A few weeks ago I listened to a video of a stump speech by Eugene Talmadge, who was Georgia's governer from 1933-1937. and again from 1941-1943. He was elected to a fourth term, but died in office.
I've heard Talmadge described as an agrarian populist in the past. The speech I watched increased the extent to which that designation mystified me. Talmadge was a precursor to the modern Tea Party movement, pushing a sort of racist lassiez-faire vision of the world. While Huey Long railed at FDR for not going far enough in the New Deal, Talmadge attacked the New Deal for offering aid, and often did it by stirring up racism.
But Talmadge built an effective statewide network. It was the time of the racist county unit system, where sparsely populated rural counties which often suppressed any attempt at black voter registration with violence, had the same statewide clout as an urban area. He bragged that he could win "any county without a street car".
One of the ways he built solidarity among his supporters (who, like modern Tea Party rank-and-file, supported policies contrary to their own interests) was by a gimmick which I think would be effective among any organizers on any end of the political spectrum. His campaign would print buttons for his rallies with the name of their county. The campaign organizers would then make sure that there were people at the rally from each of Georgia's 159 counties. At a point in the speech he would call for a roll call, and as each county was named, the delegation from that county would cheer.
While doing the roll call might be tedious by today's standards, the concept of making sure that statewide events truly reflect statewide attention is something contemporary Georgia Democrats might find useful and worthwhile.
The tendency over the past fifty years has been increasingly to target narrowly, and ignore everything else. Progressives in Georgia can't afford to keep doing that, and while there isn't a lot we can or should learn or borrow from Gene Talmadge, his focus on building statewide machinery is something we should study.