I got this email today, as I’m sure many of you did:
Dear Alan,
Every four years, a few months before the presidential election, the Democratic Party puts staff and resources on the ground in a few battleground states … and then they’re gone. After November the whole operation disappears.
Then, four years later, we do the same thing all over again.
That hasn’t worked. And I ran for chairman on a promise to do it another way.
[…]
The half-million dollars we’re investing in these first four states will pay for professional organizers — the key staff who will develop skills and help build a permanent network of Democrats at the grassroots level.
[…]
I am personally dedicated to making sure that every single state has the resources and infrastructure to compete at every level of office.
[…]
The Republican Party isn’t waiting. They have been building for years, and every day that slips by means another opportunity missed.
At first glance, this has a certain amount of appeal, at least on a rhetorical level. The Republicans have been doing this for years! We need to catch up! We shouldn’t just drop in every four years and then fade away!
But have the Republicans really been doing this for years? And if they have, were they not perhaps wasting their money? Do we really get more for our investment this way than by hoarding resources and then bombarding key states with those resources when it counts?
I agree that if the sky’s the limit in terms of finances, this proposal would be ideal: cover every state, every neighbourhood, every inch of turf in the U.S., all the time. But that’s not the case, and there is always a tradeoff. What do you think? If you back Dean’s approach, how do you justify spending money in North Carolina in 2005 that could go to, say, New Mexico in 2008?
I think this is a very good approach. And, I imagine that people in NC… having more attention paid to them and their needs throughout the year, instead of just every four years, might be more inclined to give money to work towards ’08.
Many liberal red staters were very upset about being left out, and in some places, having no party structure at all locally. That’s not good.
Dunno what the Republicans have been doing for years, officially… unofficially, through affiliated organizations/churches, they definitely have been doing this for years. We need that too.
Well, my view is that those red staters ought to see the larger picture. If they can’t move to swing states, at least they can have some sense and be happy that if their votes are wasted, at least their money is not! If they insist on spending it in-state, then both are likely wasted.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
My immediate reaction to the e-mail was delight, with a bit of concern over the cost/benefit side of things – which was, quite frankly, driven by my memories of Dean’s campaign blowing through $40,000,000 during the primaries.
I like the idea of getting people on the ground in red states, for the reasons stated by Nanette. That philosophy was one of the things that drew me to Dean in the first place. And I like the fact that he’s sticking to his convictions.
It sure seems that the Republicans are doing that very thing in Minnesota. I just commented about this in a discussion on the Midwest thread. They’ve already annointed a candidate for the 2006 Senator’s race (much to the anger of the other candidates interested in the position). And as folks may recall, the Republicans (through Cheney) were very much involved early on in telling Tim Pawlenty to step away from the Senate race so Norm Coleman could run in 2002. I wish the Democrats would pay that much attention to our state on a national level.
All in all, I’m less concerned about the monetary aspect, and more interested in the potential for positive outcomes.
Clearly, you need any project to be efficient, but hiring full-time field organizers is pretty much guaranteed bang-for-your-buck. An organizer ought to be able to earn their own keep–fundraising-wise–in addition to everything else, and I can only imagine Dean’s people have a good talent pool to choose from. One house party a month, plus a quarterly big-dollar booze-and-schmooze, and you’ve got a year’s salary.
If they are actually “earning their keep” as you say (“living off the land” might be another way to put it), that might ease some of my concerns. But I would still have a couple things I’d wonder about in such a situation:
(1) Why can’t people come up with that money without having full-time organisers around all the time?
(2) Does this perhaps become a way for the DNC to become this huge bloated entity which exists to feed itself and provide permanent full-time jobs, rather than being “lean and mean” in trying to achieve the real goal?
Alan
Maverick Leftist
The purpose of a field organizer isn’t to raise money, it’s to organize–be that with volunteers, media stuff, outreach of one type or another–in ways that vary from campaign to campaign. The fundraising is just a way to defray the cost of having peole do it full-time. I’ve worked–and known many others who’ve worked–as paid organizer for one cause/organization or another, and the personal fundraising is always a very secondary part of the job.
Fonr instance, a DNC organizer might recruit volunteers, lead rapid-response actions, plan rallies, perform actys of punditry, work on coalition building, etc., and then also focus on fundraising a couple weeks a year. It’s a common part of the loosely-Chavez-based model used for organizers by many (dare I say most?) environmental and progressive groups.
Great point about Dean’s operation in the primaries. He had a huge monetary advantage, and had little to show for it (while the DNC does not have the luxury of a financial advantage over the RNC).
In fact, though I hadn’t even thought of this before, Dean may well have made a trial run of what I see as the same overly scattershot strategy. Remember the “Sleepless Summer Tour” of ’03? Doesn’t anyone who was on the Dean bandwagon wonder if it might not have been better to spend that time and money in Iowa instead?
Alan
Maverick Leftist
1. At our DFA meeting in Jan, the DNC member present said that not one penny of the money given by Texas Dems to the DNC was spent in Texas. Of course, there was no way in hell that TX’s electoral vote was going to Kerry. BUT, there are a lot of other races down ballot where a few dollars from the DNC could have made a difference. We lost some of those by a hair.
I certainly hope that our next pres is a Democrat. But in our obsession with the presidential race, we risk losing even more Congressional seats, governorships, statehouses, etc etc. And these are important. Where would Bush’s horrendous agenda be without a compliant Congress? Look at all of the devastation being wrought to ordinary folks at the state level as “no taxes, no taxes, no taxes” R’s slash education funding, infrastructure, Medicaid, even goddamn Meals on Wheels is under attack.
2. There is a huge untapped pool of potential voters among minorities in this country. They have a low turnout rate because they are justifiably cynical about what the Democrats have to offer, when the D’s just take them for granted, make no effort to listen to their concerns or solicit their ideas. And they know the R’s aren’t on their side – but Dems haven’t made their case that we’re really any better. so they stay home.
Yes, of course, spend money wisely. But one “wise use” is to not blow it all on swing states in the pursuit of the Presidency. Spend some on down ballot races in red states and get real about reaching out to minorities everywhere.
I know alot of folks that feel left out and dispensable to the dems because their state is ignored. Ok, for instance CA is considered a given in the presidential and ok maybe the senate but look what the grovenator was able to do. We need to have our people in place at all times. Parts of CA are getting redder and redder. It was also this way in Hawaii(lived there for eight years b4 CA). Another given. Not anymore. I too hate to see Dean blow through the money but man look at what we raised on the internet in ’04. We should be doing that all the time.
Thanks Slacker for this diary…highly recommended! It is very important to be disussing this type of issue.
I think you make good points about looking beyond the presidency. Seems to me the GOP has a bit of a natural advantage in that area, but the Dems ought to be able to do something in the House in particular. And control of the House, even by itself, would be almost as good as controlling the presidency against a GOP House and Senate.
But while that argues for expanding beyond the presidential swing states, that still does not make the case for spending real money in every state. I mean, Utah? Idaho?
Alan
Maverick Leftist
real money. The DNC’s strategy in the last elections was to spend NO money in the non-swing states. CA has R congressfolk, TX has D districts. But under the previous strategy, neither CA or TX got money, expertise, or anything else to help fight for Congressional seats. CA was taken for granted, TX was seen as a lost cause.
I dunno about ID – it’s a hard case. But Utah has a Dem district – do we fight to keep it, or just let the R’s have all three congressional seats from UT?
I think this strategy could more than pay for itself. Although Dems in both TX and CA gave money to the DNC in 2004 because of the urgency of trying to take Bush out, I think they would have been more generous if they knew that at least some of their money was going to be used in their states to fight the down ballot races. I can’t tell you how depressing it was to be asked endlessly for more money by the DNC, while watching the DeLay redistricting travesty succeed at peeling off D congressional seats and the national party seeming to not care one whit. When I realized that we were going to get NO support from the DNC, I quit giving to them – I donated directly to the Kerry campaign instead.
But if the DNC can convince the solid red and solid blue states that they will support their state efforts, the DNC will have more money to work with. The DNC needs to be able to go to every state and start to work. Collect the data, look at the demographics, talk to the locals and more important, listen. The kind of work described by Frontier PAC upthread. Identify which races can be won and how. For example, here in TX, East Texas counties are 20-25% African-American. As you go south and west, the counties become increasingly Latino – 50-90%. These are Democrats natural constituencies, but we’re not going to do anything about the dismal voter turnout rate among Latinos by strategizing in D.C. or NY. We need boots on the ground. Here. Now.
My hat’s off to Gov. Dean for realizing this. You and I can quibble about how much money should be directed here or there later. But I agree with masshol upthread – the swing state strategy did not work – war time president or not, the D’s should have crushed the R’s last time. “Close” doesn’t prove it worked.
We need to start thinking long term. Even in Idaho – one field organizer is not too much to ask. In 20 years, we may be really glad we started working on that state now. Demographics change, and we can’t always predict exactly how they will change in advance.
I agree that any swing congressional district should get support from the party. But would you disagree that an out of reach, red district, particularly in a red state, should just be written off? We don’t have the money to go everywhere.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
I don’t think any “red” state should be written off, even if just a small strategy is employed in them. Republicans work constantly to take over “blue” states, from the bottom up… or the top. And sometimes they win, as in CA, which voted out their duly elected governor and installed a cartoon character.
Conceding any state, while the other side concedes not a one seems to me to be a recipe for long term disaster.
is not the same as a 435-congressional district strategy.
I hate these “would you disagree” set ups. Your original question concerned states. You were making an argument that we shouldn’t be wasting our money in certain states. Now you’ve changed it to districts.
I don’t think we should write off or write on any district. I think we should be working in every state to learn which districts we can win in. And to hold on to the ones we have.
Look at this map. Almost every state has some Dem districts. Exceptions are mostly in the northern part of the west. But should we write off Montana, for example? Doesn’t Schweitzer’s win tell us something?
Your question, should we write off – cede to the R’s without a fight – some entire states? My answer – no.
I could turn that around, though, and ask why Dean framed it in terms of states rather than districts. I suspect the states focus has more to do with the 2008 presidential race than about congressional ones. Otherwise, why mention states at all? And if we are talking about the next presidential round, I definitely think there are states we should write off.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
Slacker, I recommended your diary because I think it’s an important discussion that should hit the Rec list. And thank you for raising the issues.
It’s not just an investment of money, though. It’s an investment of manpower, time, energy and mindshare. If we just parachute a bunch of activists and money into a state six weeks before an election, we probably get nailed unless that state was going blue already. On the other hand if you put a professional organizer into a state NOW and put him/her to work building the grassroots network for 2006, 2008, and even 2010 and 2012 and beyond, you stand a chance of building an organization that, when the time comes, will be ready to work to get Democratic candidates running and, hopefully, elected.
To stretch an analogy a bit, think of the “roots” part of “grass roots.” If you plant a seed and give it only a few weeks to grow, it generally doesn’t have much of a root structure. Give it a year or two to grow and it will work its way into the soil and be much better entrenched. Healthier. Stronger. Harder to kill.
I think the DNC should be doing this in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. But, the only proper way to eat an elephant is, one bite at a time.
is that we tried this last time:
and it certainly didn’t work. Can’t say I’ve been the biggest Dean fan, but I think we need to try something new, beyond the whole idea of changing the way we get our message out, or changing our message altogether, and I think he may be on to something here.
I suppose we should try being philosophical about this. It took the GOP 30 years to get their act in gear. And we have a huge disadvantage in several areas that aren’t quickly changed:
P.S. See Chris Bowers’ new diary at Kos on the non-religious coalition.
What would you have said had they squeezed a few thousand more votes out of Ohio–“Okay, the swing state strategy pulled off a squeaker this time, but next time we need to spread the money around more and not focus on places like Ohio”? Not a chance!
Let me put it another way: when’s the last time a wartime incumbent won such a small share of the electoral college or popular vote? Heck, throw out wartime: how many modern-era Democrats (that is, since the New Deal) have done better against a Republican incumbent? Answer: just one–Bill Clinton, the most natural politician you’ll ever see, going against a clueless geek who had lost his base and was presiding over a recession.
I’ve seen this “panic and throw the baby out with the bathwater” attitude over and over at dKos. Not just in regard to this presidential disappointment, but before that in response to the 2002 midterms (yup, I’ve been posting over there quite a while). That was seen as a major indictment of the DNC, and a major raison d’etre for the Deaniac “reform” movement that sometimes seemed more concerned with sweeping the Democratic “bums” out of D.C. than the Republican ones! Yet that election was actually ultra-close. As Charlie Cook wrote:
I also think another observation Cook made is extremely important to keep in mind when interpreting the 2004 election. This was, again, still Dec. ’02 when he wrote this, but he was looking ahead to the ’04 election:
While it’s hard for those of us who hate Bush to comprehend, a dispassionate analysis of the electorate, to my mind, shows them to have been in the “maybe” column, but leaning toward “yes” (how else do you explain that Bush’s poll numbers didn’t tank after Kerry dominated the debates?). Therefore, Kerry and McAuliffe’s DNC did a pretty good job, all told.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
we lost.
So that’s how you see it, in binary terms. I guess if Gore would have gotten a couple hundred more votes in Florida (or if they would have done a statewide recount) he would have been a good candidate with a good campaign, but instead you see him as a horrible candidate who ran an incompetent campaign? Pffft.
If you were an Olympic silver medalist in the 400 meters–you lost to the gold medalist by a fraction of a second–would you throw out all the methods of training that got you that close? I just don’t get that.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
Please do not put words in my mouth. My point: a lot of money in a few states doesn’t work. we need a better field program. Field programs tend to boost up to 3% of votes. we need that 3%, and we need it everywhere. I never said Kerry was a horrible candidate, and I never said he ran an incompetent campaign, and I certainly didn’t even allude to Al Gore. I worked on the Kerry campaign in DC. I’m not bashing him or his campaign.
I’m saying we need to do more. We should have absolutely destroyed Bush. We didn’t. We need to do more. Let’s try something new. We can still spend a lot of money in the key states, but we need to spend even just a little money in the other states (which we did not in 04).
Please don’t accost me, I am not saying throw out the old. I’m saying let’s add some new.
Okay, sorry for putting words in your mouth. I assumed that you were representing the whole idea set that often goes with the “our strategy didn’t work” meme. But I shouldn’t have just assumed, because that’s no better than when people assume I support Bush because of my stance on the war. So I apologise.
I do like the general way you framed things: “I am not saying throw out the old. I’m saying let’s add some new.” So many Democrats, it seems, have more energy for “throwing out the old” than for anything constructive.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
I would say North Carolina makes the most sense in that it has an established liberal community and a growing high tech/bio-chem industry – which could induce a liberal population move. We need to target certain States as they do, but will also need to maintain vigilant in States that we now have but could go either way. That is making sure that Diebold machines don’t move in and so forth. Take North Carolina and it would hurt, in that they have 13 votes.
It’s what he’s said all along, and at least he’s making an attempt to put money where mouth is. That said, I will wait to see whether the DNC give more than lip service to flattening their pyramid. The new structure is flat. It’s the nature of the medium. Cross- and inter-connects occur between like-minded organizations and individuals irrespective of party registration. If I had to characterize the groups they would be progressive, rather than big “D” democrat.
I would probably go farther than Dean and insist that local money stay in local coffers, with only a percentage sent upstream. Save the overhead of round-tripping the funds. Unions have operated that way for decades with dues payments, and it can work if structured properly. Think national, fund local.
At first glance, I was concerned that your proposal sounded a lot like conservatives who are against the federal government! LOL But you make a good point about unions; and I actually observed up close an area where our local Democratic organisation would have appreciated what you propose.
There was a huge demand to put up Democratic signs, including Kerry-Edwards, in people’s yards. Here in small town America in particular, yard signs strike me as a pretty important psychological factor, especially when it starts seeming like one side or other is overwhelmingly dominant. But they just didn’t have signs to give out, though they gave us information on how we could order them (for a fairly high cost, unless we ordered in bulk). That’s a pretty inefficient way to get yard signs, and a hassle to boot.
But we were told the DNC was putting everything into television commercials, and there was certainly quite a bombardment for a long time (until they wrote off Missouri toward the end). Thing is, I have to wonder how many yard signs they could have bought for the cost of pulling just a couple of those commercials. Probably several hundred, wouldn’t you think? In a town of 17,000 that would have really made an impact.
What I think they don’t get is that the swing voters (remember, unlike all of us, these are frankly less educated, weak-willed people for the most part) they were trying to reach with those commercials weren’t likely to be swayed by messages on TV as long as they had the perception that almost everyone in their community was supporting Bush!
Alan
Maverick Leftist
Correct. Most top-level people in the DNC, and Kerry campaign, forget that a simple lawn sign gets more attention than tv ads “on the block”. ’04 should be a lesson in how not to run a national campaign.
speech last night in Vancouver, WA:
“The Democratic National Committee chair pulls no punches in a passionate speech at Skyview High School—
VANCOUVER — The speech was billed as “Civic Engagement and Democracy in the 21st Century,” but Howard Dean punched it up with some politics Tuesday night. Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a former presidential candidate, talked about the importance of participating in a democracy during his college-sponsored speech at Skyview High School near Vancouver. But he heard the loudest whoops and applause when he delivered campaign-style attacks on the Republican Party and the Bush administration. He also blasted proposals to privatize Social Security and emphasized the need for individuals to contribute money to political candidates to offset the influence of corporate giving.
He wasn’t speaking as chairman of the Democratic Party, Dean said at the outset of the speech, noting that he committed to the engagement before he got his current job in mid-February. “But I intend to be partisan,” he said, to applause and cheering. Even his entry onto the stage at Skyview High had the feel of a campaign stop. Nearly all of the 1,100 people who paid $11 admission stood and cheered. “Yeah,” Dean said, roving the stage with a wireless microphone. “How many of you are really from Portland?” Plenty, it appeared. “I thought a few of you snuck across the bridge,” he said.”
On Tuesday, a message from Dean on the Democratic National Committee’s Web site urged people to give money to help political organizing in general and four states specifically that voted for President Bush last November: North Dakota, Missouri, North Carolina and West Virginia. And Dean spoke passionately about the importance of money to the Vancouver audience.
“The reason we need you to give money is because the political process on both sides — but particularly on the Republican side — has been utterly corrupted by people who give huge amounts of money from large corporations,” Dean said.
With his voice rising, he continued, “The middle-class people get squeezed out of the political process. And people don’t care, but they have a say.
“You want campaign finance reform? Don’t wait for the Congress or the Legislature to pass it, give 15 or 20 bucks to the candidates you care about. “We raised $53 million — more than anybody else, and we didn’t owe a dime to anybody except to you,” he concluded, prompting shouts and applause.”
-from the story this morning in The Oregonian.
from http://www.seattlefordean.com and http://www.howieinseattlefordean.com