My town is run by Democrats. There's virtually no chance for a Republican to be elected in most of the city. It's just not going to happen. My city council reps are Dems. So's my mayor. My state senator and my state rep are Dems. My governor's a Dem as are my two US Senators. It's like living in a bubble, frankly. Some residents, however, are concerned that many of the Ds aren't progressive enough. My question is, then, should active Democrats endorse people during the primary? What if the Democrats are acting as the precinct organizing committee? Let me explain . . .
After the 2004 elections I felt like I had been punched in the gut. But before that I was met by the reality of just how disorganized the Democratic Party was when I was asked, as a newly-elected precinct delegate, to canvass my precinct. The local party had fallen apart as it had gained power. Elected officials gradually realized that they only needed a D after their name, and most of them stopped caring enough about constituents to actually reach out to them outside of an election year.
Jump to today. Over the past year several of the residents in the precinct have formed a precinct organizing committee to begin the process of educating ourselves and others. We've spoken out at a city council meeting about downtown development and have been educating ourselves on local issues. We've also scheduled our first annual precinct picnic and will have several candidates in attendance.
Something we've realized is that many folks with a D after their names are starting to act, well, like maybe they should have an R there instead. Many residents feel that developers call the shots in town and that there are too many closed door meetings and not enough open government or accountability. There's definitely very little outreach by elected officials to constituents. And our one newspaper in town is run by conservatives and has endorsed Bush the past two elections. So the paper's attempting to bring the town to the center-right.
In order to start to try to create a more open government in town, our organizing committee has decided that we should work to pull the party to the left, or at least make it more accountable and progressive. To that end we decided to take the unusual step of endorsing primary candidates. This has upset some who believe that a small committee in the D party shouldn't be endorsing candidates in the primary. And to some extent I agree--especially if the eventual D candidate was going to have a tough general election race. But that won't happen here for the forseeable future.
So what do folks think? How do we work to bring the Democratic party to the left in a one-party town? Does the old way of doing things really pertain to today?
I'd appreciate some feedback about this.