I have seen several excellent discussion threads these past two days about the "seismic" shift that has catapaulted Democrats to electoral success at the local level on Nov. 8. Reading these,
you get smothered over and over again with tales of universal Democratic victory - but is that really necessarily the case? Over at FreeRepublic and RedState, they have had a few similar conversations (albeit far less jubilant or extensive).
Now, I am a dedicated lurker on this site and love it, but if it has a deficiency, it is its ability to take observations and anecdotes, and wield them into half-baked facts, facts which then become echoed as truth in future diaries. We all saw that last November when few saw Bush's re-election coming, even on the day of. This leads to a gaping hole in our political understanding but one that a community like this is uniquely poised to plug. Are the anecdotes we are sharing with glee really indicative of a country-wide trend? A state-wide trend? What can we learn from successes where Democrats won on a local level? Where Republicans did?
Read on:
These type of questions need a massive amount of organized data, and the type of data that - as best as I can tell - isnt accesible in a centralized way. We live in a democracy goddamn it. In this day and age, we should have the information we need at our fingertips. So lets empower ourselves: lets systematically gather the data we need. Lets be able to say definitively with heads held up high to the MSM: X many county legislatures changed hands by these margins. Lets get the facts. Read on:
The other great thing about getting facts, is that then the statistically minded and politically curious amongst us (like me!) can start looking at trends, looking at campaigns, and begin to distill what were the best-practices, what tools and messages are working at the grassroots, what should the message be to pound the Republican machine into oblivion. Facts give us the sort of foundation we need going into 2006.
Now to my own disappoinment I am no web-wizard, having done very little programming. I can't set up some wiki to get this done. I can't program enough to coordinate this type of information gathering project . Imagine though, the following data set:
- State by state lists of counties and all elected municipal government positions
- Current elected officials in each position and their party affiliation
- Previous elected officials in each position (for now, just who had the positions prior to Nov. 8)
Imagine how powerful it could be. Imagine the type of things we could do with it. And realize that everything in it is merely publicly accesible information that we can just browse and find online, only its dispersed and not collated into the tool we need
Guys, this type of databank would have endless uses. We would know ourselves, and our enemy. And most importantly, we could strategize for the battles to come. Right now, we risk trapping ourselves in an echo-chamber of rose-coloured bubbles, and only listening to what we want to hear. The stakes are too high for this.
NOW, this is a year's worth of work for a single person - but surely no more than a week or twos worth for a thousand of us, each inputting data for a small part of the country - perhaps a county each. All we need is someone to set up a template and a structure (on DKospedia perhaps?).
To me, its the potential for this type of project which is one of the most exciting and rewarding things this community could do. It reaffirms our incredible place in the new political climate. And it gives strategy and political power back to grassroots.
Thoughts?