There is a kind of split personality in politics; on the one hand you are always looking at the next election, even the day after your latest victory or defeat. One the other there is need for an institutional party continuity at the local, county, state and yes, national level. Money still flows to both National Party Committees under the name of Party Building. In reality almost none of this money (at least during election years) is spent on building the party infrastructure. It is spent instead on trying to elect presidential candidates or Congressmen or Senators. This is a sad thing as there really is a need for any major party to invest in its own future.
We have seen a change in this in the Democratic Party both under the direction of former
Gov. Dean and Sen. Barack Obama (Next President of the United States of America, IL) with their respective 50 state strategies. At the time that Gov. Dean started this project it was felt by the party elite and the conventional wisdom that money spent in places like Virginia, Indiana, North Carolina and other traditionally Repug states was money that was being wasted. It could more profitably be spent on protecting our incumbents; the argument went, while we are never going to win those states.
Now these arguments are shown to be the hollow and defeatist attitude of politicians that had no courage of their convictions. For the first time in a very long time, the Democratic Party is fighting a Presidential election on the Repugs ground. Sure, there are a lot of structural reasons why this is so (Iraq war, criminal Bush Administration, Repug intransigence, the Economy, etc.), but the Dog firmly believes that we would not be able to capitalize on these structural advantages if we had not been in all 50 states.
The willingness of both Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton to fight for every state caucus and primary helped as well. People in states that have not had a say in the nominating process this year had a chance to have the candidates come and ask for their votes, as well as making their own preferences known. As bruising as the Democratic nominating process was it did push organization into every single state in the Union.
Whether this pays off in the ultimate goal of retaking the White House remains to be seen (the Dog believes that we will win and win big, as long as we keep working to the last minute of voting on Nov. 4th), but there can be no doubt that however the final Electoral College vote comes out the clear winner of this election is the Democratic Party.
The estimates do not all agree but somewhere between 3.75 and 4.5 million new voters were registered this year. A great many of them are young people (call them 18 -28) who have never voted before. This is a treasure trove that will continue giving to the Democratic Party for a generation. Political scientists know that the there are a couple of factors that almost always determine your party and voting preference. The first (unsurprisingly) is the party your parents belong to. The Dog is a Dem because he is a Liberal in his political philosophy and there is nothing for a Liberal in the Repug Party (except, perhaps loyal minority opposition). But he got his first view of what Dems stand for and do from his parent’s involvement in the Party.
The other and the one that we are interested in this time around is the party that you vote for in your 20’s. It is exceptionally rare for people to switch the way they vote (as opposed to the party they are registered to) from the way they voted in their young adulthood. You can see this in the number of middle aged Repugs that started out being seduced by the Repug Revolution (everyone likes to be on the winning side, after all) and continue to vote that way even though the ideals of the Party have been shown to be fatally flawed. With the youth vote showing a nearly 2-to-1 preference for Sen. Obama we are set to create and keep a new generation of Dems.
Of course there almost no way to know how many of these new voters will actually show up to vote, either by early voting or on Nov. 4th. This demographic (not just young voters but any first timer) is notoriously unreliable. To counter this is the enormous and tightly organized GOTV ground game of the Obama campaign. But lets be conservative (if only this time) and call it 40% turn out in this group. If they break the way the polling shows that would net us just over 1 million new Dems. That is a enough to shift states like Virginia and Colorado permanently into the Blue state column.
Perhaps more importantly it brings a lot of new energy and new ideas into a party that is top heavy with leaders that think "We have always done it this way, so we always will". It brings a new accountability to the incumbent protection racket that the DCCC has become, because these voters became Democrats in a year when change is the dominate meme. They will not be content to let the status quo go on, if it does not serve the president they worked so hard to put in office.
It also is good from a money point of view. It is true that the way that the economy is headed that younger voters will not have a much to donate, but the new paradigm of massive numbers of small donations plays into this. Long term many of these folks will become solid larger donors as they age and become more affluent. Until then we can count on some of them (say about 5% or 50,000) to work campaigns, volunteer and be part of the party structure.
Whatever the outcome of this election the Democratic Party has won a huge victory, we have taken the steps that will revitalize our Party, to assure that there is a next generation of Democrats who will take the tenets of Liberal and Progressive politics seriously and are willing to do what they need to make sure that the American Dream is an attainable one for all citizens.