I've been lurking on dKos now for a few years, but I finally registered an account a few weeks ago. I signed up because I'm a Democrat in South Carolina, and I thought I might have a few things to say about the race for our party's nomination.
I'm writing my first diary to explain the direct effect on my county party of dragging this nomination fight out for the next few weeks. Hillary Clinton's insistence on taking this to Pennsylvania has caused direct harm to efforts to organize my county party.
As political activists, most of you probably know about the VoteBuilder voter file. It's a updated version of what the Deaniacs tried to create in 2004 that many state parties and campaigns are now using.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson's campaigns used the file in South Carolina. One of the really great aspects is that the South Carolina state party gets to keep all of the data that the campaigns put into the system.
In other words, the months of hard work done by those Obama field organizers in SC is now property of the SC Democrats. We have updated phone numbers, addresses, list of volunteers, donors, lists of all their supporters, and much more. The work done by the Obama campaign alone is tremendous. We couldn't have done it all on our own.
However, there is a hitch. I just spoke to the head data guy at the state party this week. There is so much information in the Obama campaign file, they don't know what it all is. The Obama campaign has promised to send their data guy here for a few days to explain it all to us.
Unfortunately, he's currently working for the campaign in Pennsylvania and won't be available for weeks. I guess all of us down ticket Democrats on the state and county level will just have to wait!
EDIT: I just wanted to clarify that I think Pennsylvania is a lovely state and I'm not against the Democratic process there. I'm just questioning the whole idea of Pennsylvania -- the hail mary when you haven't got a chance to win. I wanted to provide a local example of the impact of putting a failed presidential bid before the good of the party. I apologize to anybody who was offended. I'm new here. Mea culpa!