1. Paper candidate - candidate who pays their fees and does nothing.
2. Ballot access candidate - candidate who is placed on the ballot to maintain ballot access for future races.

3. Educational candidate - candidate who runs to get the word out about our issues and the party.
4. Training candidate - candidate who runs a race so people can learn how a campaign is run.
5. Issue candidate - candidate who tries to change the debate or to get a law changed.
6. Winning race candidate - candidate who has a chance of winning.

I am sure that I am missing some, so please chime in.

In my opinion, paper candidates are useless. In fact, they are a negative. They take up resources and time. They have to fill out paper work and pay filling fees, which is just wasting resources. They give the voters the wrong idea about our party. When they do not show up for debates and forums, some voters take that as a slap in the face. When a low-level paper candidate does that , it hurts someone who is running a real race in the same district. Do the voters know when we are running real candidates or paper ones? No. The Libertarian party has got to stop running paper candidates.

Ballot access candidates are different than paper ones. I have seen us need someone, anyone, to run to keep ballot access. This candidate needs to know what vote level is needed and have a plan to get there. Some times these candidates have to do very little work to get their minimums but, in some states, this is a difficult job, if not impossible. I believe Alabama is one of these states.

Educational and party building is the type of candidate we are most used to seeing.

Training candidates should be run more often. This is the candidate we use to learn the ins and outs of campaigning. How to do the paper work. How to buy yard signs. How to get pamphlets made. Where to get a voter list. How to walk a precinct. How to get invited to debates. This list can go on and on. We need to practice, so when that Smither race pops up, we are ready.

We should run issue candidates more often as well. We can and should run candidates for one issue or even against another. Maybe it is taxes or gun control or property rights. The issue candidate educates herself better than the competition. She then goes out there and pushes that issue all the time. In Georgia, when natural gas was de-regulated, our candidate knew more about natural gas than the sitting public service commissioner. In the debate, we embarrassed the democrats . Gas was deregulated but the democrats screwed it up, we have multiple providers but only one supplier.

We over estimate our supply of winning race candidates. We get excited over a US House race or governor race with a $40,000 budget, even though our competition has $4,000,000 to spend. We don’t get excited about a candidate for city council in a race where the top three win. Nobody sends any money because we got that one in the bag (we lose it by 10 points). If we want to win races, we need to do a better job at picking them and realizing which candidates really can win. We need to pick the smaller races. We need to compete in those races with our money, experience and better candidates.

In the end we need to be running all these candidates, except the paper candidate. At the beginning, the candidate needs to decide what type they are and we can come up with a battle plan and a set of goals that suits the individual candidate.

For anyone who is interested I have a yahoo group about Libertarian campaigns. A join button is over on the left below the blog roll.

Thanks Doug Craig