Echoes Of Failure: Feedback

I received a lot of feedback on my piece about the disappointing California election results and I want to thank everyone who participated. A few points:

• The CDP has a version of Neighbor-to-Neighbor called Neighborhood Leader. The program asks for a commitment from the activist to talk with 25 friends on multiple occasions throughout the year. I don't have metrics on it, which would be nice to know, but my suspicion is it needs to be expanded.

• There is a lot of back and forth about the extent of the ground game here in California. Many have written in to talk about the field operation in key districts and field offices throughout the state. Some have said that I overlooked this element, including all the doorhangers and phone calls made inside the state. Others have told me that the calls tried to shoehorn too many messages into one (I did have experiences calling for multiple propositions and a candidate at the same time, which ends up shortchanging all of them) and that the results on the ground in general were unfocused. And the insistence from some to talk about field elides the point. Even if I grant that every targeted legislative campaign had the most aggressive and far-reaching field program in American history, the facts are that most of these campaigns lost, and so it's time to come to terms with the fact that the type of organizing done in the state isn't working.

• Some have suggested that Democrats, in fact, did not underperform the Presidential ticket in House races, but I think a lot of this is fun with statistics. Yes, House Democrats in California may have done better than Barack Obama, but that would be because a substantial number of them had token or no competition. Like 30 out of 53. While on the chart at the link, it appears that California exceeded the Presidential numbers, the proof is in the lack of pickups despite a 24-point blowout at the top of the ticket.

• Other local organizers have the right idea. I'm going to reprint this comment in full:

We ran a very intensive and very grassroots effort in Monterey County with more than 1000 volunteers (5 fold increase over 2004) that was by and large successful, got some newcomers into office and saved some progressive incumbents from conservative challengers.

We did all of this without CDP help.

We were offered use of the CDP voter database which in many ways was quite inadequate when it came to mapping and would have costed us money. We were also offered 1000 doorhangers on Thursday before the election (we have 80,000 Democrats in Monterey County).

Instead we commissioned our own slate mailers and door hangers and mailed and hung 80,0000 and 30,000 respectively in conjunction with the local unions. We used the VAN through CAVoterConnect for free with great results for us. We were able to manage our volunteers with it and we used it for all of our phone banking and Neighbor-to-Neighbor activities.

Here is what the CDP could have done - and can still do for future campaigns:
Support the VAN and help all local parties get access. Help integrate State VAN with Obama VAN.
Conduct more capacity building, especially in how to run county-based campaigns, along the lines of Camp Obama but applied to state and local races.
Provide a template for door hangers that local parties can buy into instead of having to go out and design their own.
Work toward a more modular - bottom-up campaign.

Vinz Koller/ Chair/ Monterey County Democratic Party

I particularly want to emphasize the VAN, the California VAN is for some reason not integrated with the DNC's Votebuilder program, which doesn't make much sense to me. There ought to be an effort to clean up all that idea in the off-year to get it ready for 2010. Votebuilder is simply easier to work with and can be managed by volunteers. And since there will be off-year elections this year, it can be test run.

• I don't think I ever blamed the Obama campaign for draining the state of resources, but let me say again that I don't. In addition to many of the best volunteers leaving the state, many of the top organizers, including most of labor, left as well. And Obama's election was crucially important for a variety of reasons so you can't blame them.

• Therefore, the biggest thing California Democrats can do to reverse this disturbing trend of the "political trade deficit," sending money and organization elsewhere and never importing anything, is to argue for and pass the National Popular Vote plan, which would force locals to organize their own communities in a Presidential election. If the Electoral College were offered as a system today, it would be found to be an unconstitutional violation of the principle of "one person, one vote" as determined by the 14th Amendment. It shrinks the pool of competitive states down to a geographically significant battleground, and has made California irrelevant - again - as it has been for Presidential races for a generation. A disruptive change like the National Popular Vote would go a long way to changing how campaigns are conducted in Presidential years in California.