How Third Parties Die

The Libertarian Party has always been fractious, but its infighting has intensified since the Mises Caucus, a faction opposed to “wokeism,” took control of the organization. Many of the party’s more socially liberal members have exited since the takeover—and in some cases, they’re trying to take the party’s state affiliates with them. In New Mexico, two rival groups, one of them attached to the national organization, claim to be the real Libertarian Party. A similar conflict is playing out in Massachusetts. And in Virginia, the dissidents announced that they were dissolving the party entirely. At press time, the national Libertarian Party was working on assembling a new Virginia affiliate.

We don’t know who will ultimately control these institutions. But we do know what it looks like when a political party’s branches start to go their own way.

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Take the Reform Party, whose roots go back to Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign. The Texas businessman ran as an independent that year, but several of his supporters formed parties at the state level. By the time Perot launched the national Reform Party in 1995, some of these mini-parties were already contesting regional races. Minnesota’s Independence Party got its first municipal official elected in 1993, for example, and by 1999 it had produced a governor.

Perot made another run for the White House in 1996, and the party started to fall apart almost immediately after that. In 1997, a dissident faction formed the American Reform Party, which promptly faded into obscurity. When I covered the Reform Party’s national convention in 2000, I was actually covering two conventions: As the main event was nominating the paleoconservative pundit Pat Buchanan, a rump down the street was coronating a transcendental meditation enthusiast named John Hagelin. The two tickets’ lawyers then battled each other for the right to the Reform Party’s ballot lines (and to millions in matching funds). Meanwhile, Perot endorsed the Republican.

The husk of the national Reform Party survives, but the real action has been in the states, where many affiliates (including that Minnesota crew) separated from the national organization. Some of these groups took on their own distinctive identities. In New York City, the Independence Party fell into the hands of Fred Newman, a