My co-admin said this:

“In order for libertarians to gain a foothold in congress, we’d have to do two things libertarians generally hate doing. That is learn to play the political game and the art of compromise.”

I think what he said was right but it needs to be expanded.
First and foremost, we need to define what we mean by “libertarians”. LP members and ideologically libertarians are not always the same group. In fact, the latter outnumbers the former several times over.
Let’s assume that we are talking about the LP members for a moment. In order for Libertarians to gain a foothold in congress, Libertarians needs to start with State and Local government positions and build upon those successes. Right now there are currently 143 LP members in office and 39 of those positions are partisan. For some perspective, consider this:

There are almost 520,000 elected offices in the US. 0.000075% of those positions are claimed by Libertarian Party…..
For the LP members, just getting elected to any position would be a victory. Dog catcher, State rep, city council, anything that they can get their hands on. The idea is to get exposure for the party and shift the numbers a big. This will probably take generations of work so I hope they are in it for the long haul…

So let’s shift for a moment to the “ideological” libertarians. I think sisyphean task is best shown when you had a person like Rand Paul (who wasn’t even libertarian but close) polling at 2-3% throughout his entire time running for POTUS. I said once that Paul wasn’t running for Pastor of the libertarian unification church, I should have been more precise: Paul couldn’t run under the platform of L/libertarian unification even if he wanted to. No one wanted what he was selling.

This is where my co-admins comments ring true. We do need to play ball with Liberals and Conservatives because they hold almost all of the power. I think our best bet politically is to get elected and start to influence both parties. Outside of the political process, we need more youth outright in order to raise a generation of people who are more likely to vote along *our* ideas (more on this later). If we are trying to win scores of people during POTUS elections, we have already lost. The Party nor the ideologically aligned will never win in this way. The numbers just aren’t on our side.

The average voter does care about liberty but many do care about safety, who will build the roads, who will feed the poor and who will do xyz. If we approach them with our “The market will provide it” platitude, we will lose many people simply because of entrenchment. Even in places where the “market” is already providing it in some places such as water suppliers (more on this later as well).

Put a different way, the average voter cares about liberty on their terms, defined by their ideology, their faith their community etc. This is not captured well in Individualism, especially in the Black Community. Liberty is safety and collective safety in the minds of many people. This is not an entirely bad position nor is it something L/libertarians should reject IMO. The critique L/libertarians should have is along the lines of who gets to draw the lines of community. A sort of libertarian communitarianism is what I think, *will* draw many people towards this way of thinking. In other words, we care about you and the people in your community. We want to empower you and your neighbors.

I think this is the major issue is the LP members and the ideologically aligned libertarians do not want the same thing. I think there are similar goals, and the methods to get towards those goals are similar but there is significant conflict. Assuming he was still running, Rand Paul as a fully actualized libertarian aligned Republicans would be antithetical to the goals of the LP (because the LP and the GOP are competitors). The same goes for any libertarian aligned member of the “Liberty” caucus or any similarly aligned members of the Democratic Party. I think this is important to keep in mind, although not entirely necessary because of the low impact of the LP in politics. Ultimately I believe that the LP should resign attempting to get into federal positions and focus for the next decade on getting elected in State and local positions. I think ideologically aligned libertarians should focus on building coalitions in the existing major parties and inject as much libertarianism as possible into the mix. When those two goals are in conflict, the LP members should defer to the ideologically aligned libertarian in the major party. If there is none, proceed with the campaign process.