Frankly, I'm Relieved

[Note: I am writing this post at about 6am on Tuesday morning, but don't plan to actually publish it until after the Reform Party announces the outcome of its presidential nomination process; it would be rude to preempt them with hints as to what it is that I'm led to believe they're going to announce - TLK]

[Additional Note: Well, once again my assumption that anything would happen in a timely manner has been deflated; my information is that the Reform Party chose its presidential/vice-presidential nominees late last night ... but so far as I can tell they still haven't gotten round to, you know, SAYING SO - TLK]

No, not sour grapes. Genuine relief. To explain why, here's a brief exchange I had with Red Philips on Facebook last night:

Red Phillips: Any word on the [Reform Party] nomination yet?

Thomas L. Knapp: Nope.

It was supposed to be decided on July 29th.

Then it was supposed to be decided by email ballot and announced at 5pm today.

Then it was "we'll try to have a decision by 9pm."

9pm has come and gone.

Keep in mind that this is nine delegates voting on a single issue.

Even if it went to multiple ballots, it's something nine seventh graders who'd never had a civics class or seen a copy of Robert's could have figured out in 60-90 minutes, tops.

They've taken ten days.

Now in point of fact there still hasn't been an actual announcement 13 hours after the last projected date for one, but I am told that in the middle of the night the Reform Party's nine delegates did finally manage, after nearly two weeks, to wrap up the process of taking a vote and choosing a presidential candidate, and that that candidate was someone other than my running mate, Darcy Richardson (which presumably means the vice-presidential candidate is someone other than me).

Let me reiterate: Nearly two weeks for nine people to complete a simple process that the Libertarian Party managed to get through in a few hours a few weeks ago in Orlando with more than 1,000 delegates participating.

To the extent that I was interested in being the Reform Party's vice-presidential nominee this year, my interest was about helping the Reform Party rebuild itself organizationally (my payoff for doing so would be learning that skill).

But I have to admit, that job was probably beyond my abilities. The level of dysfunction it takes for nine people to need two weeks to take a simple vote is probably just beyond my help. Or anyone else's.

Note that I am not criticizing the content of the decision here. From what I know of who was picked, I understand the reasons even if I think they were given the wrong weight. But making the decision was a process so simple that it should have been impossible to screw up very badly.

Good luck to the Reform Party.

#ReformParty meets #Headtalker

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Choose Darcy Headtalker campaign!

At noon today, 53 people (actually, 53 social media accounts -- each account is treated as a different person, I've noticed) told more than 1.2 million friends/followers/connections:

@ReformParty: Revive Ross Perot's Reform Party -- nominate Darcy Richardson for president!

In the four hours since then, those social media messages have produced more than 200 visits to Darcy's campaign web site. Presumably that number will increase. The analytics are a little primitive, but it looks to me like the traffic produced has just plateaued in the last hour or so. My guess is that it will decrease fairly quickly and that 12-24 hours from now we'll have seen the last of it. But I wouldn't be surprised to hit 500 visits when it's all said and done.

This last four days has been a strange form of political campaign. Its aim is to demonstrate to nine voting delegates, who will choose the Reform Party's presidential nominee between now and next Monday, that one campaign is both serious about, and capable of, promoting the Reform Party itself.

Darcy gave me a campaign budget of $50 and permission to experiment. I personally set today as the campaign's end date -- if we haven't made our point by now, we won't, and that gives the delegates four days to cogitate.

With that $50, I:

• Showed the Reform Party (through the lens of Darcy's campaign) to more than 4,000 people via Google Adwords, with a click thru rate to the campaign web site of about 1/2 of 1% (not terrible for Internet advertising).
• Showed the Reform Party (through the lens of Darcy's campaign) to about 1,600 people via Twitter advertising, with a click thru rate of 2.78% (toward the top of the normal range for Twitter ads according to some of my research).
• Deployed about 100,000 468x60 banner ad impressions (through various services) to show the Reform Party (through the lens of Darcy's campaign), as best I can tell, about 50,000 times so far (the ads will probably run out over the next few days -- they're the only part of this campaign that continues beyond now). It's hard to gauge the number of unique viewers, but it's safe to say that banner advertising is pretty dead as an effective reach tool -- the click-thru rate tops out at about 1/10th of 1%.
• Showed the Reform Party (through the lens of Darcy's campaign) to more than 1.2 million people via Headtalker. Click-thru rate to be determined, but I expect that more people will visit Darcy's campaign web site in the 24 hour period starting at noon today than voted for the Reform Party's  presidential ticket in 2008.

So, Reform Party delegates, once again I ask:

Take a look at your web site hits. Which candidate is sending people your way today?

Take a look at social media chatter about the Reform Party. What's inspiring it today?

How do those numbers compare to a normal day?

Darcy Richardson is serious about rebuilding the Reform Party. Are you?

And Then There Was The Time ...

... that I tried to do something, failed, and everything worked out OK anyway.


My goal was to amass, from my own personal "reach" -- 5k Facebook friends, more than 2k Twitter followers, 500+ LinkedIn connections, this blog, the podcast, but not the professional/work with others stuff like RRND or the Garrison Center -- 100 supporters for a Headtalker campaign to boost Darcy Richardson's Reform Party presidential nomination campaign.

Didn't happen. I was somewhat surprised (unpleasantly as you might guess) that I couldn't get  fewer than 1/70th of the people I talk to on a regular basis to do something that cost them nothing more than a minute or so of their time. On the other hand, there was a three-day time limit. So maybe something longer-term would allow me to get better response. Anyway, I learned some stuff that should improve future efforts to mobilize people for this or that. And THANK YOU to everyone who did come through.

But I had options, and used them. I scaled back my goal to 50 supporters and paid a few bucks for a little commercial "reach" (the entirety of this week's Internet campaigning will have cost less than $50 -- that's for banner advertising, Google ads, Twitter ads and the Headtalker) to get things where they needed to be. So now it's at 53 supporters and the message will go out at noon eastern today to more than 1.2 million people.

Reaching ~1.3 million people for less than fifty bucks from a standing start within four days of deciding to do so should be a wake-up call for the Reform Party National Committee. It shows that Darcy Richardson is serious. Now they just have to decide whether or not they're serious.

@ReformParty Twitter Ads Engagement -- Not Bad!

I ran a test campaign on Twitter ads with a length of one day or cost of $5, whichever it hit first. The point was to promote Darcy Richardson's campaign for the Reform Party's presidential nomination, so the tweet/ad content was "Darcy Richardson 2016 -- Reviving Ross Perot's @ReformParty," with associated graphic and link to Darcy's web site.

The engagement rate was 2.8%, which in my experience is pretty damn good for web advertising and toward the top end of usual results for Twitter ads in particular. The ad received 1,607 impressions and resulted in 45 click-thrus.

Of course, what I am really interested in is getting my "Choose Darcy" Headtalker campaign up to the 100 supporters it needs by Wednesday, which will likely result in several million exposures. Please help me out with that.

I'll probably get Google ads going later today, also on a test basis. I have two goals this week.

One is to convince the Reform Party to nominate Darcy.

The other is to demonstrate to the Reform Party what effective guerilla third party political campaigning looks like. They still seem to be in traditional campaign mode, even though the bottom fell completely out of that strategy after 2004, since when their presidential candidates have received a grand total of fewer than 2,000 votes across two presidential elections (about 500 fewer votes in two elections than the Boston Tea Party's ticket received in its single presidential outing in 2008).

Well, Then, I Guess It's On

As I mentioned yesterday, the Reform Party was, for some reason, unable to settle on a presidential ticket at its national convention and will be making that decision by email ballot over the course of the next week.

Up to that point, I was content to affirm my acceptance of Darcy Richardson's request that I serve as his running mate, outline my history with the party, and otherwise pretty much leave the matter to the judgment of the delegates, who presumably are more familiar with the party as it exists and well positioned to see to its interests.

But now, I confess, my blood is up a little. The delegates did a disservice to their party's nominees, whoever those nominees may end up being, by postponing the decision for a week with only three months remaining between now and election day. The ballot access filing fee / elector list deadline in Colorado is only two days after the scheduled announcement. The candidates need to be campaigning.

So at least two of them -- Darcy and myself -- are campaigning. We've already set up our first hundred thousand banner ad impressions, with more to come as needed. A twitter advertising campaign begins tonight, a Google campaign tonight or tomorrow, a "Headtalker" social media reach campaign awaits approval for launch, etc.

Thousands -- probably tens of thousands, maybe more than 100,000 --  will be exposed to Richardson/Knapp 2016 by the end of this week. And they will be exposed in a way that emphasizes the Reform Party, so that even if we aren't the nominees, the party benefits.

I hope the delegates will take note of which candidates are doing what, and how well, and why.

Reform Party Presidential Nomination Results

There aren't any. At least not yet. Delegates at the Reform Party's national convention in Bohemia, New York, narrowed the field down to two possibilities -- Rocky de la Fuente and Darcy Richardson -- but were unable to reach a decision before adjourning.

What happens next? I've heard two different things:

1. From Darcy Richardson, I hear that there will be an email ballot of the nine delegates to make a final decision, and the result will be announced at 5pm on Monday, August 1st.
2. At Richard Winger's Ballot Access News, I read that the choice has been postponed until August 8th. No word at BAN on whether the process is email ballot or something else, but Winger's opinion is that they are "likely to nominate the presidential candidate who has qualified for the most state ballots by then."

It seems nearly inexplicable to me that they would put the choice off until August 8th, especially if the criterion is ballot access (Mr. Fuente is clearly the candidate who would appear on the most ballots and that's not going to change in the next nine days), so I'm assuming Darcy's interpretation of events is the correct one.

Of course, this leaves me a bit on tenterhooks since I'm Darcy Richardson's preferred running mate. I had expected to know today whether to continue ramping up campaign operations or let it go and get back to other things.

I guess the campaign goes on, either for 48 more hours or nine more days. So I just went ahead and paid an ad broker for 50,000 more impressions of the campaign banner. Here it is (reduced to 400 pixels in width because 468 breaks my blog post formatting):



UPDATE: I just heard from Darcy, who reached out to Reform Party secretary Nicholas Hensley by email for clarification (when he got the impression that the issue would be decided and announced this Monday, it was by phone while he was driving). The decision will, in fact, be announced on the 8th.
My working theory for why they would rob their nominee of more than a week of campaign time with only three months to go until the election is that they are leaning toward Fuente and have given him time to withdraw from the Democratic primary for US Senate in Florida (Florida does not allow a candidate to be on the ballot for two offices, so if he tries to do both the Reform Party will likely lose its only solid ballot line for the year).
I guess I'll improve the time by campaigning. If Darcy's not the nominee, I don't want it to be due to a lack of effort on my part.

Election 2016: Math vs. Path

In a previous post, I go over the concept of "on the ballot in enough states to mathematically be elected." For presidential candidates, the number representing "enough states" is either one or zero (zero reflecting the possibility of winning a state as a write-in). Since the US House of Representatives chooses the next president from among the top three recipients of electoral votes in the event that no candidate receives at least 270 electoral votes, carrying even one state (or even a congressional district in Maine or Nebraska) represents a possible, if narrow and rather implausible, path to the presidency.

I close that post out with:

Bonus question: How many states must a vice-presidential candidate win in order for it to be mathematically possible for that vice-presidential candidate to be elected?

Hint: It's a lot more complicated than the other question/answer set.

How much more complicated?

Well, in the event that no vice-presidential candidate receives 270 or more electoral votes, the next vice-president is chosen by the US Senate from among the top two recipients of electoral votes.

From a set of three contenders, what is the fewest number of electoral votes that a candidate can receive while (1) coming in second place (2) from a field in which precisely three candidates receive electoral votes, while (3) holding the first place finisher to fewer than 270 electoral votes?

The answer, if my math is right, is 135.

If the first place finisher receives 269 votes and the second place finisher receives 135 votes, that leaves 134 votes for the third place finisher. Obviously the first place finisher could receive fewer than 269, or the second place more than 135, but like I said, 135 appears to be the absolute minimum number to get into a Senate-decided vice-presidential selection process by making the top two cut from among three contenders.

This means that the absolute minimum number of states that contender would have to win would be four. If a vice-presidential candidate won the electoral votes of California and Texas, that would bring in 93 electoral votes. The next two heaviest states are Florida and New York, with 29 each for a total of 151. Carrying only one of those two would leave the contender at 122, 13 electoral votes short, which could be made up for by carrying any one of eight states: Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey or Virginia. Absent one of those, it's going to end up taking five or more states to reach the magic number.

There's a huge gap between the one electoral vote that could conceivably make a president in the House and the 135 electoral votes it would take to potentially make a vice-president in the Senate.

Vis a vis the Libertarian Party, that makes the path to the vice-presidency much narrower for William Weld than the path to the presidency for Gary Johnson. It seems nearly certain that even if Johnson pushes the election to the House and prevails there, he'll be saddled with Mike Pence or Tim Kaine as sidekick.

Vis a vis the Reform Party, it likely closes off the vice-presidential nominee's path completely. The party's ticket will be on the ballot in states disposing of 58 total electoral votes (New York and Florida), plus possibly Louisiana with 8, bringing the potential total to 66. Note I said it likely closes the path off completely. There might be opportunities to register and have write-in votes counted in enough states to get the total up to 135. But it looks like President Darcy Richardson would likewise probably have to make do with Pence or Kaine in second chair. But I'll still do my best.

You Know, I Suppose I Should Make This Formal

Attn: Delegates attending the Reform Party's 2016 national convention, July 29-31, Bohemia, New York

I, Thomas L. Knapp, hereby declare myself a candidate for the Reform Party's 2016 vice-presidential nomination. My declaration to this effect is pursuant to having been named as the preferred running mate of prospective 2016 Reform Party presidential nominee Darcy Richardson.

I aver that I am constitutionally qualified for election to the vice-presidency of the United States, being a natural born citizen thereof, having attained the age of 35 years (turning 50 this November, in fact), and having been 14 years a resident of the United States (the last time I left the United States was in late December of 1990, pursuant to military orders; I returned in late May of 1991).

I am neither wealthy nor famous, but I am an experienced campaigner, going back to 1992 when I gathered ballot access signatures for Reform Party founder Ross Perot's first presidential campaign and proudly cast my vote for him. I pledge, if nominated, to use such resources as I have at my disposal to actively and energetically campaign on behalf of the party and its presidential ticket, and to help begin the process of rebuilding a Reform Party which can put its next presidential ticket on many more ballots and back that ticket with a much higher level financial and volunteer support.

Due to the lateness of this declaration, I do not expect to be able to attend the party's national convention next weekend. However, I will gladly make myself available via phone or videoconference should my virtual "presence" be required. Between now and the convention I invite delegates to contact me via email (kubby.communications@gmail.com) or on Facebook (thomaslknapp). Said contacts can be escalated to phone or Skype as necessary.

Thank you for your consideration.

Respectfully yours,
Thomas L. Knapp

I Was Reform Party Before There WAS a Reform Party

In 1992 I faced a presidential election quandary. I had pledged to vote for the re-election of George HW Bush, provided he honored his "no new taxes" pledge.

He didn't. But I wasn't going to vote for Bill Clinton, either. Since my first presidential vote in 1988 (for Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis), on the basis of intense reading and study, I had found myself moving across the left-right political spectrum, passing through "conservative" and into a space I hadn't yet identified as "libertarian."

Enter Ross Perot. I didn't agree with him on everything, but I had reached a point where I considered the two-party system broken and the left-right spectrum invalid, and he seemed like the best thing going. I gathered petition signatures for him as a volunteer and voted for him in November. Those who are old enough to recall the election will remember that his backing organization at that point was called United We Stand America. By 1996, it was the Reform Party (and I was an ideological libertarian and a partisan Libertarian).

OK, enough trivia. You may be wondering why I bother mentioning this at all, so let's get to the heart of the matter ASAP:

My friend Darcy Richardson has declared his candidacy for the Reform Party's 2016 presidential nomination.

Finally, a candidate I can support! No, we don't agree on everything (I would describe him as a social democrat with strong civil libertarian credentials; we've already discussed what I am), but I know him to be honest, hard-working and not intent on campaigning on the wrong side of any of the issues I just can't stomach a candidate campaigning on the wrong side of. He's also supported a number of my own political efforts over the years.

If Darcy is the Reform Party's 2016 presidential nominee, I will gladly vote for him this November.

Especially since he has selected me as his running mate.