Meta-Carrot: building a grassroots/retail political organization has two benefits for Your Guy:
The problem is that in a State Senate district with 900,000 people, it's not easy to make that clear to a mass audience. He was out there at numerous public events and when he was able to talk directly to voters, it made a big difference - turnout was up between the June 22 primary and the August 17 general elections and the places it was up was where Laird was able to get to people one-on-one.
You can't make it clear to a mass audience during a campaign. You can't make it clear to a mass audience, in a mass, period. Remember, a "mass" is made-up of individuals and the whole point of precinct politics is to build The Mass Bottom/Up. The payoff for the work is the campaign when you can use Top/Down effectively.
The Top/Down payoff when 10,000 people show up at a Laird speech that the local media has to cover. That media is not only good publicity it's publicity you don't have to pay for. And it's media - if the speech writers know their job - that has the sound bites that persuade people to get out and vote for him if the staff has done their homework using the information they've collected from the Bottom/Up operation.
However, the campaign never quite had the funding it needed, and when it did, before June 22, the campaign managers chose to listen to the paid consultant who argued that voters should be scared into voting against Blakeslee because he supports offshore oil drilling.
Paid consultants have two inter-related major drawbacks:
1. They don't know the district in their guts the way a local op does (should)
Thus:
2. They want a lot of money to tell you how to run a generic campaign they know how to run instead of the local campaign you should be running
In your After Action Assessment -- you did do one of those, right? -- you need to carefully look at what the consultant(s) cost in total versus what you bought with that money and then ask yourself if it was worth it. In short, did the advice and actions based on that advice matter a hill of beans. It may have. I don't know. Also ask if there were other, cheaper, ways to Get the Same Result. May be, may be not, I don't know. But if you haven't gone through this you don't know, either. (that's the generic "you" :-)
I've never thought much of phonebanking, and though it worked well in the fall of 2008, you've identified a big drawback - it doesn't work when voters are feeling alienated, as the act of having volunteers call on your behalf reinforces the alienation (whereas in 2008 it reinforced the notion of a popular movement to elect Obama). I'm not sure what the tactical method of implementing a better method of voter contact would be - that's not to dismiss your point at all, only to say that operationalizing it is easier said than done.
You did have a Thank You Party for the volunteers with Laird doing a one-on-one, however brief, I hope. If not. Do It. Spend the couple of hundred bucks for hot dogs and beer. Have someone talking down notes to be put in each of their Farley File entry -- you have one, right?
The volunteers who cared enough to come in and make those bloody calls comprise the initial 'hack' at your precinct and other low level operators. This group needs to be qualified, sieving out the wheat, and then 'brought in,' in some manner into the organization and the Meet-and-Greet at the Thank You is the first step of that process.
Second, the call sheets are a Gold Mine of information and data about his district. It's a laborious PITA to go through and wring it all out but it's well worth it.
This is one reason why Democrats, especially progressives, struggle. California's State Senate seats have more population than a Congressional seat (900K for State Senate, 800K for Congress). This seat in particular is about 250 miles long and spread out over five large counties, making direct voter contact extremely difficult.
That's fucked-up but that's the hand you're dealt. That's also why Your Guy has to start campaigning for the next election now when the time pressure is weaker than during the campaign season.
In this race that was exacerbated by the fact that the Republican candidate had about a 3-1 funding advantage, with large corporations spending a lot of money on negative TV ads casting Laird as a tax-raising zealot, and with Meg Whitman behind the scenes spending a lot of money to organize a field campaign that dwarfed what the Democrats had to offer.
Despite the CW: people aren't stupid. They know government costs money; they - quite rightfully - object to paying for it while the Big People don't. Now you know the attack. They will use next time. It worked this time, after all. In those call sheets you've got some district specifics to use. Maybe. Won't know until you look at 'em.
From here it looks like the GOP max'ed their vote and Dems didn't bother to turn up. Mostly impossible to get people all twitterpatted about voting for a generic Democrat; it's very possible to get them excited about John Laird. Local issues trump national issues IF there is an organization capable of effectively using 'em.
Again, none of those points are intended as excuses, but instead as laying out the known obstacles. If a progressive movement is going to succeed, it'll have to figure out how to overcome those obstacles. So far that hasn't been done.
Progressive movement hasn't been willing to do the slow slogging grunt work and raise the cash required. They want to show-up 3 months before the election and have everything go their way. Doesn't work like that. Bernie Sanders was elected to the House and then as a Senator in a formerly solid GOP state because he spent 30 years on the "rubber chicken circuit" going around talking and listening to people. People knew Bernie so when it came down to it the GOP attacks couldn't get traction. "He may be an independent Socialist ... but he's our independent Socialist!"
Speaking of that, Your Guy could learn a lot from Sanders by studying How He Do'ed It, the guy himself, or both.
There are lots of ways to go about getting a better candidate. In many places it is possible for a progressive to be a successful candidate as a Democrat, and that should be pursued, probably as the first option at this time. In many places there are third parties who qualify for state or federal funding under current rules, if these have not been totally thrown out. A solid third party candidate can put significant pressure on a major party candidate and this can be used in lots of ways. But just having built a progressive infrastructure would be a big step forward. Next time that infrastructure could be instrumental in getting a progressive as the major party candidate. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Realistically, there's thousands of people out there who know, more better than I, what needs to be done and how to do it. Before Obama wrecked it Dean's 50 State Strategy was the framework for a national implementation.
The knowledge is out there and has been for a long time. In 1946, for example, Heinlein - yup THAT Heinlein - wrote a book Take Back Your Government based on his experience in EPIC laying it all out -- as I recall, haven't read it in donkey's years.
All I'm doing is throwing pop bottles out of the left center field bleachers at the on-field players, like Montereyan, whom I'm sure already knows it.
Realistically, there's thousands of people out there who know, more better than I, what needs to be done and how to do it.
Like these folks.
It pains me to think of where we might be now had the knowledge of the '30s-era activists, or even the '60s and '70s-era folks, been the dominant skillset among the political class. But it isn't, the '90s saw a huge shift toward corporate neoliberalism, and so we have to reclaim that knowledge from the past and relearn those skills ourselves.
I count myself among the latter group - the influx of activists. Until 2008 I was just a blogger. At that time I saw an opportunity to do more than just write, but to actually try and implement change on the ground. I've been lucky enough to find full-time employment at doing so, but everything we do is still too deeply rooted in the '90s model I just described, and not rooted enough in the successful models you've been articulating here.
As progressives start looking around for solutions after the coming disaster on November 2, what you've laid out here ought to be a central part of the discussion. And the world will live as one
What about hooking up with the Santa Cruz people: Gary Patton, Michael Rotkin, and Katherine Beiers?
Maybe we should take this discussion offline? My email's right next to my username. And the world will live as one
I wasn't at the center of the campaign, but have been on very good terms with the candidate since well before this race, and I'm going to send this along to him. I know he will find it very interesting.
Overall I think one reason this sort of thing is not usually done in California - though it should be - is that over the last 10 years in particular, seats have become extremely safe for one party or the other. Laird won the 2002 Democratic primary in the Assembly district and cruised to victory that November, and was easily re-elected in 2004 and 2006. This is the usual way of things for races in California, and combined with the large size of districts as well as the '90s philosophy of "you don't do retail politics" leads most candidates for state legislature or Congress to turn to consultants and TV ads. But in a race where neither party had the obvious advantage, the Republicans exposed the hollowness of this "strategy" that CA Dems have embraced for way too long now.
I'm not a fan of most consultants, and after the first round on June 22, they weren't part of the campaign any more and the vote totals increased for the August 17 general election. Laird might be in a mood to embrace this more sensible long-term kind of thinking, as you have laid out here, especially in its ability to build a longer-lived progressive movement. He was part of similar efforts that were launched and had lasting success in Santa Cruz in the 1980s, but it wasn't tended to after about the mid-90s, as I understand it.
In any case, this whole discussion has been extremely valuable and enlightening. I think you've hit on a central failure of progressive organizing, at a time when we need to sketch out what newer and better tactics would look like. And the world will live as one
