Shelby Mood, 32, here speaking during a Henderson County Board of Commissioners meeting Wednesday, is leading the charge to revive the local Libertarian Party.

They represent less than a quarter of 1 percent of registered voters in Henderson County, but Shelby Mood is seeing to it that the Libertarian Party voice here is heard loud and clear.

Believing Democrat and Republican leaders to be out of touch with the average American, Mood, 32, has sparked a revival of the local party following a period of dormancy.

"I was in the military for seven years; I did tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan," the Edneyville resident said. "And when you're serving in a place like that, you really start to think about what's really going on in the world. And I did some soul searching and realized a lot of what's going on in our country we're going about in the wrong way.

"We've got to stop these endless wars. We've got to end this war on drugs our prison population has exploded. We need to reform our education. We need to get back to focusing on the person rather than trying to bring everyone else down."

So Mood called and wrote letters to all 177 registered Libertarians in the county. On Tuesday, a handful of people attended the county party's first organizational meeting, including state Libertarian Chairman J.J. Summerell of Greensboro.

Summerell said the state party is helping 25 to 30 county chapters get up and running again after "peetering out" in the past three to seven years. He said the number of registered Libertarian voters in the state 15,000 grew 10 percent in the past two weeks.

"It's on fire," he said.

According to Summerell, his party's recent growth is due to two major factors: presidential hopeful Ron Paul putting the Libertarian brand in front of the American people "more effectively than anybody else I know of in my lifetime" despite running on the Republican ticket, and young voters in particular becoming discouraged by Democrats' fiscal irresponsibility and Republicans' misguided social policies such as their support this year of the state constitutional ban on gay marriage.

"So they find themselves politically homeless," Summerell said of young voters, "and they're starting to find a home with the LP."

Visit link:

Man revives local Libertarian Party chapter