After years of having two parties identifying themselves as the Libertarian Party of Queens, NY, both entities decided to become one.

“We formed LPQC after the LP got ballot access in NYS and we had an organizational meeting at [Former LPQC Chair] Mike Arcati’s house in early 2019,” said Mark Weinblatt.” It has been a challenge since then to gain strength by reaching out to those in Queens who had registered as Libertarians. Without reaching out, we struggle to raise money, and without money, we can’t afford to reach out. It’s a Catch-22. The pandemic restrictions made things even more difficult. Now that we have a regular meeting time and place and will take on more ‘official’ party business, my hope is that we can find ways of both reaching out to like-minded Queens residents and also raising money to help extend that outreach to the ‘libertarian-curious’ who would be open to our ideas and values. We welcome any help that we can get from anywhere else in the state or National.”

At the same time, John Clifton’s QL has been very active getting

people together whether voters, party partisans or simply persons who

share libertarian ideas or a good story from a guest speaker.

As with most good stories, everything happened by chance. John

Clifton, who had been running QL for several years, approached Mark Weinblatt (LPQC) with the idea of merging the Queens entities after Mark attended a meeting of the QL and let him know that LPQC did not have a chair at the moment. A short time later, after years of having two parties that broke resources in almost half and getting nowhere, the two groups finally merged in early March 2023 with John Clifton from QL as Chair, Francisco Olvera from LPQC as Vice Chair and Mark Weinblatt from LPQC as Treasurer.

Now it is time for LPQC to focus on promoting the party, its philosophy and its brand. As with other county affiliates, educating voters and anyone who can influence other voters is the biggest challenge.

Clifton has brought many ideas on how to teach young adults at a college level, but we still need to promote the party at high school

level. Needless to say, this is an up-hill battle given the GOP/DNC duopoly in the United States.

We would merge the data sources into a common database that can be used by LPQC and possibly the LPNY if we can get all the proper datasets.

originally posted at https://lpny.org/2023/04/13/libertarian-party-of-queens-county-and-queens-libertarians-unite/