In this diary I argue that state party apparatus is broken. Much like university presidents, the purpose of the parties, it seems, is to raise funds. They no longer function to give people access to their public servants.
What I mean when I discuss "state party apparatus" could be extensive, but I choose to focus here on the ground machine. These include the GOTV folks, volunteers as well as committee people and precinct captains. I've lived in three states in seven years, and I am politically active, yet I HAVE NEVER MET MY PRECINCT CAPTAIN. What has happened?
Illinois: As a very young man I was a political dork working for the Republican party. I volunteered time to my committeeman, who was about 80 years old and walking no precincts. He only made it in to vote on election day. He couldn't even function as a judge or a watcher. I was appointed a precinct captain at 15 years of age (Lyons Township -precinct 312, if memory serves). I assumed from that point forward that becoming a precinct captain must be easy. Most people are too old or uninterested.
(More below the fold)
After I completed my graduate studies out of state, I returned to Illinois. This time, I moved further west (as many have done) to Willowbrook. I was in DuPage county, a cooling hot-bed of conservatism (Dole walked the Wheaton 4th of July parade in 1996). So, I called up the party headquarters and asked to be a precinct captain. I learned that I didn't have one devoted to my area. That my area and 4 others were covered by the same person. They wouldn't tell me his/her name, but they were willing to let me walk the precincts. Implicitly, I told them to screw off.
Florida: Later I moved to Florida where I experienced by political conversion after seeing for myself what strong conservative politics can do to a state and to families. I was so pissed at myself for being a Republican and at the state, Jeb Bush, you name it, that I decided I'd volunteer to help the party. I called and emailed numerous times only to be ignored through several house election cycles and one presidential election.
New York: Today, I live with my family in New York. We live on Long Island on the North Shore in Suffolk County. I have emailed the Democratic Party headquarters several times asking how to participate. I've been ignored again and again. And note that I am pretty persistent. Imagine the volume of people who build up the gumption over years to ask to help who recoil once ignored.
As a professor, I could file for a grant and build up my own activist program through my university. I don't want to do that because I'm often arguing in my classes that the parties either are relevant or should be because they are the apparatus that give people access. They give people a powerful voice. I also am familiar with the research that shows, and the theorists who argue, that the parties have been made irrelevant so that elites can maintain the control they lost through strong parties (these changes started with the McGovern primary reforms in the late 60s).
Still, this is far too transparent. Why isn't someone blowing the whistle? I refuse to join with Soros or Pariser in some offshoot of the party. I've become fatigued trying to help the party. If party building were going on year round and in years when no election was being held, I believe people would see the parties as much more relevant. But because they only come knocking on the doors of the faithful (if they knock at all), ignoring the rest because modern campaigning says this is what is done (don't want to activate the disaffected by saying the wrong thing!), it shrinks in the mind of those who give little thought to politics.
I think modern politics suck, and that one of the concrete effects has been to destroy the local reach and the human face of campaigns.