It's long been a typical narrative of every election cycle: Democrats target a fairly small number of states, while Republicans more than match them there while going on the offense in other areas.
I chose to run in 2004 because I instinctively felt this was wrong; we needed to challenge everywhere, and the Medicare Part D debate galvanized me to action. And I quickly realized, when watching the netroots push Dean into the chair of the DNC and make the 50-state strategy a reality, that I wasn't alone in that feeling. This year, I'm running to win, and over the last couple of weeks, we got a pretty good hint that our efforts to change that narrative above has combined with the weakening fortunes of the GOP to turn the tables on that old story ...
The power of the blogosphere and the net-roots is growing by leaps and bounds. Right now, you saw it in the huge ABC controversy that was started on the blogs and then expanded to include all media, letters from President Clinton and Congressional leaders, a strongly worded e-mail from the DNC (ABC "is a cog of the Disney empire"!), and so much more. And, over the last couple of weeks, there was evidence of a real change brought about by the net-roots insistence on a national party with a "challenge every district" ethic. It's way too early to start taking real victory laps; the proof is really in the elections. But, the net-roots, from pushing for Howard Dean to head the DNC to urging Democrats to challenge all 435 districts, have consistently pushed for a strategy of extending the playing field.
The first indication we got was part of a story that got a lot of attention in the blogosphere, a NYTimes story about the weakening influence of Karl Rove. But buried in that story was this little tidbit that didn't get much attention around here:
They have determined that control of Congress is likely to be settled in as few as six states and have decided to focus most of the party's resources there, said Republican officials who did not want to be identified discussing internal deliberations. Those states will likely include Connecticut, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington, though officials said the battle lines could shift in coming weeks.
The White House is largely turning away from the 36 governors' races, although Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush will continue to help Republican candidates for governor raise money, party officials said. The decision has broad significance because building a foundation of Republican governors had been a main part of Mr. Rove's goal of creating a long-lasting Republican majority.
Look at that first paragraph again. Doesn't that just read like something you've be reading the Democrats say for years now. The GOP is narrowing down their target list, trying to husband their (considerable) resources for the critical areas. They are concentrating their attention on battleground states and swing districts. And, since they issued an "all hands on deck" alert to try to save Linc Chaffee's rear-end, they're behind the 8-ball on that one. They may have more brush fires than they know how to deal with.
And, as Jonathan Singer at MyDD pointed out, the RNC is also targeting the bulk of their resources on just three Senate contests:
The Republican National Committee's independent expenditure campaign kicks off with two ads in Ohio targeting Sherrod Brown (D) and an ad in TN targeting Harold Ford. Party strategists expect much of the IE's resources to be sent to the so-called firewall states of OH, TN and MO.
Meanwhile, Howard Dean's DNC is doing exactly what he said he'd do, pushing the envelope, expanding their horizons as much as possible into states and areas not normally part of the "battleground." And the net-roots is supporting races, like ours, that have fallen below the radar before, but are the place where Democrats can expand their majority for years to come. And the DNC is fighting, as seen by their very strongly worded e-mail statement against Disney/ABC last week, and the fact that their new tools meant I got that Disney e-mail from a half-dozen people in the span of a couple of hours.
And Chris Bowers takes it a step further and talks about what this landscape could mean:
The faster we can force them into a narrow campaign for the Senate in a small number of expensive states, the easier it becomes for our fifty-state strategy to swamp Republicans in non-Senate races outside of the "firewall." The less national their campaign becomes, the bigger our wave can potentially be.
That's what we are doing in my district, pushing the envelope outside the traditional battleground. My district, at first blush, seems like a "red district." John McHugh's vote totals have been good, and our partisan ID skews GOP. But dig just a bit deeper, and it's clear that this district is purple, not red, and we are going to put it on the radar.
We were endorsed by the National Council for an Effective Congress, a group started by Eleanor Roosevelt that specializes in data-driven campaign analysis. And they support us because of what the numbers show. Our GOP-registration skew is an historical artifact, much like many Southern areas still have disproportionately high Democratic registration numbers. Federal Democrats do about as well in our district as they do nationally. Gore+(half the Green vote) was over 50% in our district. Bush won in '04 but with a percentage of the vote that was very similar to his national average. In fact, if you go back over the last 4 cycles, even with McHugh running essentially unopposed, Democrats running in federal elections have averaged almost 49% of the vote. It's even higher if you go back one more cycle to include Bill Clinton's solid win in the district.
But then why does John McHugh, a conservative foot-soldier for the Bush-Cheney GOP, manage to cruise along with his do-nothing record? Simple. Our district has very little fund-raising opportunities (it's the poorest in NY outside two districts in NYC), so very few people really try to run. It's a cycle of "underfunded challenger not putting up a fight, McHugh does well on pure name ID, no outside support comes to the next challenger, who is an underfunded challenger, McHugh does well on pure name ID, etc, etc." So far, no one wanted to put the work in to break that cycle; they never bothered to look at that second level of data to see the possibilities.
But we are going to break that cycle. We did a volunteer poll last week, and, while we didn't get enough of a sample size to get a result we could release, the indications were strong enough to make a couple of conclusions: first, Eliot Spitzer is going to pound John Faso into dust in our district; and, second, the level of "undecideds" in our race is very, very high. We can win this race, but we need to work at it. We've got some momentum building very well; our Viggo Mortensen events last week got A LOT of attention, and we have a new round of ads going up later this week and into next.
One thing we could definitely use, though, are volunteers for our next round of polling. We are tying to bypass the traditional consultant-driven polling for "people-powered polling," where volunteers do all the calls. We're trying to do it to put more power in the hands of the net-roots, and build a new style of campaigning with fewer funds (diary with the full explanation here). So, if you can help by making a few phone calls, go to my website's volunteer page and sign up to volunteer. It doesn't matter where you live, of course; you can volunteer from anywhere as long as you have a phone.
And, like any campaign, we need to raise our name ID, so any money you can contribute by going to this link would help us with that. We're going to have a couple of ads up on the air next week, one positive and one negative, and we'll be doing a really enjoyable and as far as I know unique blogathon fundraiser around them either later this week or next week ... but I don't want to spoil the fun by giving it away now.
Lastly, thanks so much for all the support so far. Our ActBlue page has been doing well, and we've been able to raise our visibility quite a bit. Your e-mails of support to the media in our district seemed to have had an effect; we've been getting more press coverage all the time (Viggo hasn't hurt, either). They very week after some of you complained about censorship, we got some very nice articles out of the blue. Coincidence? Maybe ... but I now know for a fact that members of the local media read these diaries.
We've all got a ways to go, but this is no longer such a long-shot as it was even two months ago. We can take this seat, and help put that gavel in the hands of Murtha, Waxman, Conyers, Rangell, Slaughter and all the other names that go "boo!" in the night to George W. Bush.
{I'm Bob Johnson and I'm running against do-nothing GOP foot-soldier John McHugh in New York's 23rd district. Contributions and volunteers accepted from all over the country ... you don't need to be in my district to volunteer}