Though I may have used this account for joking around before (and if you don't believe me I'm leaving), I have a serious question for you. All right, I am helping a young woman run for county council. This is the first election when we are a part of a pilot program to have publicly financed elections. Though it was a state law to initiate this program, it affected only our county and was accomplished with cooperation of Democracy Matters and local activists on the Big Island.
It was a surprising victory, narrowly passing the State House and avoiding a veto from our republican Governor. The way it works is publicly financed candidates have to collect 200 signatures (the districts have about 30,000, figuring off the top of my head) and each signatory had to donate five dollars. Then you give that money to the election office and they give you whatever was the average of all the budgets the previous term. Generally, this is a few thousand dollars.
However, our candidate is running against a pro-development guy that spent $70,000 last election, vs. $10,000. So she has $40,000 dollars. However, she just qualified, the state election office says the check is in the mail, and there is just over five weeks to the election. For county council the primary IS the real race, and the general election is just a runoff if need be.
So the question is... given 5 weeks starting on a campaign (I've just started), what would your ideas be for promoting her. Not ideas based on her, you don't know her, but I mean ideas in general. Obviously we are working already on her literature, signs, that sort of thing. We are also thinking of campaign ideas that give back to the community directly, such as installing rescue tubes kiosks on beaches, a program from Kauai that is saving lives and empowering people to help one another and form community.
I could tell you more about the candidate, but that really isn't my question. My question is what sort of innovative ways can we promote the candidate and ideally do something actually positive at the same time.
Given the budget, we've already decided to put the bulk of it into radio, but I just thought the good people of dailykos may have some ideas waiting to be tried.
cheers,
GBCW