I posted this as a comment on another blog, and thought I'd pull it over here because it makes some sense. I was responding to someone's assertion that:

The LP should be principled as well as pragmatic and achieve a crucial breakthrough, at least 10% will put it on the map, while a 1-2% will still ensure its irrelevance.

I replied:

Sure, everyone can agree that 10% is much more significant than 2%, but the fact is that we do not control how people vote. The voters themselves do (setting aside counting shenanigans, which certainly happen).

I think there's a misunderstanding of third-party (or ideological party) politics going on behind the sentence I quoted. The Nolan Chart, as useful a tool as it is, has in some ways fostered this misunderstanding. People draw out this chart, and they say something like "Look, if only the LP chooses positions that fall within an area where 20% of people 'test', then the LP should be able to get those 20% of people to vote Libertarian."

This sort of analysis – favored by Carl Milsted, example here:
http://www.lpva.com/Archives/Editorial/Milsted/20060415.shtml

completely misses a vital fact of American politics – the monopoly two-party system. The D/R Party will make promises to those people and they will continue in large part to vote for whichever branch of it they feel most comfortable with because even if it doesn't promise (or deliver) what they want, it will deliver something of what they want, and it will do that by actually winning. The ones who choose Libertarian consistently (not for a 'protest vote') will be those people who have accepted that their vote is a statement more than an attempt to seize and hold power.

Our focus at this point, I beleive, can't be people who are willing to make a lot of compromises ideologically – or who have no strong ideological leanings – because those people, by and large have a party (the D/R) that gives them what they want – the satisfaction of being on a 'winning team'. Will they vote Libertarian occasionally? Sure, especially when they want to 'punish' a politician on their 'team'. But those aren't the steady sort of committed activists the LP needs so much. Most of them will return to their 'home party' for the next election.

We can – and should! – attract and hold strong ideologues – from the right and the left – and forge them into neither 'right' nor 'left', and certainly not 'center', but into Libertarians. These are folks who understand libertarianism and will be committed to a project with a timetable much longer than the next election cycle.

Tedious? Hard? Uphill battle? Sure. But immensely rewarding, and, I think, the only proven way to have a long-term influence on not just the next election but on American political thought. Let's not settle for a change in regimes, let's aim to change America's view of politics altogether.

This is how I see it, and I may certainly be wrong, but I think that history supports me on this.

¶ 3:29 PM