User:AlexandreAssatiani/sandbox/personal

Background: Libertarian Party, LPF, LPMD

The libertarian philosophy has been an existential component of American politics since the American Revolution. Throughout the 19th century, the main debates existing around politics were centered on the role of the federal government, some presidents like Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren (both Democrats) even abolishing the central bank and many even supporting states' right to secede. While World War I established the first strong federal government, libertarianism continued to prosper in the 1920s under the leadership of the Republican Party, which argued at the time against taxes and economic regulations. Following the Great Depression, the first stark contrast appeared between the Republican and Democratic parties: Democrats under President Roosevelt leaned toward socialism, while Republicans in the opposition believed in isolationism and free markets.

Libertarians became closely associated with the Republican Party, with some major figures like Barry Goldwater. But with the presidency of Richard Nixon, who drastically expanded the war in Vietnam, increased the federal bureaucracy by creating the Environmental Protection Agency, curtailed state autonomy, and abolished the gold standard for currency, radical libertarians started to separate from the Republican Party. In 1971, a group of dissatisfied Republicans and Hippie movement activists formed the Libertarian Party, from the home of an activist in Colorado.

The Libertarian Party was rapidly joined by a series of well-known and high-ranking academics, like Alan Greenspan, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. In the 1972 presidential election, the LP fielded the candidacy of philosopher John Hospers (the first openly gay presidential candidate in US history) and Tonie Nathan (the first woman vice-presidential candidate in the United States), who ended up winning one vote in the Electoral College that year, the last time a third-party candidate would receive a vote in the Electoral College until 2016.

While it was clear that the Libertarian Party would not be able to win any presidential election in the near future, its strategy was to push the national debate on libertarian issues. Facing a deeply-entranced political establishment built to favor the two existing parties (the Republicans and Democrats), they became the first-ever minor party to open branches in all 50 states. In 2016, for the first time, the LP obtained ballot access in all 50 states under the candidacy of Gary Johnson, after a campaign that cost 20 million dollars. In 2019, the LP gained its first congressman when Justin Amash of Michigan, who did not run for reelection, left the Republican Party.

The Libertarian Party of Florida was formally established in 1987, although it was incorporated and recognized by the Department of Elections of Florida in 2012. The party was largely seen as a disorganized group of locally-based activists who would meet once a month, although they failed to win elections, never organized public protests, and had an almost inexistent media presence. The 2012 presidential campaign by Gary Johnson and the leadership of state chairman Adrian Wyllie (2011-2014) gave the organization a new energy throughout most of the state, although not in South Florida.

Miami-Dade County, with its large Hispanic population that made it culturally separate from the rest of the state and a strongly autonomous system of governance, remained out of the focus of both the Libertarian National Committee and the Libertarian Party of Florida. In the 1980s, an original attempt at creating a branch of the LP in Miami-Dade County failed within a year, after just fielding one candidate in a local election in Miami Springs. In 2008, a group of local libertarians based in Hialeah and energized by the Ron Paul presidential campaign created the second version of the Libertarian Party of Miami-Dade County, although it collapsed and was abolished within ten months. In 2012, as the presidential campaign of former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson became popular, the Libertarian Party gained new funding and a large crowd of new volunteers from across the country, as well as interests from seasoned political consultants seeking to leave the Republican Party. With the help of Roger Stone, the Libertarian Party of Miami-Dade County was recreated in October 2012 with Stone assistant Diane Thorne selected as its first chair, and Gary Johnson donors Sacha and Abigail DuBearn as directors.

Joining the LPMD: 2012-2013

Boston Tea Party

My first experience with politics dated back to when I was 16 years old. At the time, I was already solidly anchored in the libertarian philosophy, although my belief system did not go beyond reading books and listening to podcasts. With the 2012 presidential election approaching, I chose to volunteer to support Gary Johnson's campaign. His candidacy was gaining support all across the country, but his team had no representation in Miami, nor was there any interest to open a local office. So I decided to volunteer on my own. At the time, one of the biggest challenges for the LP was the creation of the Boston Tea Party (BTP), a new political party of radical libertarians criticizing the LP for its lack of radicalism. That party was open to anyone who was interested and I joined. Along with me, I brought in a woman called Tiffany Briscoe, an African-American woman from Maryland who had wanted to run for President, although she had no supporter, no money, no party, and no ideology. Through careful campaign framing, I secured the BTP's nomination for Briscoe, who became presidential candidate, before we orchestrated her withdrawal from the party and the BTP's ultimate collapse. The Libertarian Party was once again united, every libertarian backed Gary Johnson, but no one knew my role in this. (Except for Briscoe herself and a friend she met on the campaign trail, James Ogle. The two of them are now married and live in Maryland).^[1]

First position in the LPMD

On 10 December 2012, I attended my first meeting of the Libertarian Party of Miami-Dade County, one month after it was created. It had an ambitious leadership, although inexperienced. But so was I. Diane Thorne, a personal assistant of Roger Stone and an official at the Broward County Sheriff's Office, was the Chairwoman. Next to her was Eric Faden, a young anarchist activist from Hialeah. Suzanne Gilmore was Treasurer and her husband Tony Sellers served as Secretary. During that first meeting, I spent the whole evening talking to the two Directors of the LPMD: Sacha and Abigail DuBearn, two large financial backers of Gary Johnson. There were others that night, maybe a dozen people. None of them are active today. The meeting was not productive, interesting, future-oriented, or strategic. But it was interesting: for the first time ever, I was in the same room as other Libertarians. It was interesting enough for me to attend another meeting one month later. Meetings were set once a month, on the second Tuesday of the month.

At the January 2013 meeting, the mood was more work-oriented. The party had a few people, and a lot of work was necessary. The group agreed that while the LPMD needed to keep its messaging on national issues, it also had to focus on local affairs. And not a single member knew anything about Miami-Dade County politics. I didn't either, so that made me equal with the others. But there's something that Diane Thorne and Roger Stone may have liked in me because that day, Thorne appointed me as Chairman of the Nominating Committee of the LPMD. "Nominating Committee" was just a fancy term for the group in the party that had to focus on recruiting candidates and getting them to win. I was the chairman of that committee, and its only member. Maybe the fact that nobody at that time checked my credentials showed that the party needed help more than anything else. That would cause problems later. In that January meeting, there was another new face that walked in - Marc Golob.

Though for most, a position in the LPMD was more of a "hobby", I took my new responsibility seriously. I was the Chairman of the Nominating Committee of the Libertarian Party of Miami-Dade County, a handful for the mouth but a real, legal title in a real, legal hierarchy. The big question I had to answer to myself would shape my future in the party: should the focus be on federal and statewide elections (the expensive but heavily-mediatized presidential, congressional, gubernatorial elections) or on local elections (small seats with little media coverage but with real power and winnable). I chose the second option. Yes, the big elections were "sexy" but the local elections could be won and I wanted to win. My philosophy was simple at the time: we would never be able to win the White House without winning Congressional seats first, and we'll never be able to win Congress without winning local positions first. Since the national Libertarian Party focused on the big elections, someone had to focus on the local elections.

I had some opposition. There were those who did not understand the purpose of running local seats, thinking they were powerless positions. There were also those with their own self-interest wanting to run for Congress and disappointed that I would not support them openly. But I had the support of the DuBearn family and that was enough at the time.

I was 18 years old. I didn't know where to start. So I started to learn about the municipalities of Miami-Dade County. Digging, I found the 2013 Elections Calendar of Miami-Dade County and realized that the next election on the calendar was for the Golden Beach City Council, in February. This was my first test. After extensive research, I found one resident of Golden Beach who had donated money to Gary Johnson, a Joe Natoli, and I tried reaching out to him. He didn't answer his phone or his email, so I went to Golden Beach. I spent the day there, walking through each neighborhood until I found Natoli's house and left him a note. The next day, he was inviting me to his office. Turns out, Joe Natoli was a millionaire, owner of a large airplane hangar in Opa-locka. At the end, Natoli refused to run for City Council - a millionaire doesn't run for local office - but I had a better deal: he started funding the LPMD. Within one month in the party, I had devised a whole strategy for the LPMD's election strategy and brought in a major financer.

Things changed in the LPMD that spring. Eric Faden left his position of Vice-Chairman and was replaced by Tony Sellers. Then, two months later, Diane Thone also resigned for reasons nobody understood. Tony became the new Chairman of the LPMD. Abigail DuBearn resigned as Director to become Secretary, and Marc Golob became Director. Throughout that time, I stayed out of the internal decision-making and focused on the elections. When summer started, the national Libertarian Party forwarded me an email from a young man in the City of Hialeah who was interested in getting involved. He had checked the box "I am interested in running for office" on the party's website, so the central party office in Virginia sent me the contact directly. His name was Marcos Miralles. And there, it hit me: there was an election coming up for City Council in Hialeah in November, and the deadline to file was in July. We both took a leap of faith and we agreed that Marcos would run for City Council and I would be his campaign manager.

The 2013 Hialeah Election

The Marcos Miralles campaign was its own very unique experience. Hialeah is a city that's almost 95% Cuban-American, and only a small minority even speak English. It is a deeply-corrupt city, and it's also the fourth-largest city in Florida, but it has always managed to stay under the radar of the media because of its lack of English-speaking politicians. Its City Council was known as the Seguro que Yes Council (the "Of Course Yes Council") because not once in its history had any member voted against the mayor's proposals. Every council meeting (once a month) was filled with waivers of competitive tenders, and candidates had almost a million-dollar budget. The FBI tried once to intervene, in the 1990s, and arrested Mayor Raul Martinez, but he was reelected as soon as he came out of jail. The State Attorney's Office never filed a lawsuit. When the Ethics Commission gave a $1,000 fine to Mayor Carlos Hernandez in 2015 for his ties to a company, he paid the whole fine in pennies he brought himself to the County Government Center. Time and time again, Hialeah politicians would use accusations of corruption as tools of populism, the "Hialeah against the rest of the world" system that made its leaders revered by the aging Cuban population and feared by journalists and activists. In 2012, the Miami Herald closed its last office in Hialeah, the last newspaper covering local news.

With all of these factors, Hialeah was far away from the radars of the Libertarian Party. Libertarians, whose main focus remained issues like marijuana legalization and fighting American imperialism, had no strategy or response to the corruption of a local government, leave alone to the dire crisis of having a Cuban thief-in-law organization controlling a city that doesn't speak English. Marcos and I were left alone. Even Roger Stone refused to get involved, saying the city was "too tribal". And the dozens of activists that had tried to speak out against Mayor Carlos Hernandez in the past (and ended up punished, even evicted from their homes or arrested in jail) refused to join our campaign, out of fear. But Marcos and I were not afraid. Maybe we were young and ambitious, maybe we just did not know enough.^[2]

Marcos ran against Pablo Hernandez, a 21-year-old City Councilman largely considered to be a puppet of the mayor. And once he became a candidate, we were contacted by Ricky Garcia, the head of the local police union. He was planning a revolt against Carlos Hernandez and wanted to become mayor himself. He wasn't a clean man, but he knew the corruption had devolved into authoritarianism and wanted a way out. We agreed on a coalition: Ricky Garcia as the Republican candidate for Mayor, and Marcos Miralles (Libertarian) and Julio Rodriguez (Democrat) as City Council candidates. Garcia would die one day before we announced the coalition publicly, officially of a heart attack. We struggled and found a replacement, Julio Martinez, himself a former Republican mayor before Carlos Hernandez. The coalition was saved but we were severely weakened.^[3] ^[4]

During the campaign, we faced a huge disbalance in campaign finance. But Marcos was charismatic and scored great points during his interviews. Soon, there was money coming in from companies preparing for Carlos Hernandez to lose: former mayor Raul Martinez, former Miami Mayor Maurice Ferre, insurance company Univista, large restaurants in the city. Anonymous public servants would reach out to Marcos and give him secret documents revealing corruption, including video footage of an illegal secret meeting of the Mayor with his councilmen to give them orders on how to vote at the next City Council meeting, in clear violation of the Sunshine Law. It became clear that a power struggle was taking place between the traditional Cuban mafia (supporting the opposition coalition) and the cocaine trafficking thief-in-law organization that was controlled by Mayor Hernandez. When the Miami Herald sent a journalist to cover the election, the mayor personally gave him a death threat.

At the November election, Marcos Miralles ended up with 27% of the vote, more than any other candidate of the coalition.^[5] We lost, but Miralles remained on the radar in Hialeah. Two months after his defeat, Mayor Hernandez proposed him to join his team and be appointed as a member of the Zoning Committee of Hialeah, which Marcos refused. This was right after Julio Martinez ended up in a coma after a car crash.

First two victories: Sea Pines Estate and Fisher Island

This was my first election, my first real experience. I failed, but I didn't let it get to me. Marcos and I split ways, even though we had become close friends - he needed time off from politics after his loss, and that made sense. I couldn't ask him to follow me in other Libertarian adventures when the Libertarian Party had ignored his campaign entirely from the beginning to the end. So I went back to the Elections Calendar, where I saw a new election scheduled for January 2014, something I had never heard of before: the "Sea Pines Estates Street Lighting Special Taxing District".

This was a public referendum in a small neighborhood in West Kendall called Sea Pines Estate, with the goal of imposing a small tax on homeowners to add street lights. Historically, this type of referendum has always passed in Miami-Dade County (the only one ever defeated was in 2004) and similar referenda take place regularly up to four or five times a year in various neighborhoods. But this was a new tax and it was an election, so I chose to get involved. I asked Chairman Tony Sellers to help by setting a small budget to campaign against the referendum, but the party refused and I went forward alone. With my own money, I sent letters to every resident and went door-to-door twice in Sea Pines Estate, distributing flyers with the slogan "Say NO to STDs in your neighborhood" - a play on the abbreviation of STD (either "special taxing district" or "sexually-transmitted disease"). I framed my campaign against new taxes and arguing that Miami-Dade County had worked a deal with state monopoly Florida Power & Light over the street lights without public input. At the end, my campaign was successful and for the first time since 2004, a special taxing district was defeated in South Florida.

At the February 2014 meeting of the LPMD, I presented my report on the referendum and offered to present my personally-funded campaign as a "legal gift to the party" for reporting purposes (as a private individual and a foreigner, I was not allowed to finance the campaign myself). But Chairman Tony Sellers refused to accept, arguing that he had not been consulted enough and that the entire party should have approved the messaging and the letters distributed. This was a small disagreement, but it was the beginning of a shift. Shortly after, Sellers increased his power and required every social media post by the party to be approved by the Executive Committee of the LPMD.

Continuing after this first victory for the LPMD, I set my eyes at the next wave of elections for the summer of 2014. I realized that there were 10 Community Councils across Miami-Dade County with high vacancy rates and almost no candidates interested. To me, this was an opportunity to get Libertarians elected without a lot of effort. I reached out across the county to individuals that had donated money to Gary Johnson's presidential campaign in 2012 to see their interest, and was lucky to find one interested person: Gary Gerstein, a millionaire Wall Street trader who lived on Fisher Island (interestingly, Fisher Island was once the property of Badri Patarkatsishvili). I met with Mr. Gerstein twice to convince him to run for office and he finally agreed. On June 9, 2014, Gary Gerstein filed to run for the Community Council of Fisher Island and with no other candidate, he was elected unopposed the same day. For the first time in Miami-Dade County's 178-year history, a Libertarian Party member was elected to a public office.

Removal and Return: 2014-2015

Without organization

At the June 10, 2014 meeting of the LPMD, I presented my report announcing the victory of Gary Gerstein as a historical achievement for the South Florida Libertarian community. At that same meeting, Chairman Tony Sellers took me and the other committee chairs to the side and privately told me that he was forced to terminate my party membership immediately. I stayed until the end of the night and when the meeting ended, I was asked to resign publicly from the Nominating Committee and the party membership, which I did. I think at this point I was also serving as Director, although these positions did not matter much at the time. Officially, the reason for my removal was my immigration status: a party executive committee member had to be a citizen per Florida State law. But a party executive committee member also had to be a registered Libertarian voter per the same law, and Tony Sellers was not (he was a registered Republican), so it was tough to imagine that this was not linked to some other reasons, which I don't fully understand. To quote Marc Golob, from a party that prides itself on rebellion and civil disobedience, such a careful attention to the details of the law was bizarre.

Without a party behind me, it was difficult to work independently. There was no goal to pursue, no partisan support base. From the pride of two victories in a row and a very mediatized campaign in Hialeah, I went to having nothing. I joined Examiner.com, a news website, as a political journalist for Miami-Dade County and wrote columns about local politics with a libertarian leaning. I was interviewing mayors and city council members with tough questions, and my name gained some recognition across the Florida libertarian community as a rare libertarian journalist. All of this was happening in the summer of 2014 and the Florida political circles were preparing for the November midterm elections with major elections on the ballot: Congress, Florida Governor, State Legislature, and a hundred local elections.

I was still anchored in my belief that fielding Libertarian candidates for major offices was pointless if we didn't have a strong local base first. A local base is important because it provides you with endorsements, campaign donations, volunteers, media presence and networking opportunities, while running for Congress with no strong local base is akin to throwing a child in a box ring against international champions. But Omar Recuero reached out to me that summer. He was a Libertarian from Broward County who wanted to run for the Florida State House of Representatives in District 100, a district that went from Dania Beach down to Surfside, so a lot of beaches straddling Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. He was with no charisma, no money, no plan. For some reason, he did not want to run for his local city council in Broward County and preferred the big State House race, thinking he had an imaginary chance. But District 100 was interesting. It was where I lived at the time and even more, it was a solidly Democratic district, which meant Republicans would most likely not even run a candidate there, giving hope for any Libertarian to gather at least 20% of the vote in a two-candidate election.

Omar had heard of me. Apparently I had a reputation that went beyond Miami-Dade County. He had heard of my work in Hialeah and he wanted me as his campaign manager. I agreed, under one condition: he had to abandon control of his social media immediately. To me, candidates who spend time writing their own posts on social media instead of going door to door often fail to write proper messages and fail as candidates. He agreed, at least in theory. So we went to work. By Florida Law, we had to collect petitions of 1% of registered voters in the district, so roughly 300 petitions. I started going door-to-door, collecting signatures, secured donations by Gary Gerstein and the DuBearn family, designed campaign literature, wrote an agenda, met with the Republican Party to negotiate its support in the general election, and secured the endorsement of local Republican city council members. But soon, I realized that I was alone and Omar was not going door-to-door and worse, he broke the one condition I had and just chose to focus on his Facebook page. I left his campaign after one month. He ended up with 2.5% of the vote at the end.

Adrian Wyllie, SFCNG and Return

But my reputation was back. I was not in the LPMD anymore, but the Libertarian Party of Florida knew who I was. In the same midterm elections, Adrian Wyllie was running for Governor of Florida. Wyllie was the chairman of the LPF and a very successful IT businessman. He had real charisma and was appearing all over the media, especially as neither the Republican or Democratic candidates were very popular. I applied to become a volunteer for Adrian Wyllie's campaign and became "Precinct Captain" (responsible for a neighborhood) of Precinct 948, which included Keys Cove and the neighboring jungles. I started going door-to-door, talking to people, getting signatures on the petition for Adrian Wyllie to get on the ballots. I built a close relationship with Lauren Sonnenberg, who was the head of Adrian Wyllie's campaign in Miami-Dade County, but realized that the campaign had almost no budget for South Florida. I wanted to put at least 10 signs in my precinct for Wyllie, but the campaign had put aside only 30 signs in total for all of Miami-Dade County, and just 100 flyers (that wasn't even enough for my one precinct, and there are 1,000 precincts in the region).

So Lauren Sonnenberg and I agreed we had to launch our own separate campaign for Adrian Wyllie with our own budget to handle Miami-Dade County autonomously. We opened South Florida Citizens for a New Governance, an independent political committee registered with the Department of Elections to support Adrian Wyllie, independently from his campaign (a Super PAC). We gathered money from my donors, established a few thousand dollars for our budget, and printed stickers, flyers and signs. We engaged in a guerilla campaign, putting stickers all over cities and coordinated with a dozen volunteers who wanted to help. None of these volunteers were affiliated with the LPMD, they were students, activists who wanted to support Wyllie. We also organized protests when Wyllie was rejected from participating in the debates, even though his ratings were at 20%. The LPMD was silent during that process and did not do anything to support Wyllie. On Election Day, it was my organization that organized the election night party, and Tony Sellers came to that event.

With the Wyllie election came a whole new team of young activists who were independent from the LPMD. So I organized an operation to retake control of the party. From within the LPMD, I was helped by Marc Golob and Lauren Sonnenberg, while from the outside, I rallied the support of local businessman Robert Fernandez, Marcos Miralles, the DuBearn family, and the Rothbardian Circle (an anarchist NGO based in Miami). Elections for Chairman of the LPMD were scheduled for January 2015, but Tony Sellers had created a whole set of rules to prevent new members from getting involved: the toughest rule was the requirement of members to attend three meetings in a row before they had the right to vote, and there were only two months left. But with Golob, Sonnenberg, and Fernandez already considered as party members, they passed a resolution to postpone the Chairman's election from January to March. This allowed our team to start attending meetings and to become full members. Our core team was meeting almost every day at the office of Robert Fernandez, but I did not go to LPMD meetings, as to avoid suspicions. Within a few weeks however, the plan had become obvious but it was too late for Tony Sellers and Suzanne Gilmore to change the rules.

At the March 2015 meeting, Tony Sellers put himself as a candidate for reelection. And in a surprise, so did Robert Fernandez, who was immediately supported by Marcos Miralles. Sacha and Abigail DuBearn also came to the meeting for the first time in two years and promised to fund the party if Robert was elected. In that election, Robert was elected with a majority, while Tony Sellers came out last (the third option, "None of the above", had more votes than Tony). Tony then tried to run for Vice-Chairman, but lost to Marcos Miralles. Suzanne Gilmore refused to run for reelection as Treasurer. This was the end of their control of the party.

LPMD Takeover

Robert Fernandez as Chairman: 2015-2016

As the architect of the takeover of the LPMD, I launched an entire reorganization of the whole party, starting with the governing documents. I wrote the LPMD's entire Constitution, which could be amended only once a year, and the Bylaws, which could be amended at any meeting of the party. Within the first 30 days, I met with the LPMD members one by one and asked for each one's opinion, and ended the process with a table reading for Sacha and Abigail DuBearn, for them to give their blessing. I wrote a lot of changes, starting with membership: any registered Libertarian voter was automatically considered a member of the LPMD. If someone could not register to vote (non-citizen, minor, convicted felon), the Chair could sign a waiver on a case-by-case basis. Chairman Fernandez signed my waiver.

We also created the LPMD's Executive Committee (EC, the American version of Georgia's Political Council), the party's governing branch responsible for its day-to-day activities. The EC was to be made of "Precinct Delegates", representing each one of the 1,000 government-drawn precincts in Miami-Dade County. Each precinct would be entitled to be represented by one man and one woman on the EC, and they would be elected once a year at the LPMD convention, by the registered Libertarians in each precinct. If precincts were vacant, the Chairman would have the power to appoint (from local Libertarians) with confirmation by the EC. For example, I was elected Precinct 948 Delegate every year from 2015 to 2018 in an election where the three registered Libertarians of Precinct 948 were allowed to participate. By my Party Constitution, the LPMD had to sent a ballot with all candidates for Precinct Delegate to the precinct's voters one month before the LPMD Convention. And the LPMD Convention would take place every April.

At the top of the Executive Committees were five officers: Chairperson (responsible for setting the party's agenda), Vice-Chairperson (party spokesperson), Executive Director (responsible for making sure every EC member was working efficiently), Secretary (responsible for the bureaucratic records), and Treasurer (responsible for reporting to the State). They were elected by the Precinct Delegates, also once a year at the April Convention. At the April 2015 convention, the officers were:

Robert Fernandez, a small business owner in Kendall, as Chairman
Marcos Miralles, an activist in Hialeah, as Vice-Chairman
Lauren Sonnenberg, a political consultant in Brickell, as Executive Director
Oscar Gallego, a lawyer in North Miami, as Secretary
Josh Curtis, a small business owner in North Miami, as Treasurer

Besides the Officers, the Executive Committee was made of six committees: Rules (to arbitrate conflicts and to propose amendments to the bylaws), Elections (the new name of the archaic Nominating Committee), Membership (responsible for growing LP membership in South Florida), Communications (responsible for the party's social media and newsletters), Lobbying (in charge of helping elected Libertarians in City Councils write legislation), and Finance (in charge of fundraising). Overtime, we also added a seventh committee in charge of Outreach, to plan social events, protests, and create Libertarian Clubs in various cities. We recruited an energetic new team to lead each committee:

Ricardo Vacas, a successful lawyer in Westchester, led the Rules Committee
Marc Golob at the helm of Membership
Maxwell Getz, a tech developer based in Brickell, in charge of Communications
Shalom Holzer, an Orthodox Jewish lawyer in Surfside, took over Lobbying.
Keon Grayson, an African-American activist, became chairman of the Outreach Committee.

Of course, all I wanted was the Elections Committee. Chairman Fernandez officially appointed me once again to my old position following the April 2015 LPMD Convention, and I got to work immediately. One early priority was to deal with the case of Rosa Palomino, a Republican running for City Council of Miami who had received the support of Tony Sellers. To me, it was unacceptable that the LPMD was formally supporting a non-Libertarian candidate and in any election, the party should either work to have a candidate or not support anyone at all. We had been in an uncomfortable situation as Hector Roos, Palomino's campaign manager, had been in close friendship with Tony and Suzanne. They had given him the entire party's membership list, donor contact information, and even promised to fundraise money for Palomino and scheduled a press conference to officially endorse Palomino. Meanwhile, she was refusing to even say the word "libertarian", arguing that the party's name was toxic to the average voter. I launched one round of negotiation with Palomino and Roos and proposed to continue the cooperation in exchange for Palomino to make a public declaration thanking the LPMD, which she refused. At the May LPMD meeting, I proposed a resolution to end all cooperation with Palomino's campaign, which passed unanimously.

I set my eyes on the election that was coming in September for City Council in Homestead. I immediately took the list of the nearly 200 Libertarians of Homestead and sent each one of them letters, asking to consider running for office. Only one responded: Breanna Kirkland, a mother and an animal rights activist. I vetted her and we launched her campaign immediately. We managed to gather some funding for her campaign, although it would be a difficult election as she was running against a popular incumbent known for her close connections in the African-American community. The party put its whole weight behind her, producing campaign video ads, energizing volunteers, and helping bureaucratically. In June 2015, the LPMD held a special fundraiser at the home of Sacha and Abigail DuBearn, with a keynote speech by Roger Stone, which raised a few thousand dollars for Breanna's campaign^[6] ^[7]. At the peak of her campaign, she was predicted by the South Dade News Leader as a potential underdog surprise candidate, while one former Mayor and a former Vice-Mayor of Homestead endorsed Breanna's campaign officially. We also secured a secret deal with former Florida Governor and presidential candidate Jeb Bush: his donors were to raise close to 100,000 dollars for Kirkland's campaign, in exchange of which we would refuse to campaign for Gary Johnson's presidential campaign in 2016 in Miami (this was a major move because Florida was considered a key state in the presidential election, meaning that whoever won Florida would win the whole election). Unfortunately, we missed her deadline to submit her filing paperwork, and her candidacy was cancelled.^[8]

This was certainly a defeat and 2015 was without any electoral victory, but the political community was already turning toward the 2016 presidential election, while we had finally created a real political organization that had grown from just 3 members in January 2015 to an Executive Committee of 34 full-time Precinct Delegates making up five officers and seven committees. Gary Gerstein and Sacha DuBearn were fully contributing financially to the party. The system of precinct delegates allowed party leaders to focus on bringing the libertarian message to their neighborhoods, and that worked: in Precinct 930, Katha Sheehan created a blog encouraging people to clean the roads; in Precinct 307, firefighter Michael Lesmes would go door-to-door to talk against new taxes; in Precinct 337, Michel Ibarra would talk to journalists on a weekly basis; in Precinct 304, Lisa Crosby would stand with Libertarian Party signs every day on the side of the road. And this energy allowed more energetic people to join the party by the end of 2015, like the young Cuban activist Riquet Caballero, the Mormon financer Dennis Misigoy, the Nicaraguan dissident Milton Rodriguez, and Marialexandra Garcia.

Maxwell Getz as Chairman: 2016-2017

Restructuring and new victories

In November 2015, Executive Director Lauren Sonnenberg resigned after a family tragedy. To replace her, Chairman Robert Fernandez appointed me as the new Executive Director of the LPMD and I launched a new management of the party's everyday activities. I starting holding weekly meetings with committee chairs, asking them for regular updates and giving them new instructions. If I saw that some Committee chairs were inefficient, I asked Chairman Fernandez to replace them. I made constant outreach to Libertarians across Miami-Dade County to recruit new precinct delegates. In order to coordinate our work, I also created the Committee of the Whole, made of the party's five officers (Chair, Vice-Chair, Executive Director, Secretary, and Treasurer) to meet once a week, to decide on large ideas, such as selecting future leaders in the party and planning the LPMD's relations with the Libertarian Party of Florida.

Chairman Fernandez was an efficient chair of the LPMD, but I saw his potential exhausted by the end of 2015. With the presidential election coming up, I believed we needed a younger and more energetic new face to lead the party, so I asked Fernandez to not run for reelection at the April 2016 convention. Instead, I asked Maxwell Getz to run for the chairmanship. He was a young businessman, with an office in the heart of Brickell, specialized in high-tech. He made his mark by completely reshaping the party's social media presence and he showed his readiness to work every day. At the 2016 chair election, he was elected unanimously, while Marcos remained Vice-Chair and I as Executive Director.

By that time, we had gathered enough funds to rent an office in Brickell. This was only the second-ever Libertarian Party office in the United States, after the central headquarters in Virginia. We started streaming our party meetings live on social media. We also gathered enough funds to create a website, close down other websites alleging to be the LPMD, and start running ads for membership purposes. Within a few weeks, I instituted a "daily briefing" system with Chairman Getz and Vice-Chairman Miralles: every morning, I would send a news briefing of every political development in Miami-Dade County to both leaders, based on which the Chair would choose what to respond to. With this strategy, Marcos, who was the party's spokesperson, started holding press briefings and we started sending press releases on a weekly basis. Sometimes, certain events made us organize small public protests, or we would go to city council meetings to express our opinions.

This started making us relevant. When Miami Beach banned home-sharing, we spoke out at the City Council against the proposal. When Bal Harbour Shops was considering expanding its mall on public land, we were brought in as lobbyists. And when Miami-Dade County gave public land for free to David Beckham for the construction of a soccer stadium, Marcos Miralles made a speech in front of a hundred activists against the corruption. Ultimately, this made Macros a public figure and he appeared on Spanish-language television once a week. Across the entire state of Florida, Marcos was the only Libertarian Party official to ever make media appearances. Soon, we added Cuban-American activist Michel Ibarra on Hispanic televisions.

For me, my biggest problem was that the Elections Committee remained unstaffed since I had become Executive Director. I wasn't satisfied with the work of others, so I started centralizing my power by passing a resolution at the LPMD EC to allow the Executive Director to take over a committee in case of a vacancy. The work was insufficient and urgent, with only two months left before the qualifying deadlines for midterm candidates. Not only was the presidential election on the ballot in November, but so were hundreds of local seats, including Community Development Districts (CDDs), which had been left unsupervised by both the Republican and Democratic Parties and had become just breeding ground for corruption by developer companies. I once again became the chairman of the Elections Committee and launched Operation: CDD Takeover, a special mission by the LPMD to elect Libertarians on CDD boards. The goal was to take over a majority of CDDs before moving up to larger City Councils. The party funded the operation and we sent out letters to every Libertarian that lived in CDDs across Miami-Dade County.

At the end of June, we had made history once more. Marialexandra Garcia was elected (unopposed) to the Board of the Islands at Doral CDD. Marco Alvarez, an Iraq War veteran, was also elected unopposed to a CDD in Kendall. Keon Grayson, our Black Libertarian Faction leader, was elected to the North Central Community Council, which is probably the most important district in the county as it includes Miami International Airport and every black neighborhood of South Florida - his election was also unopposed, but only after we had the 14-year incumbent disqualified on a technicality. In November, while Donald Trump was winning the presidency, Dennis Misigoy was elected to the Board of Enclave at Black Point CDD, defeating the incumbent with 65% of the vote. We now had five elected Libertarian officials, more than any other county in Florida.

The rise of the far-right

Of course, the more the party strengthened, the more we saw some backlash. At times, the Republican Party would send operatives at our meetings. The Rothbardian Circle, which had previously been close to our cause, had been co-opted by Tony Sellers and Suzanne Gilmore, and had joined the new far-right movement of Florida. At its head was Luis Rivera, an avowed neo-Nazi calling for the legalization of slavery and the first to publicly use my immigration status as a reason to attack me. That organization was, surprisingly, joined by Robert Fernandez. To this day, I do not know who funded the organization and why it was dedicated to fight against the LPMD, but it did force us to spend time and energy on preventing division right in the middle of the presidential election.

While we were able to preserve a liberal-minded organization in Miami-Dade County, the far-right movement started to become problematic for the Libertarian Party of Florida. Nearly half of its leadership was either openly supporting Trump in the election (including the LPF's spokeswoman Raquel Okyay) or was affiliated with far-right views. This had thrown the LPF into total chaos and a philosophical debate over libertarian values at a time when the party should have been focused on Gary Johnson's election. And there came Augustus Invictus.

No one really knows where Invictus came from (and as I'm writing this, it's starting to be a lot of "I don't knows" concerning far-right groups in the LP in 2016, which may be suspicious), except that he was at some point a lawyer and the author of a white supremacist manifesto that called for the legalization of eugenics. In early 2016, he had filed to run for the United States Senate from the State of Florida, against Marco Rubio. And he had filed as a Libertarian candidate, which placed the party into a very difficult position. On the one end, the LPF was not financially ready to support a Senate candidate, nor did it want to. On the other hand, there was a large pressure from the Libertarian National Committee to not have a white nationalist as candidate in Florida so to avoid negative backlash on the presidential candidate. As a result, some figures in the LPF launched the candidacy of Paul Stanton, an IT developer with no charisma, no money, unknown with no experience either in local or party politics. But he wasn't Augustus Invictus and that was enough for the LPF's old school to support him. Within weeks, he had raised a few tens of thousands of dollars, mostly from unknown sources with no previous ties to the LP.

For the first time in Florida history, a Libertarian primary was scheduled for the Senate. Of course, as a liberal, I preferred to see Invictus lose, but it was my strong belief that the party should not interfere in the primary and that voters should decide on their own. This was my whole philosophy of a party's role: our existence is to fulfill the will of the voters, and not the other way around. The LPMD was the only county affiliate of the LP to stay officially neutral during the primary, which led to serious backlash and accusations of a secret deal with Invictus. We allowed (even encouraged) our elected officials to endorse the candidate of their choice in order to promote competitiveness and Keon Grayson endorsed Augustus Invictus, which made us seem even more affiliated with him. We also commissioned a poll of Miami-Dade Libertarians that showed almost a statistical tie between Invictus and Stanton in South Florida. And when we organized a debate in Miami for both candidates, Stanton boycotted us. Stanton refused to campaign in Miami, the largest city of Florida, throughout his campaign, but he did trust Tony Sellers and Suzanne Gilmore by appointing them as his coordinators for South Florida. They held a grand total of one event for Stanton during the election period, for roughly a dozen libertarian activists in a cafe.

Our neutrality made us noticed. For the first time, the LPF was paying attention to Miami-Dade County, although it was to criticize us. In retaliation to that neutrality, Char-Lez Braden, the chairman of the Libertarian Party of Florida, appointed Suzanne Gilmore as the Representative of Region 14 on the Executive Committee of the LPF (Region 14 is Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties). This was a clear affront to appoint someone like Suzanne to "represent the interests" of the LPMD at the state party committee, but it served to grow a divide against us. After years of ignoring Miami-Dade, the LPF was now becoming uncomfortable with us. We knew Invictus would eventually lose, but we saw an advantage in dividing the LPF as much as possible, so we acted towards this. Ultimately, Paul Stanton defeated Augustus Invictus in the Libertarian primary, and we supported his campaign against Marco Rubio.

2016 presidential election

The Libertarian Party's presidential candidate is selected at the Libertarian National Convention by close to 1,000 delegates representing the 50 states. In this system, each state is allocated a set number of delegates based on state population, number of members per state, and last presidential results in the state. At the 2016 convention, Florida was allocated 53 delegates and per the LP's rules, the Libertarian Party of Florida was required to appoint these delegates. The process of selecting these delegates in Florida was done through an election at the LPF's own convention, which took place just a month before the national convention.

We decided to work toward making Miami-Dade County's voice as powerful as possible at the national convention. Our logic was that if we had a lot of delegates from our county at the national convention, the presidential candidates would spend time in Miami and would help the LPMD grow. So we proposed a list of candidates, the "Business Slate", a group of strong Libertarian Party activists from Miami to run for the position of delegate during the LPF convention. We had 12 candidates and we lobbied the entire LPF convention by printing out flyers and having one-on-one conversations with electors. All 12 were elected at the end, although only 8 were able to attend the national convention.

Our strategy worked and Libertarian presidential candidates started being interested in South Florida. At first, billionaire tech businessman John McAfee asked the LPMD to organize an event for his campaign, which we refused as it would have violated our neutrality stance, but we offered to hold a candidate forum with the participation of others; in response, John McAfee's campaign representative in Florida (Joe Wendt) launched a personal attack against me and against the LPMD, which would begin the history of confrontation between us two. Austin Petersen, a well-known journalist and activist who was also running for President, made two trips to Miami and set up a whole local campaign staff, but most of the money in Miami remained in the hands of Gary Johnson. In April 2016, we organized a presidential forum where every LP candidate was invited to debate (we were the only county-based organization to do in the nation). Two candidates came: Austin Petersen and Shawnee Sterling.^[9] But controversially, we also adopted an initiative that proved to be controversial: the binding of our delegates.

We passed a resolution within the LPMD that would require us to hold a special primary caucus following the presidential forum, after which every national delegate coming from Miami-Dade County would be required to vote for the winner of the Miami-Dade caucus during the first round of voting at the convention. That meant that the 8 delegates from Miami would be required to vote for the winner. Austin Petersen won the caucus, with Gary Johnson in second place. Maybe the fact that Gary Johnson lost is what caused the anger that followed: when news came of the binding of our delegates to Petersen, Gary Johnson supporters started complaining and alleged that our decision was a violation of the freedom of association of our delegates (even though none of our delegates opposed the measure). The Libertarian National Committee threatened to withdraw Florida's entire delegation, a drastic measure to punish the entire state, and we felt the pressure. We agreed to not enforce sanctions against delegates that violated their bind, and this calmed the situation. But the amazing show of solidarity was that this did not change anything: all our delegates voted for Austin Petersen, even Gary Johnson supporters like Marcos Miralles, in a show of solidarity for our group.

Gary Johnson won the Libertarian primary. We started working for him immediately after his win at the primary. What's interesting is that the LPF appointed Tony Sellers as Johnson's campaign chairman for South Florida, which was perceived as yet another attack against the LPMD. This meant he controlled the resources of the campaign in the region and was the one to receive all donor and volunteer information. But our team worked as hard as we could anyways. Marcos Miralles followed Gary Johnson across the country as a photographer and a consultant on Hispanic media relations. I did interviews on Dutch and Swiss national televisions to promote Gary Johnson's foreign policy, as well as other national news outlets^[10]. Without any yard signs and campaign literature, our job was more difficult, but we did as much outreach as we could. Marcos, Maxwell and I did tours of Miami-Dade College and Florida International University to ask students to volunteer, and we got some great new activists to join the team. I did a debate tour, going to three debates in schools against representatives of the Trump and Clinton campaigns. In September, we saw a real peak when we helped the campaign organize a rally at Florida International University for hundreds of students with a speech by Johnson himself.^[11]

Gary Johnson lost the election, obviously. In South Florida, the same night he lost, we won the election for Dennis Misigoy, which was a bit of a consolation prize. The LPF had been more of a nuisance throughout the process than anything: besides the Tony Sellers episode, it had now elevated Joe Wendt to a leadership position, allowed its spokesperson Raquel Okyay to publicly endorse Trump and criticize Gary Johnson, and failed to address the rising far-right movement within the ranks, all while refusing any sort of help for our own successful campaign for Dennis Misigoy (refusing to even recognize Keon Grayson and Marialexandra Garcia as elected officials of the Libertarian Party by not sending their credentials to the national party). At that point, it had become clear that the divide between the LPF and the LPMD was too big to ignore.

The Marialexandra/Martha Duo

After the presidential election, I engaged in seeking the Gary Johnson campaign donors from South Florida to get involved in the LPMD. I reached out over and over again to several people. Many came to party meetings, some were appointed as Precinct Delegates, but only one stood out as being truly engaging: Martha Bueno, a wealthy businesswoman in West Kendall. By early 2017, the situation at the LPMD was now different: we had a wealth of activists ready to work, a strong budget and a good organization, but Maxwell Getz did not want to run for reelection and had been slowly disengaging since the presidential election, while Marcos was focusing on his run for Chairman of the LPF (more below). We had to complement our strength with a PR boost.

With the Gary Johnson election, a dire truth was that the Libertarian Party had real potential in the white communities of the fly-over states (Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, the Dakotas), but we were truly at a disadvantage with women and minorities, which was an even more serious handicap for us as Miami-Dade County is mostly female and mostly Hispanic. So I had the idea of replacing the existing leadership with two Hispanic businesswomen who could make real break-ins into the Cuban community of South Florida. Despite original doubts about inexperience by some, and despite a few leaders wanting to run for the position themselves (Keon Grayson wanted to run for Vice-Chair), I was able to convince our core group (Maxwell, Marcos, Marc, Sacha and Abigail) that the best next choice would be: Marialexandra Garcia as Chairwoman and Martha Bueno as Vice-Chair of the LPMD.

They would be elected unanimously at the April 2017 LPMD Convention, which happened to be the largest local LPMD meeting in our history, and, according to Libertarian National Committee Vice-Chairman Arvin Vohra, "larger than most statewide conventions". We had 80-100 attendees, all amassed into the meeting room of a bar. If any must be considered that way, this day should be considered the peak of our organization. At that moment, we had gone from a sad group of 3 people meeting at a Denny's to close to 100 proud and active individuals. With Marcos leading a successful and hope-bringing campaign for LPF Chair, the entire state party was now looking at the LPMD as an "example of how to get things done". We were no longer the black sheep of the LPF, we were its beacon of strength.

With all this new attention also came some criticism. The LPF's Candidates Committee (in charge of getting people elected) made a formal complaint about our salary-sharing policy: all Libertarian Party elected officials had committed to donate 50% of their income as City Council members with the LPMD, which was criticized as being "socialistic", and we were forced to drop this policy, at least formally (the elected officials continued to donate half of their salaries without a written contract). The LPF also accused us of authoritarianism for implementing a Loyalty Oath, which banned members of the LPMD EC from endorsing candidates running against a Libertarian in an election (to us, this was a response to Raquel Okyay's endorsement of Trump against Gary Johnson). Of course, my own personal role as an immigrant was criticized.

Marialexandra and Martha became a strong team, even though they didn't know each other before their election. I remained the Executive Director and progressively centralized my power and secured my position through carefully-positioned reforms: the Waiver of Citizenship that Chairman Fernandez had granted me now could only be removed with a 2/3 majority of the EC. Any committee without a chair would be automatically chaired by the Executive Director until a replacement could be found. The Executive Director became automatically Chairman of the Committee of the Whole.

We reached a record of 41 Precinct Delegates in the summer of 2017. This was almost as much as the Republican Party. And more than any county in the United States. The LPMD's EC was stronger, bigger, and better-organized than the LPF. We had so many precinct delegates that we started work to launch "Libertarian Clubs" as small affiliates of the LPMD in certain parts of the county (for example, the Libertarian Club of Homestead, or the Libertarian Club of North Beach). Right around that time, we lost our office as it was rented out to a contractor of the Department of Homeland Security, and we started looking for a new office. The lack of office caused us some difficulties, but we survived. In parallel, we had access to a new source of fundraising in the summer of 2017 when we successfully reached out to Matthew Lazenby Whitman, the millionaire owner of Bal Harbour Shops and Brickell City Centre. He started donating to the LPMD by the thousands of dollars.

We were hungry and there was no new CDD election scheduled until 2018, so we had to find work to convince our donors to keep donating and our activists to remain energized. So we brought our focus on Coconut Grove. For years now, the DuBearn family had insisted that the LPMD spend more time focusing on the issues in Coconut Grove. Most of all, they wanted to abolish the business tax district in the Grove, an end to gentrification, and separating the Village of Coconut Grove from the City of Miami. In November 2017, an election was scheduled for the Coconut Grove Village Council, which we chose to use as an opportunity. Sacha ran for the office. And so did three others: Zachary Elliott (an attorney), Greg Eversole (Sacha's business partner), and Eddy Nagy (a pilot). We had the Libertarian slate, to which was joined Courtney Omega, a Republican African-American woman. Had all five candidates won, we would have obtained a majority of the Village Council. Activists from across Florida came down to campaign for them. The campaign had an offer to participate in absentee ballot machinations by local special interests, but Marialexandra strongly opposed any deal.

The Coconut Grove campaign turned out tougher than expected. Hurricane Irma's devastation cost us two weeks of work. A real estate company openly launched a campaign against us and spread fake news against our candidates, like an idea that we wanted to legalize automatic weapons in the Grove. Our slate made all the remaining candidates (the remaining nine) partner up against us. We took a blow: except Zach Elliott, none of our candidates went door-to-door, we didn't have any women in our list (which was a turn-off for a large chunk of the electorate), and the fact that we were Libertarians also went against us (Coconut Grove is mostly Democratic, and the Democrats blamed Libertarians for Hilary Clinton's loss). At the end, Zachary Elliott was elected. But through pressure, attacks, and patience, two Democratic Village Council members resigned within a few months and Sacha and Courtney Omega replaced them. Courtney Omega switched from the Republican to the Libertarian Party.

By early 2018, we had 8 Libertarians elected in offices: three in CDDs (Marialexandra Garcia, Dennis Misigoy and Marco Alvarez), two in Community Councils (Gary Gerstein and Keon Grayson), and three on the Coconut Grove Village Council.

LPF Politics

2017 Chairman Election: Marcos Victory

The growing clash between the LPF and the LPMD was becoming a real concern for us. There were talks within the Char-Lez Braden team at LPF to even abolish the LPMD (they had the power and they were using arguments like my immigration status). In other counties, the LPMD was a also a cause of dissatisfaction. Other county affiliates accused us of not "doing enough" in solidarity with the LPF, of not participating in the LPF's events and fundraising drives. We weren't collegial enough for them, although I suspect there was a big hit of jealousy in this. This lack of solidarity, though, could be explained by the simple fact that Suzanne Gilmore (who was tasked by Char-Lez Braden of being the liaison with Miami-Dade County for some reason) never came to even one meeting of the LPMD. There was also bad blood on our side, but what else could the LPF expect when it was threatening to abolish us, was refusing to recognize our elected officials, and never even lifted one finger for our campaigns (like they did for failed candidates in other counties).

At a park in Brickell, Marcos, Maxwell and I were discussing of what to do next. I asked, "Marcos, should you run for LPF Chair?" He answered, "I think so, yes." The two of us went to Sacha in Coconut Grove and asked for his blessing. By mid-December 2016, Marcos had officially announced he was running for Chairman of the LPF at the next LPF Convention in May 2017. I designed a website, MarcosforLPF.com, and wrote an entire agenda for Marcos's chairmanship that addressed every issue, from recruiting new candidates to increasing our membership. We knew the difficult image that Miami-Dade County had with the rest of the state, so I sought to find a balance of power with the northern Florida counties, proposing a rotation of LPF meetings between South, Central and Northern Florida. We sought endorsements from all around the state: Dana Moxley-Cummings (former Chair of the LPF), Libertarian elected officials across the State, county and state LP officials, even officials from the national Libertarian Party. We ran a real campaign, making news every single day through endorsements, Marcos traveling across the state, organizing Q&A sessions, addressing solutions to problems, making speeches at county affiliate events.

Char-Lez Braden ran for reelection. He had small support, but on his side was the "old class" of the LPF (the Tony and Suzanne's of Florida) that feared an active political machine and saw the role of the party as a philosophical social media-based platform more than an active organization. Internal polls we made showed Marcos winning overwhelmingly (54-60% of the vote), while Char-Lez refused to participate in any debate that we called for. But what was the most on Char-Lez's side were the rules, especially rules on membership. The LPF had very drastic rules on who could vote in its convention. Anyone was allowed to be a delegate, but they had to be a registered Libertarian voter AND have signed-up on the party's website for up to a year before the convention, which meant that only four or five people were allowed to vote from Miami, and the concentration of voters were in Central Florida (Orange-Lake-Hillsborough Counties). To this day, one of my biggest failures was to not change this outdated system and to adopt a reform to allow all Libertarian Party members to vote at conventions.

In the LPF, the Chairman is a weak position. What's strong is the EC (Political Council) and we knew Marcos wouldn't be able to get anything done without a favorable EC. Besides the Chair election, we also started focusing on the other EC positions, like Vice-Chairman, Director, Regional Representatives. Char-Lez also had his own team: Joe Wendt for Vice-Chairman, Paul Stanton and Suzanne Gilmore for Regional Reps. For Vice-Chair, we put up as Marcos's running mate James Chipman, the chairman of the Libertarian Party of Jacksonville. Chipman was essential because he opened the doors to the far-right's support: rapidly, there was an alliance between the LPMD and the far-right of the LPF, including influential figures like Ryan Ramsey.

At the Convention, we had a major game of rules and a suspenseful election. Larry Sharpe, a rising star in the party who was running for Governor of New York, came to moderate the Chairman's election. Marcos Miralles won, defeating the incumbent Char-Lez Braden (first time in LPF history that an incumbent chair was defeated). The results were a lot closer than expected after weeks of playing with the rules (55% for Marcos). James Chipman refused to run at the end and we replaced him with Dana Moxley-Cummings, but a less-than-exciting speech at the convention made her lose to Omar Recuero, who would become a continuous obstacle for the next two years. Greg Peele, our candidate for Second Director, won the election. Steven Nekhaila of Key West defeated Suzanne Gilmore as Region 14 Representative.

Reorganization of LPF

The LPF was a disorganized mess when we took it over. It was counting no more than 15 county affiliates, out of which no more than five or six were truly active and only one (Miami-Dade County) was actively working on recruiting and electing candidates. The committees were a complete mess, made of members that had not done any significant work in years. The Executive Committee was divided. There was no fundraising, our coffers were almost completely empty. Marcos's victory was immediately followed by the resignations of Joe Wendt (who was also in charge of planning conventions) and Raquel Okyay, which allowed us to slightly close the ranks. We abolished the position of LPF Spokesperson (giving its responsibilities to the Vice-Chair) and we replaced Joe Wendt with Marc Tancer of Palm Beach County. Marc Tancer was not an ideal choice for us but we had to appoint someone with experience from outside of Miami-Dade County.

But besides this small victory, the committees were deeply toxic. The LPF was made of the Communications, Candidates, Legislative Review, Rules, Convention, Platform and Membership Committees and each one of them had different and chaotic appointment rules, which was due to years of individual committees asking previous Chairs to adapt their rules to their memberships. For example, the Rules Committee's members had to be elected at Conventions once a year, the Candidates Committee had to have members from each of Florida's 14 regions, and the worst condition was that Marcos Miralles, as Chairman, had zero power to fire any of the committee chairs. We walked into the job with the staff of Char-Lez Braden and we would never be able to fully impose our order. Removing Committee Chairs required us EC votes and more than once, the EC leaders would refuse to cooperate with us. The same went with committee members: in one case, we tried to have one member of the Candidates Committee removed as he had not attended a single meeting in two years and was not responding any phone calls, but the EC refused Marcos's request.

It took a lot of negotiations and convincing, as well as political pressure to change the situation. We had county affiliates pressure EC members into asking for committee changes. The Committee Chairs would refuse to follow Marcos's directives, arguing that they were autonomous with their own agendas. Some accused Marcos of being a "dictator". Finally, after months of struggle, we reached a partial breakthrough: by March 2018, every committee chair had been pressured into resigning and we were free to appoint our team: Angela Kunz of Seminole County became Membership Committee Chair, Marc Golob became Fundraising Chair, Marialexandra Garcia became Candidates Committee Chair, Zach Detwiler of Orlando became Convention Committee Chair, Ariel Salazar of Miami became Legislative Review Committee Chair, Steven Nekhaila of Key West became Platform Committee Chair (he was from South Florida and was also an ally of the far-right movement), and Chaz Sanders became Chair of Communications. We now had four committee chairs from South Florida and two from Orlando. On top of that, we had Miami-based people sitting in each committees. This had effectively become our takeover of the committee work of the entire LPF, while we had formed an alliance between Miami and Orlando, leaving out North Florida which had been overwhelmingly leading the LPF before.

Out of every committee, the most problematic may have been Communications, whose chair was Alison Foxall. She was a woman from Sarasota County who had been appointed by Char-Lez Braden and refused to resign when Marcos asked her to. Our conflict expanded when she refused to follow orders from the Chairman, while refusing to modernize our social media accounts and refusing to write new press releases. She had the protection of a majority of the EC, so her lack of work became truly problematic. When she decided to run for the Florida State House of Representatives, we saw an opening: a whole team from Miami came to campaign for her in Sarasota (myself included). She then finally agreed to resign to "focus on her campaign", while the EC passed a resolution officially thanking her work. She resigned. She would receive only 2% of the vote in her election.

We also moved to create as many county affiliates as possible. Out of 67 counties in Florida, only 10-15 had Libertarian Party branches, which was absolutely unacceptable for a party that claimed the title of third largest party in America. Within the first month, we recruited Libertarians to create the Libertarian Party of Indian River County. The Libertarian Party of Duval was recreated. We also spent time trying to affiliate other counties in Northern Florida like Hamilton, Bradford, Brevard, and Jefferson. Our relations with some older affiliates was tense, as they saw our rise as a threat to them (for some reason, which I don't fully understand). For example, Volusia, Hillsborough, Broward and Palm Beach Counties continuously refused to participate in the campaigns we launched.

In this whole time, I had no official role within the LPF. I called myself "Chief of Staff to the Libertarian Party of Florida", but this title is what would later be used by Joe Wendt in his lawsuit against me, arguing that I had no right to hold a position within the Libertarian Party as a non-citizen. What would save my case was the fact that the position of Chief of Staff was never formally established by the LPF, which meant I was just treated as such and was never appointed. I worked extensively with our colleagues in Orlando, Alachua and Jacksonville to write resolutions and identify new committee members, while I was responsible for the creation of new county affiliates. However, because my name had become increasingly unpopular throughout the state, Marcos remained the face of the diplomacy, traveling across the state and making public declarations, while I formally only remained in Miami-Dade County. This doesn't mean Marcos didn't have his own opponents: Char-Lez Braden had remained in the Executive Committee as Regional Representative, while others (Director Russ Wood, Regional Rep Paul Stanton, Jon-Luc Tesky and others were incredibly opposed to Marcos's rule, even supporting the lawsuit against me).

What our opponents knew best was to use parliamentary procedures against us. Even when we had a majority of the vote on a given resolution, they would use Robert's Rules of Order and obscure rules to cancel the results and make our work even more difficult. This is when we decided to create a so-called "Book Club" for the Robert's Rules of Order in Miami, with Marcos, Marc, Martha, Marialexandra, and myself. We would meet once a week, although we talked more about big ideas than the rules themselves.

Gubernatorial election: Randy Wiseman v. Riquet Caballero

With the 2018 midterm elections coming up soon, we were facing one major problem: Randy Wiseman. Randy was a new Libertarian who joined the party after seeing the success of Gary Johnson, although his credentials were more than doubtful. By any standard whatsoever, he was more of a retired Republican who saw an easy opportunity to come out of retirement and appear on the media by running for office. And what an office: Governor of Florida. The man had almost no government experience (he was a School Board member in Lake County in the 1990s), but that was nothing new, a lot of great Libertarian candidates have had no government experience and still led great and inspiring campaigns. His problem was that he had no charisma. He espoused no real libertarian principle, was very conservative, and felt entitled to the party's help. And in all fairness, he was getting that help when Char-Lez Braden was still chairman of the LPF.

Political party nominees for the position of Governor would not be decided until the August 2018 primary, but he was already campaigned as the Libertarian nominee by December 2017. It was my strong position (just like with the Augustus Invictus vs. Paul Stanton race) that the party should not pick a nominee, that the nominee should be decided by the voters. Nobody was running in the Libertarian primary against Randy Wiseman, but the fact was that the party supporting Wiseman before the cutoff date for primary announcements would discourage potentially strong other candidates. At first, I had nothing against Randy Wiseman, I even accepted a position as head of his South Florida team temporarily. I was definitely not impressed by him, but I would have made sure that the entire party stood behind him had be become the nominee for Governor. I just did not want any party resource to be spent for him before giving others the chance to also run and challenge him.

That created a strong divide. Some counties had already endorsed him: Polk, Sarasota, Manatee, Volusia, Broward, Palm Beach. Many members of the LPF EC were already on his campaign staff. So when Marcos refused to publicly endorse him in December 2017, that became the cause for a heavy debate inside the party, with some accusing us of wanting to divide the LPF, or even worse. And then Randy Wiseman spoke out, which was his biggest mistake. He sent some of his staff messages that threatened to contact immigration services against me, messages that leaked and caused a serious backlash against him. There started to be pressure for him to drop out of the race, but he refused. I pushed back myself and scored a win: the Lake County Libertarian Party refused to endorse him, which was a big blow to his campaign since he was himself from Lake County.

It became clear that we could not have the party's gubernatorial nominee working so openly against the LPF's leadership. The solution was radical but simple: to find someone to challenge him in the primary. We weren't planning to go all the way, but I wanted to scare him enough to drop out of the race entirely. Riquet Caballero was a Cuban-American young financer in Miami who had just recently joined our team in the LPMD. He was fresh, but he was young and had a certain charisma to him. His nationality also made him an ideal candidate for us: a Libertarian Cuban candidate for Governor would boost exponentially the LPMD and its membership and open the doors to a whole new audience. I talked to Riquet. Marcos, Marc, Martha, Marialexandra and I secretly made a deal to support Riquet's challenge to Randy Wiseman.

We started organizing fundraisers for him, gathering petitions to put him on the ballot, he even traveled across the state for a few weeks. He immediately received the endorsement of almost every single Libertarian elected official in Florida (which we pushed). In about a month and a half of campaigning, Randy Wiseman dropped out of the race. The worst was over. Riquet Caballero never qualified his candidacy. The LPF was without a gubernatorial candidate in 2018, but that was better than the alternative - a bad candidate that would have taken aback financially and would have represented plenty of lost opportunities. Let it be said here that Ron DeSantis would probably have lost the election had the LPF fielded a candidate.

Record fundraising

Besides the gubernatorial election, the 2018 midterms were also a ripe opportunity to focus on the hundreds of local elections. This was the perfect chance to share what we had accomplished in Miami-Dade County across the entire state of Florida, although this would be a lot more expensive and a lot more logistically complex. We codenamed the mission Operation: First Step, with the goal of electing Libertarians at the smallest levels of government in every single county. And to spearhead the financial aspect of the mission, Marcos recruited Marc Golob and appointed him as Chairman of the Fundraising Committee of the Libertarian Party of Florida. Marc had recently made a success as head of fundraising for Miami-Dade County, and his appointment in the LPF was surprisingly with no controversy. Even his contract making him the first-ever paid employee of the LPF was approved by the EC with no real debate.

Marc's work was impressive and it was a real fulfillment of Marcos's campaign pledge to boost the party's finances. Of course, the new funding was not immediately obvious and it started small. He sought to have every EC member commit to monthly donations, even contributing his own money quite extensively. He organized fundraising events, sent regular reminders to our donors, met with big donors regularly, organized fundraising challenges. He even got Sacha DuBearn to donate money to the LPF for the first time ever. He had this productive-but-cool, aggressive-but-realistic nature that talked tough while remaining a diplomat. The 2018 LPF Convention in Fort Walton Beach was a perfect example: during his official report, he publicly ripped up the signs prepared for the convention, calling their quality a "shame" for the party and calling out many party leaders, while that same evening, he organized a successful fundraising party.

That LPF Convention (the only one I took a part in helping to organize) was a social and fundraising success, but it was a business failure. I sought the election of Steven Nekhaila as Treasurer of the LPF, but he lost to Fred Coulter, an accountant from Volusia County (Steven would anyhow later be appointed by Marcos as Director of the LPF when anti-Marcos Russ Wood resigned, while Martha Bueno replaced him on the LPF EC as Region 14 Rep). Through various delegates, I introduced several resolutions, but none of them passed: one to increase Marcos's powers to allow him to decide committee compositions, one to require a regional rotation for convention hosting, and one to open LPF membership to anyone registered to vote with the Libertarian Party. That last one was the most painful. I remain convinced to this day that the LPF will continue to fail to grow to its full potential as long as it remains so restrictive on its membership, a small political organization should beg for new members, not remain closed off.

At the peak of Marc Golob's work, he had built the party's coffers to more than 40,000 dollars, while they were almost empty when Marcos took over as Chairman. He truly worked as much as possible to involve the rest of the EC, even inviting Treasurer Fred Coulter to meet with donors in Miami. In the last months of 2018, a lot of that success was annulled when Fred Coulter fell victim of an Internet scam and lost close to 15,000 dollars of the party's funds.

Operation: First Step (2018)

Anyhow, the LPF now had enough money to implement First Step. The first challenge was the EC, who argued that the Chairman should not be recruiting candidates in counties, as it would constitute a "violation of affiliate autonomy". We had to come up with a compromise, a written agreement between the LPF and county affiliates allowing us to recruit local Libertarian candidates. Alachua, Orange, Duval, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Monroe, Indian River signed the agreement. The other affiliates refused until the end. Some of these affiliates refused to sign the agreement even though their members wanted it, such as Palm Beach County. When Broward County refused to sign this agreement at the behest of our own LPF Vice-Chair Omar Recuero, we staged a coup within the affiliate, removed Omar from his local county position, and had Adolfo Jimenez elected as Chairman of the Libertarian Party of Broward County. Adolfo was himself a former Miami resident, so the LPMD's web of influence had now extended to cover the tri-county area of Monroe, Miami-Dade and Broward.

Those counties that refused to sign the agreement had zero candidate run in the midterm election. Ironically, we were thankful that a majority of counties had no Libertarian Party had no affiliate at all, which allowed us to recruit candidates freely. The second step of this operation was to identify the districts where to run the candidates, which took me an entire month of seeking public records, drawing maps, analyzing election results, and mapping Libertarian Party members. To contact all potential candidates (and it added up to almost 1,000 individuals), Marcos wrote a letter calling on them to get involved and run for office, but sending out the letter using LPF funds was another bureaucratic obstacle that we overcame with difficulty: the EC even tried to require a vote to approve the language of the letter (if this sounds like a flashback to Suzanne and Tony's work in Miami-Dade, it's because Suzanne had become Secretary of the LPF at that point).

But we crossed all these obstacles. And we were greatly successful. More than 40 Libertarian candidates ran for local offices in November 2018, and a great majority of them were elected, from Soil and Water Conservation Districts to CDDs across the state of Florida. Florida now had more elected Libertarians into office than any other state in the nation. First Step had become an example for the entire nation. Marcos, Marc and I started giving advice to the Libertarian Parties of California, New York, Ohio, and Alabama. Marcos had become a well-known figure in the country, some even talking of Marcos as the next vice-presidential candidate in the 2020 presidential election. At the 2018 Libertarian National Convention, Marcos was a speaker: this was the first time someone from Miami was addressing the thousand delegates at a national party convention.

Even when we didn't win an election First Step, we still had positive results. County affiliates of the LP were created in Hamilton and Columbia Counties thanks to new activists recruited through First Step. Despite all the challenges, we were seeing real progress.

Return to Miami-Dade and Last Days

The Joe Wendt lawsuit against me came in on the heels of First Step. The suit was filed with the Federal Elections Commission and was accusing the LPF, the LPMD and myself of violating campaign finance laws because of my immigration status. With Marc Golob a successful right-hand man to Marcos, and First Step successfully implemented, I chose to distance myself from the LPF. I went back to the LPMD, not defeated, but just retreating back for some time before planning my comeback. This wasn't the first time I was injured, but the LPF members had no interest in showing solidarity towards me, so I returned where I felt home. At the LPMD, I wanted to make sure that our organization was safe from any problem and tried to pass a resolution that removed the concept of "Chairman's Waivers" for immigrants, but the LPMD's EC refused to vote in favor (interestingly, only Tony, Suzanne, and myself voted for this. Yes, Tony and Suzanne had become Precinct Delegates in the LPMD at this point).

I also resigned as Executive Director to cover all my bases. This didn't mean the end of my involvement: we also passed a resolution to abolish the elected position of LPMD Executive Director, instead allowing the Chairman and the EC to select a private company to manage the party's day-to-day activities. The idea here was that Marcos and I would open a political consulting firm, Liberty Consulting, which Marialexandra would have appointed as the managing firm of the party.

Back in Miami, we scored new victories. In August 2018, Martha Bueno was elected unopposed to the West Kendall Community Council. That same month, after lobbying, a Democratic member of the Coconut Clay CDD in Miami Gardens, Clarence Strong, switched to the LP. The same happened at the Islands at Doral CDD, where a Republican board member became a Libertarian, which meant that Marialexandra was not alone anymore on that board. Finally, we also elected two Libertarians to the South Dade Soil and Water Board. By September 2018, Miami-Dade County was now counting 13 elected Libertarians. This was not just any record. Miami-Dade County had more Libertarians into office than 48 states. 256,000 citizens of Miami-Dade County had at least one Libertarian elected official. Courtney Omega, our councilwoman in Coconut Grove, was also appointed as a member of the Miami Oversight Board, the prosecutorial committee of the City of Miami responsible for investigating crimes committed by law enforcement.

We fielded candidates for Community Councils in Kendall (Matteo Marchetti) and West Kendall (Christian Sweeny). We also ran a campaign for Christian Lisogorsky, the husband of Marialexandra Garcia, who also ran for the Islands at Doral CDD. The three lost, but we still had a lot of other victories that year. And with the victories came new funding: the second largest lobbying firm of Florida started contributing money to the LPMD to help us get candidates elected on Community Councils. We started building alliances with NGOs: we signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Miami Coalition Against Breed-Specific Legislation which was fighting against the ban on pitbulls, we fought with anti-corruption groups in Miami against a proposed project on Watson Island, which was well-mediatized. Martha started doing interviews on Hispanic radio on a regular basis. In November 2018, we were contracted out by a developer company in Surfside to help campaign for a referendum on a construction project, which was supposed to bring in a new stream of income. Marc Golob, on top of his work at the LPF, and myself started studying the public transportation system to propose a countywide reform, with Marc even considering a run for City Council of Palmetto Bay.

I left on 13 December 2018.

Marcos would not run for reelection at the 2019 LPF Convention. Martha and Marialexandra ran once more for a term and left the party in 2020. Tony and Suzanne took over the LPMD once again. Marc stopped his involvement with the party in 2021. On 22 November 2022, the last elected Libertarian in Miami-Dade County, Martha Bueno, will see her term end. And with her ends all the wins since Gary Gerstein, both in the county and at the state level.

References

^ "BTP nominee Tiffany Briscoe not a graduate, says Community College Registrar". Independent Political Report. 2012-01-13. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
^ "Young Hialeah lookalike candidates likely to slate together". Political Cortadito. 2013-07-31. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
^ "Hialeah candidate Marcos Miralles scores at council meeting". Political Cortadito. 2013-09-30. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
^ "Hialeah election candidates: Something old, something new". Political Cortadito. 2013-07-29. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
^ "Hialeah incumbents slide in easy, challengers hang around". Political Cortadito. 2013-11-06. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
^ "Local Libertarians stay energized, engaged in elections". Political Cortadito. 2015-06-15. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
^ "Libertarians meet at Coconut Grove event". Coconut Grove Grapevine. 2015-06-05. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
^ "Homestead's Election Candidates Qualify". South Dade News Leader. 2015-09-11. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
^ "Austin Petersen vs Pastor Shawna Joy Sterling at the Libertarian Party of Miami-Dade County Debate". Counter Collective - Youtube. Retrieved 2022-11-16.
^ Nielsen, Kirk (2016-05-28). "Libertarians Goin' Wild in Orlando". The Progressive Magazine. Retrieved 2022-11-16.
^ "Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson Is Coming to Miami Tomorrow". Miami New Times. 2016-08-16. Retrieved 2022-11-16.

[1] "BTP nominee Tiffany Briscoe not a graduate, says Community College Registrar". Independent Political Report. 2012-01-13. Retrieved 2022-11-14.

[2] "Young Hialeah lookalike candidates likely to slate together". Political Cortadito. 2013-07-31. Retrieved 2022-11-14.

[3] "Hialeah candidate Marcos Miralles scores at council meeting". Political Cortadito. 2013-09-30. Retrieved 2022-11-14.

[4] "Hialeah election candidates: Something old, something new". Political Cortadito. 2013-07-29. Retrieved 2022-11-14.

[5] "Hialeah incumbents slide in easy, challengers hang around". Political Cortadito. 2013-11-06. Retrieved 2022-11-14.

[6] "Local Libertarians stay energized, engaged in elections". Political Cortadito. 2015-06-15. Retrieved 2022-11-14.

[7] "Libertarians meet at Coconut Grove event". Coconut Grove Grapevine. 2015-06-05. Retrieved 2022-11-14.

[8] "Homestead's Election Candidates Qualify". South Dade News Leader. 2015-09-11. Retrieved 2022-11-14.

[9] "Austin Petersen vs Pastor Shawna Joy Sterling at the Libertarian Party of Miami-Dade County Debate". Counter Collective - Youtube. Retrieved 2022-11-16.

[10] Nielsen, Kirk (2016-05-28). "Libertarians Goin' Wild in Orlando". The Progressive Magazine. Retrieved 2022-11-16.

[11] "Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson Is Coming to Miami Tomorrow". Miami New Times. 2016-08-16. Retrieved 2022-11-16.

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