Membership Growing, Young Libertarians Hold First Wisconsin Convention

In the years since 2008, when millennials were credited with helping to put President Obama in office, enthusiasm for national politics among youth has waned. A recent Pew Poll showed that 50 percent of millennials don’t affiliate with any party. One libertarian group, Young Americans for Liberty, is growing in spite of—or perhaps because of—that trend towards political independence.

On a sunny morning in Wisconsin’s capital, many UW students headed outside to celebrate their campus-wide spring party, while others headed inside to a political conference: Wisconsin’s first “Young Americans for Liberty” (YAL) state convention.

Edward King, YAL’s director of Programs, welcomed people.

“We’re weird—you know, it’s Saturday, and we’re at a political event. I mean, there’s races going on outside … There’s a ton of people out front,” he said. “We’re in at a political event: we’re weird! Most college people? They don’t do that.”

Normal, they are not. Even as studies during the past couple years have shown millennials to be less interested in national politics than their predecessors, involvement in YAL is on the rise. The state chair of the group, Eric Shimpach, addressed the convention.

“The growth that YAL in Wisconsin has seen over this last year is absolutely, for lack of a better word, explosive,” Shimpach said. “The reason I say that is because when we started at the beginning of this fall semester we had about eight, nine chapters across the state. We now have 21. That’s crazy. We doubled in a year.”

Young Americans for Liberty was born out the group “Students for Ron Paul,” which backed Ron Paul during his 2008 bid for the Republican Presidential nomination. The group has had particular success in the Midwest, which Eric attributes in part to the concentration of swing states and geography.

“Within party politics it all starts in Iowa, with the Straw Poll,” Shimpach said. “There’s a lot of volunteers that came from not only Wisconsin, but the Midwest [and] all over the place, to go help Ron Paul out in 2008 and 2012.”

The group has organized nationwide campaigns, including its current “War On Youth” initiative, which cites things like Obamacare and the national debt as putting an undue burden on young people.

The group is growing, but its political identity isn’t altogether clear. Libertarians get both praise and flack from both sides of the aisle and that tension played out during the convention. Robert Burke, Libertarian candidate for governor of Wisconsin, asked this question of one of the speakers:

“I’ve heard speaker after speaker after speaker say ‘conservative,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘conservative.’ The sense among youth in America in the liberty movement is one of [being] fiscal conservative, but one of social tolerance and liberty of choice,” Burke said. “I’d like your thoughts: do we lose something by even dropping the word conservative?”

While their identity may still be in the making, the face of the movement is clear. Ron Paul and his son Rand have most of the name recognition within the libertarian movement nationally. Those at the conference, however, see the libertarian movement moving beyond Ron Paul. Gus Ferendorf is running for Congress in Wisconsin’s 6th District.

“We’ll just have to find other people to take [Ron Paul’s] place,” he said. “Could be me, could be Bob here: who knows? We are libertarians at heart, and we speak the same language”.

With Rand Paul a possible contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, it’s likely the focus, for now, will be continuing to attract more young potential voters. They have more coming down the pike. Samuel Anderson was one of the youngest attendees at the conference. He’s 13.

“I think that this relates to my life a lot,” Anderson said. “Just government intervention and stuff. We just need to be aware of this and stuff like that.”

Next stop for America’s young libertarians is their national convention in late July in Washington, DC—a less popular city among America’s libertarians.