This Diary is particularly for those of you who like the nuts and bolts of campaigning.
Wisconsin's elections system is much different than other states, and I'm curious to get the views of "outsiders" who live in states with more "normal" systems.
In the dairy state, we don't register a party preference, even for the primary elections. Actually, in smaller communities we don't even have voter registration (though that is changing)! As most of you know, generally a campaign manager sits down and looks at the numbers of registered dems vs. registered repugs and forms a strategy based off of those numbers (energizing the base, targeting independents, turning off voters, etc.). However, in Wisconsin, we simply don't have that data. So what do we do?
We rely on a data company that more or less has a monopoly on the state to put together voter history, then the state party pays a hefty price to get it. Once we get the data, we add our own ID's (which I understand comes from previous campaigns). Candidates buy this data from the state party, and it becomes their voter data file... the database that drives all fieldwork. Unfortunately, the number of ID'd voters is depressingly low, so candidates have to spend a great deal of resources running voter ID's, which any campaign manager will tell you costs a great deal of money.
Luckily, the monopoly won't have a hold for too much longer. The "Help America Vote Act" is requiring that the state begin maintaining a statewide voter registration list. For now, however, the party and the candidates will have to pay through the nose for pretty bad data.
How I'm Dealing With This on My Campaign
As many of you know, I'm the Campaign Manager for Bryan Kennedy, who is running for Congress against Sensenbrenner. To get access to the file, we need to pay $8,500. That's a lot of money (so please help us raise it! Donate to the Kennedy Campaign Tech Fund!) Then we need to use the data quickly... We need to knock on many doors and make many phone calls - just to see what voter preferences are. Obviously, that requires a lot of manpower and money too. Stay tuned for an exciting update on how we plan to use technology to help us with that. While we have an extremely aggressive field plan written up for the campaign, it will be revised as the numbers come in from ID'ing voters.
I realize that collecting this information is not only going to help Bryan win, but it will help us make sure that we are able to drive the vote for our Democratic governor, who is going to be in a tight race (and both houses are controlled by the repugs). While our district is generally Republican, Waukesha County has the 3rd highest number of Democratic voters in the state... so we need to push them to vote! Additionally, building our ID's will give us voting preferences for people in future elections. I haven't seen it, but I'm sure that the Republicans have many more ID's in our district that we do.
WE NEED TO INVEST IN FINDING OUR OWN VOTERS!!!
That's why today I am asking for your help. Please donate to the Kennedy Campaign Tech Fund. It will help all Democratic Candidates who will be on the ballot here in November, and many more for years to come.
Donate Here! The first 10 people to donate will get a free "vintage" 2004 Bryan Kennedy for Congress bumper sticker!!! (I can tell that you are excited!)