I was one of the thousand or so DCCC volunteers who took to the streets of South Dakota, and was really blown away by the experience. First of all, I have no doubt that Herseth is going to win by a pretty decent margin. The response we got was awesome....
... Granted, I was cruising around the Southeast corner of the state, which the locals told me is one of the friendlier Dem regions, so my perspective may be totally skewed.
The trip was incredible, and I think most who went were glad they did. If you get a chance to do something like this in November, (if you're living somewhere your help isn't needed as badly), I highly recommend getting to a swing state in a large group. We knocked 80,000 doors and had a great time doing it.
It's true that the weekend could have been run more smoothly, and I think some good lessons could certainly be learned from the organizational problems. If there are other Kossacks who were there who want to comment on those glitches (there were many), I think it'd be an interetsting and valuable discussion for the organizers who hang out here. Suffice to say, we could have hit those doors with half the people had it been organized better. That said, I think there was actually some benefit to getting 1,000 people involved, even if it was frustrating at times and a little more expensive. Everyone who went is going to come home energized, with canvassing experience they can take back to their local races (I was amazed at how many in the group had never canvassed before).
I definitely think that whenever the national party has a choice between buying ads and paying for hotel rooms for volunteers, we should strongly consider sending volunteers, especially in places where the ad market is so cheap. When we turned on the TV, we watched for about 20 minutes and saw 8 Herseth and 2 Diedrich ads. People were totally on overload with campaign advertising, and had started tuning it out, so doorknocking was a great way to pull the campaign out of the background and get them thinking about it again.
It felt really good to get out of my nice, safe district and fight the good fight on the front lines. I really wish I could have stayed for the victory party and one more day of visibility...