially given my favoring the repeal of Social Security and Medicare and my favoring the end of all governmental involvement in education. I didn’t care.
I ran the same type of campaign of principle that I’m running now. No reform measures or Republican-Lite proposals whatsoever. Open borders. Repeal Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all other welfare-state programs. Separate school and state. Legalize all drugs. End foreign interventionism. End all restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. Abolish the federal income tax. End economic regulations, including the minimum wage. Unilaterally adopt free trade. Separate money and the state.
On Election Day, I received 7 percent of the statewide vote. That’s 7 percent, not .07 percent. That’s because there is a large segment of voters out there who love our genuine principles and who will take the time and effort to go to the polls to vote for a 100 percent genuine libertarian message.
One of my proudest accomplishments in that race was receiving the endorsement of one of the most prominent Black ministers in the country, John O. Peterson, who was the pastor of the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria. He later was elected to the African-American Hall of Fame. He gave me a written letter of endorsement and said for me to show it to every Black minister in the state, which I did. To this day, I have no doubt that a large portion of the 106,000 votes I received came from Blacks, especially given my fierce opposition to the war on drugs as the most racist government program since segregation.
That was 20 years ago. We Libertarians have made a lot of progress in the last 20 years. I have no doubts that I could double that 7 percent, not because of me personally but because today there are undoubtedly many more people out there who are wiling to vote for a campaign of pure libertarian principles than there were two decades ago.
Our principles are our greatest asset
As I have long maintained, our genuine principles — the principles I am standing for in my campaign — are our greatest asset. We need to embrace our principles, enthusiastically. We need to fight as Libertarians, not as welfare-warfare-state reformers and Republican-Lites. We need to strive for liberty, not a warmed-over, improved serfdom. If we do that, we achieve the electoral breakthrough for which we have long yearned. More important, by making the case for genuine liberty in our presidential campaign, we lead America to the freest and most prosperous, peaceful, and harmonious society in history.
I need your help
I hope you will join me and support me in this endeavor by attending your state convention and becoming a delegate for me at the national convention next May and also by helping people in my camp at your state convention to become delegates to the national convention.
I also hope you will give me a hand with a generous donation to my campaign, which you can do at my campaign website: www.jacobforliberty.com. I assure you that I will put your donation to good use advancing the genuine case for freedom.
Yours for liberty,
Jacob Hornberger
www.jacobforliberty.com
P.S. As you will see on my website, I have now spoken at three state conventions -- South Carolina, Maine, and Connecticut. So far, I have committed to speaking at state conventions in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, and Colorado. I will also be in two presidential primaries on Super Tuesday — Oklahoma and California. Needless to say, I could sure use your generous help in this endeavor.
Copyright © 2023 Jacob Hornberger for President, All rights reserved.
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