My Campaign Strategy, Revealed

I am a candidate for the 2024 Libertarian Party presidential nomination. My campaign website is: www.jacobforliberty.com.

In the interests of transparency, I have decided to publicly reveal my political strategy for my campaign to seek the 2024 Libertarian Party presidential nomination.

The story begins in 2018, when I attended several state L.P. conventions where I delivered talks in which I made the principled, uncompromising case for the libertarian philosophy — the same principled, uncompromising case that I am now making in the race for the 2024 presidential nomination.

As I was delivering those talks in 2018, I noticed stunned looks on the faces of many L.P. members in the audiences. Since I had not been active in the L.P. for many years, I couldn’t understand why I was receiving such shocked reactions to what seemed to me was a very normal exposition of libertarian principles.

Welfare-warfare state reform

It gradually dawned on me that the reason for those shocked reactions was that many L.P. members had never heard the principled, uncompromising case for libertarianism. All that they had been exposed to for the last 20 years or so was the case for reform of the welfare-warfare state under which we have all been born and raised, and which, for them, was what libertarianism was all about. 

Social Security reform (e.g., opt-outs; phase-outs; directed investments; annuities; buy-outs). 

Medicare reform (e.g., health-savings accounts; pharmaceutical competition).

Immigration reform (e.g., ending quotas; securing the border).

Education reform (e.g., vouchers; school choice).

Drug-war reform (e.g., eliminating mandatory minimum sentences; decriminalizing marijuana; ending asset forfeiture).

Pentagon reform (e.g., reducing military spending).

CIA reform (e.g., reining in the CIA).

NSA reform (e.g., FISA court reform; reduce secret surveillance).

Foreign-policy reform (e.g., limiting foreign interventions to those in our “national interest”).

Tax reform (e.g., lowering taxes; the “fair tax”).

Monetary reform (e.g., limiting money-supply growth).

It also became clear to me that the target audience for these reforms was Republicans, whose political campaigns were also based on welfare-warfare state reform. This was manifested by the longtime, still-ongoing fantasy of garnering the massive number of voters who had come out for Ron Paul in his 2008 and 2012 quests for the Republican presidential nomination. 

Thus, the standard L.P. presidential strategy had come to be one of proposing welfare-warfare state reforms with the aim of finally bringing the “Ron Paul revolution” to a L.P. presidential candidate. In the process, libertarianism had become synonymous with welfare-warfare state reform measures that were designed to be better than the reform proposals being advanced by Republican candidates. In fact, proponents of Libertarian welfare-warfare state reform measures oftentimes described their proposals as “bold.”

And suddenly here was a speaker (me) giving the principled, uncompromising case for libertarianism — one that naturally called for the repeal, abolition, and dismantling of all welfare-warfare state programs, departments, and agencies and that expressly rejected the idea of welfare-warfare state reform.

As I went from state convention to state convention, I could easily tell that there were many L.P. members who simply did not know what to make of what they were hearing from me, as I made the case for immediately abolishing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public (i.e., government) schooling, immigration controls, the Federal Reserve, and all drug laws, and dismantling the national-security establishment and restoring a limited-government republic to our land.

My 2019 race for the nomination 

In November 2019, I announced my candidacy for the 2020 L.P. presidential nomination. My candidacy was based on making the same principled, uncompromising case for liberty that I had made in my talks at those state conventions the year before and for which I have stood ever since I discovered libertarianism in the late 1970s.

By this time, however, I knew what I was up against. I fully understood that L.P. supporters of the reform paradigm would ardently oppose my candidacy. In fact, shortly after I announced my candidacy, one of my enthusiastic supporters telephoned me and exhorted me to remove my position calling for the abolition of Social Security and Medicare from my campaign website. He said that I could never win the L.P. presidential nomination with those positions. Not long afterward, he called me again and said that if I stuck with my position favoring open borders, my quest for the nomination was doomed. Needless to say, I stuck with my positions. 

Throughout the campaign, the supporters of reform felt that if I were to win the L.P. presidential nomination, I would set the party back in terms of votes because it would damage the image of reform that had been carefully cultivated among Republican voters for the past 20 years.

I was totally opposed to that mindset. Ever since I joined the L.P. in 1990, I have believed that our libertarian principles are not a liability or a political albatross but instead are our greatest asset — and that these principles are not only the way to lead America to freedom but also the way that L.P. candidates can garner a large number of votes. 

Ever since I joined the LP in 1990 (and served 3 terms on the Platform Committee), I also have believed that even if voters are not ready to embrace libertarian principles, it is still imperative that we adhere to our principles rather than compromise, conceal, and water them down in the hopes of increasing vote totals. (See my 1997 six-part essay “Compromise and Concealment: The Road to Defeat.”)

To show that the reform-oriented Libertarians were mistaken in their claim that a campaign of principle could not garner a large number of votes, I announced early on that I intended to enter the presidential primaries in states where the L.P. had qualified to participate in such primaries. I invited all the other L.P. presidential candidates to also enter the primaries, and they did so.

At the end of the process, I won 7 of 9 presidential primaries, and I came in second place in the 8th one. Those results demonstrated that voters clearly liked the principled, uncompromising message that I was expounding.

I ended up losing the race for the 2020 presidential nomination, but I felt that at least I had proven that the reform wing of the Libertarian Party was mistaken in its contention that a principled, uncompromising campaign was incapable of garnering a large number of votes. Keep in mind that a presidential primary is totally different from a state L.P. convention. It is a real election where registered voters are going to the polls to cast their ballots for their preferred candidate. 

My race for the U.S. Senate

Was my winning those 7 primaries a fluke? Actually not. In 2002, I ran for the U.S. Senate in Virginia against one of the most popular governors in the history of the state, John Warner. He had been married to the famous Hollywood actress Elizabeth Taylor. He was the chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee. He was running for reelection and had the race locked up. The Democrats didn’t even bother running a candidate. 

This was right after the 9/11 attacks. During my campaign, I was pointing to U.S. foreign policy as the motivating factor for those attacks. I was also making the case for open borders as the solution to America’s perpetual, ongoing, never-ending immigration crisis. Needless to say, those were not popular positions at that time (or now), to say the least, especially among Republicans. I knew that there was no way that I would receive even one Republican vote. 

I also knew that I wouldn’t receive even one Democratic vote, given my position in favor of abolishing Social Security, Medicare, and other welfare-state programs, departments, and agencies. In fact, I am certain that any Democratic protest votes went to a Lyndon LaRouche candidate who was also running.

Nonetheless, I received over 7 percent of the statewide vote, with just a bare-bones, guerrilla type of campaign. Some 106,000 people had taken the time to go to the polls and cast their votes for me. That wasn’t because of me personally because I was a total unknown. Voters clearly liked the principled, uncompromising case for liberty I was making during my campaign. And keep in mind that this was 20 years before I would win those 7 primaries with the same principled libertarian message, when most people didn’t even know what libertarianism was.

One of the things I am most proud of in that race is that I received the endorsement of one of the most prominent Black ministers in the nation, John O. Peterson Sr., pastor of the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. He later was elected to the African-American Hall of Fame. He wrote a letter of endorsement for me and told me to take it to every Black minister in the state, which I did. I have no doubts that a large number of my votes came from Black voters. I have long maintained — and still maintain — that Black Americans are a potential gold mine of votes for us Libertarians, especially given our fierce opposition to the war on drugs, whose adverse consequences have long fallen disproportionately on Black people.

The 2024 race

This time around, however, I have decided to do things differently. 

Among voters, the rejection rate for the reform-oriented message of standard L.P. presidential candidates is a tsunami-large 98-99 percent. Most recently, the 2020 L.P. presidential candidate to whom I lost the race, Jo Jorgensen, garnered a rejection percentage of 98.9 percent.

This phenomenally high rejection rate among voters 50 years after the Libertarian Party was founded has traditionally been blamed on voter ignorance. If voters became aware of the L.P. welfare-warfare state reform proposals, it is said, they would embrace it wholeheartedly.

This sentiment is often expressed after L.P. presidential races with the lament that if the L.P. presidential candidate could have gotten into the debates, he or she would have garnered more votes. The notion that voters simply do not like the reform message and, therefore, reject it, time after time, on Election Day, is given short shrift. 

To bring attention and publicity to the L.P. reform message, some L.P. candidates, podcasters, and twitter aficionados have resorted to unusual tactics, believing that if only voters will become aware of the L.P. reform message and give it their attention, they will vote for it. Such tactics consist of (1) using profanity (with the “f” word being the most popular); (2) “macho flash” (advancing some far-fetched application of libertarian principles); (3) inflammatory rhetoric designed to shock people; and (4) personal attacks against opponents. The electoral result, not surprisingly, has inevitably been worse. 

This time around I decided to announce my candidacy last February, which was around 9 months earlier than I did in 2019.

Why did I do that? Because I wanted to show L.P. members that it is possible to wage a hard-hitting, principled, uncompromising Libertarian Party presidential campaign without resorting to profanity, macho flash, inflammatory rhetoric, and personal attacks. 

And that is what I have done on a weekly basis since last February. If one goes to the blog section of my campaign website at www.jacobforliberty.com, one will see a long series of short videos (usually 3-5 minutes long) targeting Democrat and Republican presidential candidates for their positions, in the context of Libertarian principles. One will not find one single instance of profanity, macho flash, inflammatory rhetoric, or personal attacks against anyone. But one will see a hard-hitting, principled, no-compromise exposition of libertarian principles. '

My strategy

And that’s my political strategy for winning the 2024 L.P. presidential nomination — exhorting L.P. members during the next several months to do something totally different this time around — something genuinely bold — running a presidential campaign of principle for the “Party of Principle,” with the aim of leading the American people to freedom and, in the process, garner a large number of votes by fighting as Libertarians rather than as welfare-warfare state reformers.