BRUNSWICK, Maine — Almost overnight — Tuesday, July 12, 2016, to be exact — the creation of the Maine Libertarian Party morphed from a months-long slog by a core group of volunteers collecting party registrations to a political shift that is beginning to roll on its own.
Chris Lyons, the newly named chairman of the party, said the announcement of official party status that day blew up social media and, anecdotally at least, is causing Mainers to register without being asked.
“It would have been nice if that could have happened a week earlier,” said Lyons, a contractor from Brunswick who became the party’s chairman in May.
A week earlier, volunteers were scrambling to register the final 487 of 5,000 Libertarian voters they needed to satisfy Maine’s ballot access law. The fledgling party was on the heels of an emotional whirlwind that saw a months-long registration drive in 2015 deemed a failure by the state in December 2015, that decision upheld in court April 25 of this year and then resurrected when the court reversed its ruling May 27.
“It’s taking hold, as we speak right now,” Lyons said during a meeting with a reporter at a restaurant on Brunswick’s Maine Street. In the five days following July 12, he said the reach of the party’s Facebook page, which currently has about 5,100 followers, went from 33,000 users to more than 80,000.
“That’s in just five days. That’s just a little Facebook page in Maine for the Libertarians,” Lyons said. “The number of people registering as Libertarians without us doing much has increased in just five days. Sometimes people have to see the truth.”
What’s on the horizon for the state’s newest political party, and how did Lyons become its leader?
More party building
The party needs another 5,000 registrants, and it needs more than 10,000 registered Libertarians to cast ballots Nov. 8. Lyons said whether that happens depends on his party’s ability to spread its message — not strong-arm registrations.
“Our principles themselves stand on their own,” Lyons said. “It’s more of a grass-roots effort than a big-financed campaign.”
The national party will help. Libertarians achieving ballot status in Maine caught the attention of the national party and the campaign of Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, according to Lyons. That means dollars and volunteers coming to Maine to help with registrations.
Lyons said the party is working to achieve at least another 7,000 registrations to make sure a minimum of 10,000 go to the polls.
From Washington County to Libertarian leader
Lyons has moved around. After his early years being raised in Washington County — where Lyons said his family’s roots go five generations deep — he moved to the Topsham area at age 15. He earned bachelor degrees in English and classics from the University of Keele in England. Lyons and his wife, Anita, lived in Malaysia for more than seven years before relocating to Maine. Today, he is a construction and landscaping contractor.
He was once a Republican. Lyons was a registered Republican who was involved with local and state political committees, but only for about 14 months.
“I began to look around and I said, ‘what happened while I was away?’” Lyons said. “Everything was out of balance. … It doesn’t matter who the president is. It doesn’t matter who’s in Congress. We get the same identical policies that we’ve had for the past 30 years. It’s disgraceful. The two big parties are definitely colluding. It’s basically a one-party system.”
Both parties, he said, are far too prone to supporting big government and regulatory intrusions into individuals’ lives. They also are caught in a partisan trap that halts all progress, he said.
He’s not “anti-government.” He said one misunderstanding about Libertarians is that they want to abolish government.
“I believe in limiting government, not eliminating it,” he said. “The problems we have were manifested by big government and they can’t be solved by bigger government. Both the Democrats and Republicans have consistently and without any shame given us that.”
Why Libertarian?
It’s about giving power to the individual. The power of individuals to influence their own lives ought to be in their hands, which is the core tenet of of Libertarianism, Lyons said.
“It really comes down to the greatest minority is any individual,” he said. “When each individual has exactly the same rights and responsibilities, then we have a prosperous society.”
Being a Libertarian isn’t about adhering to any certain set of beliefs, Lyons said. “We do have our internal conflicts on certain topics but the bottom line is it doesn’t matter if you’re gay. It doesn’t matter your race. It doesn’t matter your religion, if you have one. If you’re poor, you’re poor and it doesn’t matter.”
Or forcing beliefs on others. “I promise as long as I’m chair of the Libertarian Party of Maine that we will say what we say and stand by it, and we know that’s going to disenfranchise some voters,” Lyons said. “We’re not here to get voters. We’re here to say what we believe in and you have the choice to choose. Just having that choice is climbing that mountain.”
