Before we get started, here's the link to the first diary of this series, and here's the link to the second!
Finally we get to the state of the party. I will divide this up into two parts, doing a post mortem of 2014, and ending by looking at Lon Johnson’s presented vision for the next cycle.
We’ll never know if we could have won the big three (Gov. AG, and SoS), given the wave that swept very qualified Democratic incumbents out of office. There is something to be said about the fact that we elected the only new Democratic US-Senator, while people like Braley, Weiland, and Tennant were beaten, all while trying to fill an open seat. However, that can be attributed to Gary’s solid campaign and Terri Lynn Land’s terrible campaign. Either way, what did the Democratic Party here do that led to a loss in the trifecta? Click under the fold to find out.
Well, we can start with absentee voting and voter registration. These were initiatives that then-new chair Lon Johnson pushed hard, especially the former. In the beginning, we made sure that we identified newly registered voters, as well as voters that required absentee applications. And then….nothing. We never followed up with the people whom we had advertised absentee applications to – it was never in our volunteers’ script. In other words, we had contacted voters, had either registered them or asked them for an absentee application, and never checked up on them. As far as a turnout apparatus, this was pretty miserable on our part. For 2016, we need to make sure that we can sequester a list of people who need an absentee application, and provide them with written directions on procuring a ballot, including the nearest office they can go to in order to get a ballot. As for registering voters, we need to sequester them off as well, and contact them regularly – assuming they would vote, let alone vote Democratic, was a mistake. Nevertheless, despite these shortcomings of the Coordinated Campaign, we still drove 216k drop-off voters to the polls, in some way, shape or form, which means the goal of the Coordinated Campaign, to drive 180k drop off voters to the polls, worked. Why, then, did we come up short there? I believe we need to look at the manufactured nature of the coordinated campaign.
“All politics is local” That’s the oft-quoted phrase by Tip O’Neill. However, I doubt it got much traction in the MDP offices – although this may not be entirely their fault. The coordinated campaign, which linked the Schauer and Peters campaigns, was predicated on the idea that we could boost Mark Schauer’s name recognition in places where Gary’s name was known (and liked), and vice versa. This campaign sought to boost turnout in precincts which hadn’t turned out in 2010 – and in doing so, turn out 180k drop off voters in November. Now, understand that these precincts and localities were the sole focus of the field team, so much so that we would send volunteers and interns there, and nowhere else. If you wanted to walk your own precinct, where people actually knew you, tough luck. If you wanted to try and make a genuine connection with the voter, well, you can try, but the script forced you to do otherwise. This strategy brilliantly turned a highly motivated and informed team of volunteers into a group of tech support workers, addressing the most banal qualities of each candidate to people who considered them “stranger” rather than “friend” or “neighbor”. If you think that’s bad, in the words of Billy Mays, wait – there’s more! Our phone banking was even worse. A call sheet would require a volunteer in Pontiac to place calls to someone in Detroit, then someone in Traverse City, then someone in Farmington Hills, then someone in Grand Rapids, and so on. We didn’t even bother to tap into the volunteers’ knowledge of their own communities! Rather, we forced them, again, to talk about the most general themes of the campaign. Unfortunately, given the fact that one of the campaigns that were coordinated was a Senatorial Campaign, there have been people who said that it was the DSCC directing this strategy, which worked for them, but left the other, more local race of the two, without the community by community attention it needed.
So, the mistakes of last cycle are clear – improve our interaction with absentee and new voters, and organize the next cycle’s coordinated campaign on a more local basis. So, what’s the vision for this year? That was revealed in Lon Johnson’s acceptance speech, which comprised of three parts of his vision, each of which will get its own section.
Be the party of bold ideas. Lon Johnson spoke of addressing several key themes in the next cycle. Sounding like a governor giving the State of the State address, Lon Johnson rattled off some ideas he wants to define the Democratic brand with – and I’ve categorized them into the three Es for your reading pleasure: Environment, Economy, and Education. Environment refers to a living environment, where you can lay down roots without fear of discrimination as well as the physical environment, which we seek to protect against fracking and other cheap exploits. Economy refers to, well….the economy – making sure that the minimum wage is a living wage, making sure that corporations pay their fair share, and making sure that retirees aren’t unfairly taxed on their pension. Education refers to increasing the funding of K-12, as well as restoring funding to universities on the condition that tuition stays low. More than the specific big ideas, I know this will be easy to accomplish in a presidential year, where the nominee will be bringing this issue to town. However, I am curious to see how we build our messaging around these themes in a midyear, especially in light of the next component of Lon Johnson’s vision.
Appeal to local issues. You know the saying – think globally and think locally. Wait, that’s not right. Apparently paradoxically, Lon Johnson’s next component seems to be the opposite of the first – but does center on the key complaint that I had about the coordinated campaign: that it was waged on too broad terms, which didn’t let volunteers with the insight to their own communities promote Democratic solutions inside their own neighborhoods. Lon Johnson spoke of a party that could communicate with voters “on their own terms, and address the salient issues germane to each community”. As an example, he put forth the fracking in a local neighborhood, and talked about how we should be talking about how Democrats can solve it. This is absolutely the right step, and I’m happy to see the chair starting to turn in this direction, especially with the state house on the line next year. However, I wonder how it will coexist with the first component, which spoke of the need to engage voters in grand themes. We will need to see how that coexistence plays out in ’16, and adjust accordingly for ’18.
Well, the last component of the grand vision is the most obvious – and most painful, I’m sure, to many people. Lon Johnson finished his address by talking about how we need to grow the party. His objective is to grow the party’s stature by all metrics – by membership, fundraising, and online presence. As an example of the latter, one of his benchmarks was to double the amount of emails the party sent out, which might cause sustained weeping among some on our email list. Unfortunately, I find this part to be the most lacking. I think that we need to grow the party, true, but we also need to reshape the way that field works, especially from the strategic failure it was last year. Lon avoided questions on field when I saw him at Royal Oak, but if we are going to talk about growing the party, we must talk about growing our volunteer base and keeping them sustained through off years. We must talk about building a connection between the county party/local clubs and precinct delegates. And we must talk about making sure activists aren’t locked out of the process, as they were during the coordinated campaign.
In conclusion, the state of our party is getting better, and seems to be committed to not making the same mistake twice. I think that all these things will contribute to making a greater and stronger party, ready for the trials of 2016 and 2018, a party which can elect more and better Democrats.
To all of you who stuck around and read 12439027412 words, thanks a lot. As usual, feel free to AMA, and, again any criticism is good criticism!