May 1998
LP sets record: 25,000 members
Four-year membership surge results in 165% growth in contributing members
In 1996, the Libertarian Party turned 25.And in 1998, the party turned 25,000.
On March 25, the Libertarian Party passed the 25,000 membership threshold for the first time in its 27-year history.
"25,000 members! I love those big round numbers," said Perry Willis, past LP national director and architect of the direct-mail membership recruitment drive which brought in many of those new members.
The new record represents a 165% growth for the Libertarian Party in the past four years. In March 1994, there were 9,512 contributing members of the LP.
Even more remarkable, it represents a 294% growth since late 1988, when party membership stood at only 6,402.
The steady growth -- which has continued since the end of the 1996 presidential campaign -- "makes it clear that this isn't a fluke," said LP National Chairman Steve Dasbach. "We now know that we can sustain strong growth even without a presidential campaign. Or any campaign, for that matter."
Dasbach said most of the new members over the past year have come from the party's ambitious direct-mail recruitment campaign, Project Archimedes.
"We hit 25,000 because we've been relentlessly focusing on building membership -- mostly through Project Archimedes, but also by reaching out to lapsed members," he said. "Also, some has come from our media effort -- doing increasing numbers of radio and TV interviews, which generate increasing numbers of calls to our 800# and our Web site."
The new record confirms one of the basic theories behind Project Archimedes, said Dasbach: That millions of Americans hold Libertarian beliefs -- and the party can use high-tech demographic profiling and mass mailings to find them and convince them to become contributing supporters of the party.
The eventual goal of the project is to recruit as many as 200,000 LP members -- which means "we'll have the grassroots and financial strength to duplicate, at the presidential campaign level, what Ross Perot did in 1992," said Dasbach.
The good news -- as shown by the record-setting membership numbers -- is that the project is off to a very successful start, said Willis.
"Most of this recent growth came from just the testing phase of Project Archimedes," he said. "Imagine what we'll be able to accomplish now that we're ready to make use of what we've learned from our tests!"
