Making new an old-fashioned party-building approach.
Hillary Clinton is making a big deal out of rebuilding state Democratic parties, as noted
here by Kerry Eleveld last week. That's an important move that every Democrat of whatever stripe ought to be 100 percent behind.
She's recently given the message to activists in Iowa and New Hampshire that this rebuilding effort—in part a renewal of the 50-state strategy promoted by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean when he was head of the Democratic National Committee, but jettisoned subsequently—will be a key part of her campaign. There's obviously self-interest in that. But Gabriel Debenedetti reports that this won't be typical party-building that sees presidential candidates hollowing out state parties for purposes of their own campaigns every four years. It will be an approach that can pay off locally for those states even when there is no presidential race underway:
Without blaming the president by name, Clinton’s team is telling early state officials and activists that they feel their pain—and that they’re here to help.
“For the last eight years there were a large number of people who were attracted to be involved in campaigns because of Barack Obama, and that didn’t necessarily translate into those folks being party activists for other candidates, which is what you’ve been seeing in the off-year elections,” said New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Raymond Buckley, who saw Clinton last week. “We really need to be able to build something that is a permanent infrastructure, right from the precinct level.”
That's precisely what's needed. If Clinton, as seems likely, becomes the Democratic nominee, part of this strategy should be to twist arms at the DNC to use a portion of the money now expended on television advertising—that fewer and fewer people watch—on precinct building. An average of $5 million per state spent for year-round, face-to-face, door-to-door precinct building by people actually living in or near those precincts would go a long way toward changing the dynamic in midterm elections, as I've written about
here.
Currently, vast numbers of precincts are not organized by Democrats at all, have no precinct leaders and no infrastructure. Presidential campaigns can motivate people to turn out to vote despite this. But after the election, everything goes dormant. The outside volunteers go home and so do the paid consultants ... along with their software and their data. This adds to our midterm blues. This is, of course, not true everywhere. Models exist on how to do it right, taking into account the unique local dynamics. But the widespread lack of party organization and the attitudes of sinecure and entitlement taken by many of the supposed leaders who do run precincts are hurting us badly.
One element of a 176,000-precinct strategy is to recruit progressive candidates for the thousands of elected positions Democrats should be contesting, but often do not. That's the way to build a deep bench of progressive people who will not just organize precincts but be candidates for county party executive committees, school boards, city councils, state legislatures, and higher. Such organizing is a key aspect of bending the party in a more progressive direction and matching a half-century of relentless local organizing by Republicans.
The Koch brothers and other ultra-wealthy rightists are funding candidates all the way down to the school board level. Fighting that requires a new methodology, which is actually the old-fashioned way parties have organized locally, only assisted now by technology.