Thursday, July 05, 2018

My Occasional Plea to the LNC on National Convention Scheduling/Location, Nth Iteration

I love Libertarian National Conventions. There's nothing better than spending several days in the company of a thousand or more Libertarians.  Thanks to this year's Convention Organization Committee for making it a great one. That said:


  • We always schedule our conventions for holiday weekends (Memorial Day or 4th of July). We don't need to do so (people who want to come will find the time), and doing so disadvantages our CANDIDATES, for whom those weekends are campaign event musts. Someone running for Congress or whatever needs to be glad-handing at a community festival over Memorial Day and/or visiting voters at their local parades and fireworks festivals on Independence Day.
  • We should go back to having conventions in odd years, so that our presidential slate is loaded for bear and hunting votes while the Big Two are still deciding who their nominees are going to be. And preferably in Iowa or New Hampshire so that we're nominating our candidates under an already existing political media spotlight on the Big Two's early caucus/primary stomping grounds.
  • Those odd-year conventions should happen some time after Labor Day, perhaps as late as November. From a financial standpoint, I suspect we can get better deals on convention venues when we aren't competing for space and accommodations with other organizations that hold their events on holiday weekends. More venues will be hungrier for our business at non-holiday times.
The 2020 convention is already set (Memorial Day weekend in Austin, Texas).

I'd love to see the 2024 presidential nominating convention take place in November of 2023 in Manchester New Hampshire, or in Des Moines or the Quad Cities on the Iowa/Illinois border.

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