Look: the battle begins now. We need a 50 state strategy again. Young’uns and newcomers might not remember but *WE* made that happen. After Kerry/Edwards (ugh!) lost, we had to rebuild the DNC from the ground up, the 50 State Strategy was what was needed and it was what we got with the good Doctor.
How Howard Dean remade the DNC:
Tell me about the origins of the 50-state strategy. What was the goal?
My experience from having campaigned and from being governor is that there are Democrats everywhere, and if you want to nurture the party you have to nurture all of them. If you focus only on the states that are mostly Democratic, it’s demoralizing to the other states. So you never get any growth. So the origin of the 50-state strategy was to be prepared to go anywhere. The idea was, if you ever wanted a Mark Begich, you had to invest in Alaska before a Mark Begich came on the horizon so you could be ready. Mark Begich is the example that I use. Nobody expected Ted Stevens to be indicted, but when he was, we were ready. So the origin was to invest in the party throughout the country. There was also another aspect to it. My strategy to win the presidency was to find a way to win without Ohio and Florida. Obama came along and ran an incredible campaign, which was great and very metric-oriented to get votes out. But I was prepared to preside over a Democratic campaign in 2008 where we didn’t win Florida or Ohio, but we win in the West, we’d win in Colorado, possibly Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada. That would put us over the top, and would have as well for Kerry in 2004. So, that was another part of it.
And as long as we’re pushing for nostalgia with the Clinton’s let’s go to more recent history. This is what we need to do everywhere. Fight for it, work for it.
It’s part of a piece, though, right? It’s all part of an overall strategy.
Yes, underlying all of it was this idea that the Internet was wonderful, but it’s not a substitute for personal contact. And then the model we built was, instead of 1,000 college kids door-knocking the last weekend of the election …
You’re familiar with that strategy.
Yeah. So we wanted 1,000 college kids to take responsibility, each one to knock on 25 doors over an 8-10 week period before the election, to get to know people. We knew that personal interaction meant everything. And obviously the candidate couldn’t knock on every door in the state. So you had your representatives do it. And we wanted to be sure that happened in an organized way. So, I think it was called neighbor-to-neighbor. We said take control of 25 households and talk to them five times between now and the election. And then we had people call us back and say, some of these people on our lists are people who our parents haven’t spoken to for 25 years. So we had to swap out names. But it was pretty good, it was kind of neat.
The DNC needs to engage at every level, especially with the upcoming dark night of the soul the GOP is having/will continue to have.
He’s a Clinton supporter too, so this isn’t as far fetched as it was in 2004 when we actually got him in!
Howard Dean for DNC chair! Again. let’s bring the Doctor back.