I've been trying unsucessfully to get either John Lapp or Jesse Lee to respond to my questions about the allocation of resources and GOTV efforts in the Paul Hackett race. I believe the race could have been won with an extra $100,000 used for a tightly organized on-the-ground canvassing operation.
Surprisingly there has been no response. Maybe my question doesn't deserve a response. Maybe I'm completely off-base and I don't know what the heck I'm talking about. But it'd still be nice to get some feedback. So what do you guys think?
JesseLee? Are you reading this?
Open letter below the fold.
Dear DCCC,
Ok, you guys spent about 300,000 dollars on the Hackett race. That's awesome. It definately helped. But most of that 300,000 was taken up by the media buy right? It was a great ad, and it probably helped with Hackett's name ID and Schmidt's negatives I'm sure.
Here's my problem. Why not spend $100,000 just on GOTV? And not just phone-banking, but actually putting people on the ground and canvassing on the day of the election to make sure Democrats get to the polls. If you've contacted a Democrat and they haven't been crossed off of the voter list as having voted by 6:00, do a call back and remind them again or offer them a ride. Why is that impossible? I'm not talking about doing this for every Democrat in the district (or maybe I am?). But if all the money and volunteers got you 55,000 votes, then you know that there are at LEAST another 35,000 Dems that did NOT vote in this election based purely on Sanders's (the previous Democratic candidate) totals last November.
Let's look at the rural counties (notice I call them rural and not ex-urban like the DCCC memo).
2004 Democratic Election results for eastern counties in the 2nd district.
Sanders's Vote Totals
Adams - 3,169
Brown - 5,293
Pike - 5,578
Scioto - 8,004
Sanders lost all of these counties to Portman and as we all know lost the election be almost 50 points.
Now let's look at Hackett's numbers in these same counties (Hackett won all of them, most by substantial margins).
Adams - 2,101
Brown - 3,950
Pike - 2,659
Scioto - 4,925
So Hackett's differences are:
Adams - (1,068)
Brown - (1,343)
Pike - (2,919)
Scioto - (3,079)
Total for rural eastern counties: 8,409 fewer votes than Sanders in 2004
That's almost double Hackett's loss margin to Schmidt. Why couldn't the DCCC put in an extra $100,000 and hire 100 people to each be responsible for getting 100 Democrats to the polls on election day? Especially since we know that turnout on special election days is horrendous. Especially since we knew that the race was going to be close. And we knew it would be close with LOW VOTER TURNOUT. To me that means that you get a lot more bang for your buck for GOTV efforts right?
If you say its too expensive, then let me pose this too you. What other races did the DCCC have to worry about in early August? We got a lot of great press this week for almost taking out Schmidt. But it was not an earthquake. It was a 2 day story. We got almost an equal amount of press saying things like, "This doesn't really mean anything. Remember Hackett didn't actually win. Now if he had won the race....that would be different."
Now can you imagine the press the ENTIRE party would have gotten if Hackett would have gotten 5,000 more votes and won? August is usually the slowest news month, and we could have given the DC press a 5-alarm fire to cover for the whole dang month.
So wouldn't an extra 100 or 200 grand specifically for canvassing and getting Dems to the polls just to get the vote levels closer to the 2004 Dem votes, wouldn't that have been worth spending? Spending that much money still would just have equaled what the national Republicans spent. And you could also argue that if the extra money spent had resulted in a win for Hackett, I imagine donations would have started pouring into the DCCC.
I've got a lot more to say on this line of thinking, but I think that's enough for now. I'd really really appreciate a response, because I have yet to receive a peep from anyone in the Party except to say that it's difficult.
Thanks for listening
Adam