I have just returned from a Texas Democratic Party event billed as Rural Summit, where I could “... learn about how we can work together to elect more Democrats in rural Texas, and create a winning plan for how to organize your community...” The email invitation was received on Wednesday afternoon for a Saturday event 70 miles away from my home, and I was already scheduled for a battleground Texas voter registration event. Once I confirmed that there would be enough people to cover the registration event, I decided to spend the day to see if the Party could offer anything that would help our local organizing efforts. Since I have been blasting the State Party for months for not doing any outreach to activists other than to ask for money in what is weekly if not daily emails, I thought to myself that at least this time they were asking for me to do something besides clicking on the donation link. It is my thought that in addition to emails asking for money, the Party could ask me to send emails to my friends, get certified as a deputy voter registrar to register voters, send letters to the editor about all the issues they think are important enough to hound me for money about.
That is the difference between Battleground Texas and the state Party as I see it. BGTX asks people to do things in addition to asking for money. Register voters, have phone banks, do community outreach. BGTX asks for time and energy commitments not just money.
So here was the Democratic Party asking me to drive 70 miles and attend a meeting, it was a start, So I went.
And I am glad I did, in a way it was like old home week. I saw some folks from other parts of the state I have not seen in a while. I had the chance to meet others that I have only gotten to know through social media in the last year or so.
As far as learning how to organize it could have been better, if there were people there that had not been involved in campaigns before they would have learned some basics. As the average age of the 60-70 people in attendance was probably between those same numbers, I don’t think there were many novices in attendance. I wanted to see if the Party had any new and exciting tips on local candidate recruitment, if they were going to promise us resources that we could promise possible candidates.
There was some basic campaign information, but nothing necessarily specific to rural organizing. Organizing in rural areas has specific hardships that those used to working in cities often can’t understand. Working to identify your voters and GOTV by knocking doors is difficult when your doors may be miles apart. So I was hopeful that the party had identified rural counties that had adopted some very useful strategies and were now going to pass it along to the rest of us. Wishful thinking.
I understand the party is under new leadership, I remain hopeful that The Texas Democratic Party will reinvent itself and provide the resources that we need in our battle to turn Texas blue, but today after giving them 10 hours of my life, I still don’t know if the State Party has a message or a plan for the 2016 election cycle. I did not hear any thing new as to turning out our base.
After listening to complaints, comments and questions from the attendees, I realize that many people involved in their local party processes are wanting to know how to recruit and provide resources to possible candidates, wanting to know how to combat the fact that we allow the Republicans to define us, wanting to have talking points and information to share in their community to show how Republican policies are destroying the middle class, etc, Unfortunately answers to those questions were not part of the agenda of today’s meeting.
We have a local group, here in our small rural county, that came together through Battleground Texas. We have continued to get together twice a month since the first of the year. We consistently have between 15 and 30 people at our events. We have had voter registration events every month, our folks are working the phones and doing outreach with Young Democrats, teachers, college students and others in our community. Our members are attending City Council meetings and organizing lobbying efforts aimed at local representatives. We are discussing the issues and have brainstorming sessions on how we can do more to energize the Democratic base in the next election. We are doing these things partly because BGTX asked us to make a commitment to continue working together. It would be nice if the State Party would join us.