(cross-posted with adaptations on MyDD)
Dear DKos Community,
My name is Greg. In August, I will be leaving my job as an associate in a great Manhattan law firm to take a full-time position as Deputy Campaign Manager for Research with Jack Carter's U.S. Senate campaign in Nevada. (At my request, the position is unpaid; that money can be put to better use between now and November 7.) I'll be in charge of areas including polling and opposition research. Part of my pitch to Jack in taking this position is that I have hopes of bringing with me a secret weapon that could help balance out the advantage in campaign cash that his opponent, John "100% pro-Bush voting record in 2004" Ensign will bring to the battle.
What is that secret weapon?
You. Your brains, your energy, your heart, your muscle. Your people power. I'll explain below.
(A personal note before I begin: I'm a frequent contributor here through another screen name -- many of you also met me at Jack Carter's party and elsewhere at YearlyKos -- but I want to keep my participation on that account and this one separate (especially until I've left my current job at a Manhattan law firm.) So please, those of you who might recognize me -- especially through my overuse of run-on sentences -- send any well-wishes you might have using my other screen name only through e-mail. P.S.: No, I'm not Armando.)
Your monetary contributions to Jack Carter's campaign have been outstanding, as have been Sarah R. Carter's and those of her somewhat famous grandfather in soliciting them. But as Ben Franklin said (overadjusting for inflation), "a hundred bucks saved is a hundred bucks earned." Progressive bloggers can volunteer to help with the brain work of the campaign. Every dollar we don't have to spend on something the DKos community can do as a labor or love is a dollar we can spend beating John Ensign.
And we will beat John Ensign. He will not know what hit him.
The purpose of this initial diary is to lay out our program. It's ambitious; I'm not sure there's precedent for it. But there's also not precedent for the sheer amount of brainpower and goodwill assembled on this very site -- citizen-activists waiting to know how to be deployed. You've wanted to know how you can contribute more than merely money to a critical campaign from your own home? This will be how.
We want volunteers to devote their intellectual skills and free time to coordinated activities that would otherwise take up a large amount of campaign resources. These include:
- opposition research
- polling
- translation (Spanish and otherwise)
- media/marketing ideas and approaches
- generating strategy and tactics, noting especially innovations from other campaigns
- issue-oriented research to inform and facilitate campaign position papers
- developing and pursuing legal strategies to preempt and counter voter suppression efforts
This is an ambitious agenda, so I'll review each proposed area in greater detail.
OPPOSITION RESEARCH: This is the most natural place for bloggers to devote some of their time and effort. John Ensign has a long and abysmal voting record - being one of the first Senators to reject net neutrality (which Jack Carter strongly favors) and to endorse the Sensenbrenner approach to criminalizing illegal immigration (which Jack Carter opposes) are only among the most recent atrocities - and we'd like help nailing down every last legitimate criticism we can offer. If you're interested, send me an e-mail at greg@carterfornevada.com, and we're doing to dig in and start shoveling. (Please note: we're interested in finding legitimate criticism of John Ensign, not illegitimate dirt or misleading mudslinging. Luckily, that will still leave us in a "target-rich environment.") Some of what we discover will be discussed in diaries on this blog as our finds lead us in new directions; some of it will be held back. It will not be fun for the Ensign campaign to be defending against what our research skills can turn up.
POLLING: This is a less obvious way for DKos members to get involved, but there's a great payoff. I was trained as a public opinion researcher during my years as social scientist; I know how to design and implement a poll, and did many both as a Ph.D. student and a university professor. I'm sure that there are others here with similar skills -- people who can write intelligent questions, develop sampling frames, train people to do phone interviews, and code and analyze data. And I'm sure that there are lots of people here without such skills that can still do a responsible job of conducting phone interviews. (It's not hard.) I'm not yet sure whether we're going to be able to put together a Buick or a Rolls Royce, but we can get a polling operation to run. Especially if you have expertise, I'd love to hear from you.
Update: diary was truncated; the balance of it is found in two posts below.