Month: August 2018

Follow the NRA Rubles: Or Hunting Russian Honey Pot Election Money

by Spocko

“Follow the rubles,” said the modern day Deep Throat.  But following money is boring!  Who cares if you find the connections between Russia, the NRA and the 2016 elections of Republican politicians and campaign finance law violations?

Luckily we have Maria Butina. Everyone wants to know about her and her leader’s plan to influence the US elections.

In the same way the Stormy Daniels case gave the media an eye catching hook to look into the corrupt dealings of Michael Cohen and Donald Trump, so too will the Maria Butina case give the media a way to look deeper into the Russian connection to the NRA and the influence they have had on the Trump campaign as well as MULTIPLE REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGNS.

Because the mainstream media needs to look serious, they won’t just cover this “unregistered foreign agent” they will also report on the multiple campaign finance violations committed by the NRA over the years. But we all know it’s the sexy spy that will lead the coverage. Which is fine with me, as long as the NRA involvement is fully exposed.

Following the FBI and Mueller investigations, there should be big fines for the NRA, lots of them. Because the NRA knew what they were doing. For years the NRA has used shell games and parsed the language of campaign finance law to avoid reporting and detection. As Howie Klein pointed out back in January of this year.

“There are two other clear grounds for federal campaign finance law liability: soliciting a “thing of value” from a foreign national, and “substantially assisting” the foreign national in spending to influence an election.”

The money from Russian to the NRA then to Trump will be the white whale story (orange wail?), but there are many more down ticket races where Republicans were helped by NRA/rubles. I made a video to point some of them out.

When the NRA campaign finance violations become known by the politicians who were helped, what should happen?

• Demand they condemn the NRA for their coordination with Russia?
• Demand they donate the money to a non-partisan group like Opensecrets.org?
• Give the money back? (Of course the NRA would love that, they are whining they need it. The NRA Says It’s in Deep Financial Trouble, May Be ‘Unable to Exist’)

Fun fact: It’s illegal for foreign funds to be spent in American elections.

The NRA has a pattern of other types of campaign-finance violations too. Mike Spies of the Trace did a great piece looking into other violations, The Mystery Firm That Became the NRA’s Top Election Consultant but sadly he noted:

“The FEC is widely considered a toothless agency, paralyzed by partisan infighting, and campaign-finance laws are often honored in the breach.”

This is why I’m happy about Butina. Her involvement will highlight a lot of great reporting about the financial and personal connections between Russia, the NRA and Republican politicians. Here’s a few for those interested.

For an excellent overall timeline see Ladd Everitt‘s very through work that is still being updated.

Denise Clifton and Mark Follman in Mother Jones have many stories on the case like, The Very Strange Case of Two Russian Gun Lovers, the NRA, and Donald Trump wherein we learn about Alexander Torshin (who really should be played by Patton Oswalt in the movie. )

Once again McClatchy was head of the pack with this piece by Peter Stone and Greg Gordon from January 18, 2017, FBI, 5 other agencies probe possible covert Kremlin aid to Trump. In their recent work they have been “following the rubles” with this story about  Cleta Mitchell,  Lawyer who worked for NRA said to have had concerns about group’s Russia ties  

David Corn of Mother Jones asked the question, Did Alleged Russian Spy Maria Butina Cause a Leadership Shake-up at the NRA? The quick installment of Oliver North as NRA president becomes  much more interesting if it involves a sexy Russian operative.

(BTW, as someone who has watched thousands of spy movies I always roll my eyes when I see female spies working on straight guys. Men soooo easily get sucked into these schemes. Then add in a bunch of old white guys who like to carry around guns as proof of their manhood? As the slaughter lobby members might say, it’s a “target rich environment.” )

As more about the Butina case becomes revealed in court, it will be good to keep looking at the money and people connections but also to “things of value” and who was “substantially assisting” the foreign national in spending to influence an election.

 If the Russian plan wasn’t so effective, it might seem like something out of a cartoon show.  But we need to see that this was a long-term, multimillion dollar plan by the Russians to interfere with our elections and the NRA was an eager and willful participant.  

There needs to be serious consequences for NRA for their actions.

Is it true what they say about Texas?
by Tom Sullivan

from #NN18 in New Orleans

The Cook Political Report on Friday moved the U.S. Senate race in Texas from Likely R into the Lean R column, signifying a tightening no one expected when Democrat Rep. Beto O’Rourke announced his challenge to incumbent Republican Ted Cruz:

In many ways, O’Rourke is running a very modern campaign that thrives on social media. He has visited all 254 counties in the state at least once, posting parts of his journey on Facebook where he has 354,000 followers. O’Rourke has 255,000 followers on Twitter, and a very active Instagram account. He doesn’t have a pollster or a media consultant. The campaign released its first ad in late July; it was produced entirely from footage shot with an iPhone during campaign stops over the last few months. For now, it is only airing online.

O’Rourke has also proven to be a very adept fundraiser. As of June 30, he had $23.8 million receipts for cycle, including $10.4 million in the 2nd quarter; 41 percent of the 2nd quarter receipts were in contributions of less than $200. After spending almost $4.5 million last quarter, he finished with $13,961,359 in the bank. O’Rourke doesn’t accept contributions from PACs and has asked super PACs to stay out of the race. By contrast, Cruz had $23.7 million in receipts for the cycle, including almost $4.1 million in the second quarter. The campaign spent $2 million in the second, posting a cash-on-hand total of $9,299,366 as of June 30.

Real Clear Politics shows Cruz with a 6.5 point polling advantage through the end of July. That closes polling gap from two months ago by almost half.

Josh Voorhees writes at Slate:

The best reason for Democrats to be excited, meanwhile, might be that Cruz is acting like a candidate who is starting to get nervous. Back in April, O’Rourke challenged Cruz to a slate of six debates, two of which were to be in Spanish. Cruz finally felt compelled to respond last week, proposing five debates, all in English. Yes, Cruz fancies himself a master debater, but as my colleague Jim Newell points out, that’s an awful lot of televised one-on-one time for an incumbent to offer up if he believes he has re-election in the bag.

Still, liberals ought to temper their expectations in Texas—not easy since they would take obvious joy in knocking Cruz off given his role on the national scene during the past half-decade, on everything from health care to immigration to guns. Democrats are vastly outnumbered in Texas, and O’Rourke still faces the very real challenge of simply introducing himself to voters in the state. Quinnipiac found that, about 100 days out from Election Day, 43 percent of Texas voters didn’t know enough about O’Rourke to have an opinion of him.

It’s still an uphill climb for O’Rourke, Voorhees writes. Wendy Davis’ pink shoes carried her only so far in her gubernatorial challenge to Greg Abbott in 2014. But that was then. This is now. The momentum is in Democrats’ favor. He would have been a rock star at Netroots Nation in New Orleans (#NN18). Sen. Kamala Harris filled that role instead, and probably better than he could anyway:

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Saturday Night at the Movies

Can’t buy me love: Dark Money (***½) & Generation Wealth (**)

By Dennis Hartley

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. -Dorothy Parker

What is this “dark money” of which “they” speak these days? You know, “them”…all those smarty-pants news anchors and political pundits and conspiracy theorists on the internet, radio and TV who bandy the term about with worried tone and furrowed brows?

According to a new documentary by Kimbery Reed helpfully entitled Dark Money, that term should be bandied about with worried tone and furrowed brow. To paraphrase Jason Robards’ wry understatement in All the President’s Men: “Nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.” Oh…there is also a little matter of the continuing integrity of our elections.

Before you panic, I should clarify that there is a “New Coke” (New Koch?) element here. The implementation of “dark money” is nothing new. The concept of “buying an election” is deeply embedded in the DNA of our republic… it’s as American as apple pie. It’s just that the semantics have evolved. Terms like “graft” and “influence peddling” have been part of our lexicon for a long time (“a rose by any other name”…and all that).

Even the Father of Our Country played a little footsie under the table (some 30 years prior to the Constitution, no less). From a 2014 Washington Post article by Jamie Fuller:

When George Washington lost an election to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1755, he decided to improve outreach. Two years later, he bought about $195 worth of punch and hard cider for friends, and managed to win. However, the newly elected legislature quickly passed a law prohibiting candidates from giving voters “meat, drink, entertainment or provision or…any present, gift, reward, or entertainment etc. in order to be elected.”

How quaint. The point of course is that campaign finance reform has unquestionably been there all along, as well. However, the effectiveness of such legislation is perennially…questionable. One thing’s for sure…the Founding Fathers could never have envisioned the SCOTUS’s “Citizens United” decision of 2010. Also from Fuller’s piece:

2010-In Citizens United vs. FEC, the Supreme Court held that independent expenditures by corporations and labor unions were protected by the First Amendment, which struck down BCRA provisions—building on previous campaign finance laws—banning these types of expenditures.

A few months later, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals applied the decision in Citizens United to the case Speechnow.org v. FEC. The federal judges decided arguments that unlimited independent expenditures would lead to corruption were invalid. The chief judge noted that these arguments “plainly have no merit after Citizens United.” These two cases paved the way for the creation of super PACs and the growing power of 501(c) 4s.

Man that is some byzantine postmodern influence peddling, in contrast to a couple jugs of hard cider and a set of wooden teeth. I am aware that most of Digby’s regular readers are much more politically astute than I. But for someone like me, who doesn’t know a “501(c) 4” from a petit four…you have to literally draw me a picture. Thankfully, the “star” of Reed’s documentary, investigative journalist and founder of the online Montana Free Press John S. Adams, does just that at one point in the film. He summarizes thusly: “[Backdoor corporate campaign financing via super PACs] is not the people controlling the government. It’s a government, controlled by a corporation, controlling the people.”

Reed has found two perfect framing devices for her treatise; firstly, Adams with his mission to expose the insidiousness of elections that are (“thanks” to the Citizens United ruling) bought and sold by untraceable corporate money, and secondly the state of Montana itself, posited as the “frontline” in the fight to preserve fair elections nationwide.

Montana makes a fascinating case study on many levels, from its “citizen legislature” (a unique practice shared by a handful of states), to its history of campaign finance reform (e.g. the “Corrupt Practices Act of 1912”). Rich in resources, the state has a sad tradition of being exploited by special interest groups; every level of their political system is dominated by corporate interests (not unlike many Third World countries, n’est-ce pas?).

Reed takes a few side trips around the country as well, to illustrate the many tendrils of dark money interests. For example, she points to the 2010 election of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, whose victory was due in no small part to the Koch brothers-funded conservative political advocacy group Americans For Prosperity. Walker is also held up as an example of how crucial the control of state supreme courts is to dark money interests (pointing to his cronyism in appointing some of his major supporters as justices).

Admittedly, it’s all a bit of a downer. Still, Reed gives us glimmers of hope here and there. Case in point: Beginning in February 2019, right here where I live, in Seattle, the “Democracy Voucher” program will kick in. As explained on the Seattle.gov website:

In November 2015, Seattle voters passed a citizen-led initiative known as “Honest Elections Seattle” (I-122). I-122 enacted several campaign finance reforms that changed the way campaigns are typically financed for Seattle candidates. 

One major reform allows the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission to distribute “Democracy Vouchers” to eligible Seattle residents. Other campaign reforms include campaign contribution limits for lobbyists and contractors.
Seattle is the first city in the nation to try this type of public campaign financing. The Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission is committed to increasing transparency, accountability, and accessibility for how Seattle elections are financed.

It’s a start. But Seattle is only one city, and it’s a big country (and look who’s in charge).

If “dark money” is the anthesis of “democracy” to you, and gives you cause for concern, then this film is in your wheelhouse. Granted, if you are a political junkie Reed may be preaching to the choir, but her film is accessible enough to work for the casually engaged and/or wonky-curious voter as an easy-to-digest primer on a complex (and timely) issue.

Greed is the lack of confidence in one’s own ability to create. -Vanna Bonta

Here’s a stupid question: Who wants to be a millionaire? Yeah, pretty much everybody. But is a million enough? And if not, why not? Why is it always “more more more (how do you like it, how do you like it?)”. And why are people who have more than they could ever spend so goddam unhappy until they can figure out a new way to make even more?

In 2008, filmmaker and photo-journalist Lauren Greenfield set out to answer those questions. The culmination of her decade-long project is a “multi-platform” release including a museum exhibition, photographic monograph book, and the documentary Generation Wealth. This is solely a review of the film portion of Greenfield’s triptych.

Spurred by the accelerating worldwide obsession with wealth and all that it implies, Greenfield literally goes all over the map (L.A., Monaco, Russia, China) in this sprawling study. She profiles a jarringly disparate cavalcade of subjects, from porn stars and plastic surgery addicts to convicted Wall Street swindlers; people who have gained and lost fortunes, people who live beyond their means to feed their narcissism, to people who got fucked up because they were born into wealth…pretty much the entire, erm, rich pageant.

The sword of Manafort

by digby

Paul Waldman points out why the Manafort trial has Trump so agitated:

we’re talking about someone whose major client was a corrupt Ukrainian politician with close ties to the Kremlin. Who was allegedly millions of dollars in debt to a dangerous Russian oligarch. Who even in the sometimes-sketchy world of Washington lobbying was long known for being utterly devoid of ethics or morals. And who offered to work for free. Despite all these red flags, Trump has been trying to argue both that it was perfectly reasonable for him to hire Manafort because he had worked for other Republicans in the past and that he had almost nothing to do with him. Here’s what he said about him a few weeks ago:

“You know, Paul Manafort worked for me for a very short period of time,” Trump said, before ticking off other Republican presidential nominees with whom Manafort has been affiliated. “He worked for Ronald Reagan, he worked for Bob Dole, he worked for John McCain or his firm did. He worked for many other Republicans. He worked for me for what? For 49 days or something? A very short period of time.”

In fact, Manafort served 144 days as Trump’s campaign chairman.

Not only that, Trump and Manafort go way back. When Manafort and his partners, including longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, set up their consulting firm in the 1980s, their first client was none other than Donald Trump. And let’s just say both of them have reportedly spent time interacting with the world of Russian oligarchs and mobsters.

But Trump’s real fear is not so much that a Manafort conviction on charges like tax fraud will reflect specifically on him, but that it will go a long way in the public’s mind to validate the Mueller investigation. You could argue that it’s already more than validated, given that Mueller has gotten guilty pleas from multiple Trump aides (Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos) and indicted dozens of people on charges related to Russian meddling. But a conviction of Trump’s campaign chairman, even if it’s on charges related to what he was doing before he joined the campaign, will make it even harder than it is now to claim that the investigation should never have begun in the first place and should be shut down immediately. Or as he said Thursday, “Now we’re being hindered by the Russian hoax. It’s a hoax, okay? I’ll tell you what, Russia’s very unhappy that Trump won, that I can tell you.”

And that — the investigation completing its work and putting everything it has learned before the public, both in the courtroom and in some kind of report that winds up getting released publicly — is what has Trump so worried.

Manafort was Trump’s campaign chairman. In any normal administration this alone would be considered a major scandal.

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A weird obsession with stabbing

by digby

This will never stop creeping me out:

President Trump delivered a nearly 90-minute-long speech in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on Thursday night in which he suggested he may yet lock up Hillary Clinton and smeared immigrants as violent murderers.

Trump sought to scare people about the risks posed by immigrants by referring to MS-13 as “slicers” and “animals” and mimicking the motions of a person being stabbed.

“‘Our first lottery winner — let’s see, he has seven convictions for death. He’s killed nine people.’ And we’re getting him the hell out of our country!” Trump said.In fact, visa lottery recipients are vetted just like all legal immigrants are, and immigrants — both undocumented and otherwise — commit crimes at rates no higher than American citizens.

And of course there’s this:

When Trump mentioned Clinton, the crowd broke out in “lock her up!” chants. Trump responded by saying, “Some things just take a little bit longer.” He then complained that his Justice Department “only wants to go after Republicans. You look at the kind of criminal actions and crime — they only want to go after the Republicans.”

And this:

Here is the president mockingly mimicking @SenJohnMcCain, who is currently stricken with cancer, for his vote against ACA repeal pic.twitter.com/iB4Zn4gjYC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 3, 2018

“The most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of”

by digby

Trump knows he didn’t really win the election straight up. And he gives it away in so many different ways …

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.

Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state — after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work, which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel.

Before it was disbanded by Trump in January, the panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the White House claimed at the time that it had shut down the commission despite “substantial evidence of voter fraud,” due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states. Kobach, too, spoke around that time about how “some people on the left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”

Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”

In particular, Dunlap pointed to an outline for a report the commission was working on that circulated in November 2017. The outline included sections for “Improper voter registration practices,” and “Instances of fraudulent or improper voting,” though the sections themselves were blank as they awaited evidence, speaking to what Dunlap said indicated a push for preordained conclusions.

“After reading this,” Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that three to five million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.”

After a career of more than 20 years that has included stints as a state representative and the chairmanship of a committee on fisheries and wildlife, Dunlap said that his time on the panel was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of.”

It’s baffling why Trump hasn’t made Kris Kobach a member of the cabinet:

Kris Kobach’s gubernatorial campaign employs three men identified as members of a white nationalist group by two political consultants who have worked with Republicans in Kansas.

Kobach spokeswoman Danedri Herbert rejects the accusation as a baseless distraction from real news in the closing days of a contested GOP primary race.

The consultants in early July independently named the three men, all in their early 20s, as members of American Heritage Initiative, a splinter of Identity Evropa, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as as a campus-based white supremacy group that builds community from shared racial identity.

Also:

Kris Kobach likes to tout his work for Valley Park, Mo. He has boasted on cable TV about crafting and defending the town’s hard-line anti-immigration ordinance. He discussed his “victory” there at length on his old radio show. He still lists it on his resume.

But “victory” isn’t the word most Valley Park residents would use to describe the results of Kobach’s work. With his help, the town of 7,000 passed an ordinance in 2006 that punished employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them.

After two years of litigation and nearly $300,000 in expenses, the ordinance was largely gutted. Now, it is illegal only to “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants there — something that was already illegal under federal law. The town’s attorney can’t recall a single case brought under the ordinance.

“Ambulance chasing” is how Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, describes Kobach’s role. Young characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”

Kobach used his work in Valley Park to attract other clients, with sometimes disastrous effects on the municipalities. The towns — some with budgets in the single-digit-millions — ran up hefty legal costs after hiring him to defend similar ordinances.

Farmers Branch, Texas, wound up owing $7 million in legal bills. Hazleton, Pa., took on debt to pay $1.4 million and eventually had to file for a state bailout. Fremont, Neb., raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services. None of the towns is currently enforcing an ordinance he helped craft.

“This sounds a little bit to me like Harold Hill in ‘The Music Man,’ ” said Larry Dessem, a law professor at the University of Missouri who focuses on legal ethics. “Got a problem here in River City and we can solve it if you buy the band instruments from me. He is selling something that goes well beyond legal services.”

He’s the son Trump never had.

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Trump’s fantasy trade war

by digby

The United States trade deficit widened in June and is on track to be the biggest in a decade despite President Trump’s efforts to slash it.

For the first half of 2018, the trade deficit in goods and services hit $291.2 billion, the federal government reported Friday, which is higher than last year and puts the nation on track to have the largest annual deficit since 2008.

Trump has repeatedly promised to reduce the trade deficit during his White House tenure, but so far, it has grown under his watch.

He claims America’s “massive” trade deficit is a sign the country is getting beaten by China, Germany and others, and he blames the deficit on “very stupid” trade deals. Most economists do not view the trade deficit as a problem. They point out that a big driving factor behind the higher trade deficit this year is that U.S. consumers are buying more stuff. That’s happening largely because the U.S. economy is doing well and people feel bullish enough to shop more for goods. Trump’s tax cuts have also helped fuel the buying spree for foreign products.

“While the administration is intent on reducing the trade deficit — which it wrongly perceives to be the result of unfair trade practices — the implementation of a late-cycle fiscal stimulus package will put further upward pressure on the trade deficit in the coming months,” said Gregory Daco, head of U.S. economics at Oxford Economics, a research firm.

But Trump doesn’t see it that way. He views trade as a zero-sum game where one country is winning and the other is losing. He claims trade wars are “easy to win” and he has launched battles with numerous countries in an effort to pressure their leaders to come to the negotiating table.

They probably would do it just to appease him but he’s so incoherent they don’t have any idea how to do it.

This presidency just gets weirder and weirder and weirder.

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“Yeah, we get it, you don’t like us. Fine. But do you have to put our lives in danger?”

by digby

Katy Tur:

“Yeah, we get it, you don’t like us. Fine. But do you have to put our lives in danger?” Tur asked.

“The president continues to call the press the enemy of the people, even after four journalists and one sales assistant were shot dead in a Maryland newsroom by a man who was angry with what they factually reported about him,” she noted.

“Even after the publisher of The New York Times stressed to him in a private conversation that his words were putting journalists in mortal danger,” Tur continued. “Even after CNN white house reporter Jim Acosta was shouted down and taunted in a rally the other night in Florida.”

“And even after the president’s own daughter, at least publicly, disagreed with her dad.

Tur then played a clip of first daughter and senior White House advisor Ivanka Trump saying she did not view the press as “the enemy of the people.”

“I’m glad someone in the administration said this out loud with a camera recording,” Tur said. “I hope she implores him to tone it down, because either he doesn’t get the problem or he does not care.”

Tur spoke of the abuse she personally receives.

“Sadly, the harassment and threats are not stopping,” she reported. “What you do not see are the nasty letters or packages or emails, the threats of physical violence. ‘I hope you get raped and killed,’ one person wrote to me just this week.”

“Raped and killed,” Tur repeated. “Not just me, but a couple of my female colleagues, as well.”

“In case you want to argue this has nothing to do with the president, the most recent note I got ended with MAGA,” Tur explained, referring to the commander-in-chief’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

Tur urged those within the administration to stop Trump’s attacks on a free press, “before it is too late.”

Others have aspirations

We have an operation

from #NN18 in New Orleans

As progressives, our first instinct is to think or our way out of the wilderness. Or technology our way out. Or message our way out. But elections are not just contests of ideas. They are contests of skills. To win, we need to perfect our slider, retool our backswing, and practice exploding off the blocks. Visualization alone won’t do it. Election Day is a little late to start working on strength and technique.

A quick story for local party volunteers. You all know these guys. They show up at your headquarters every presidential election. You’ve never seen them before, don’t know their names. All they want is a yard sign or a bumper sticker.

But while they wait at our place, they see sign packages lined up along the walls, labeled and staged to go out. They see boxes of sample ballots bundled for Election Day. A parking lot full of cars. Volunteers arriving for a phone bank. People hustling up and down the hallway.

Occasionally, these people who are never going to knock a door or pick up a phone – unprompted – reach into their pockets, pull out a checkbook and ask, Who do I make the check out to? And leave $100.

Because they can see with their own eyes our team has got it going on. And they don’t even know what It is. But it smells like napalm in the morning. It smells … like victory. And they want a piece of that.

So do volunteers. That’s why ours keep coming back and contributing money. Because we don’t just have aspirations. We have an operation. That inspires confidence and builds esprit de corps. We’re not even a campaign. We’re a local Democratic committee providing logistical support for three dozen campaigns across the county. Honestly, a couple staffers from the local Clinton 2016 office who had lost faith in their program came to work after hours with us.

Just over a year ago, I started placing a link to For The Win, my get-out-the-vote planning primer, at the bottom of my morning posts. This is a particularly wonky project no one else seems interested in pursuing, but it means to address a chronic infrastructure gap. It’s a “lead a horse” effort. This is nuts-and-bolts, supply and logistics so basic nobody thinks it important enough to train. Creating and distributing sample ballots. Recruiting, training, and supplying electioneers for dozens of polling stations. Coordinating manpower and logistics for dozens of local, state, and national campaigns. It’s not sexy, just vital.

Progressives by nature immerse themselves in issues, policy, and candidates. When they first engage in party politics, we expect we can dance before we can crawl. We want to engage in an ideological contest of ideas. but what we lack starting out are basic skills. We want to drive the car. Now. We’re not interested in how to build one from parts. We want to do all the sexy stuff before we can put our pants on one leg at a time and tie our shoelaces, in that order.

If you’re like me, you learned whatever you know about GOTV mechanics by the seat of your pants over multiple election cycles, and when you left what you knew left with you, and the next generation began again from scratch.

Sadly, that’s still the way most people learn — from those around them. Problem is, if those around them know little, that’s what they learn. Many local committees don’t do more because they don’t know what more looks like. If you live in a more rural county, odds are the governor’s race isn’t setting up shop out there. Barack Obama isn’t parachuting in a team from Michigan Ave. to show you how a high-energy, months-long campaign operation runs. This cannot stand. That learning curve has to shorten. It’s good to be right. It’s better to be good, too.

For The Win is not messaging or strategy or targeting or canvassing or fundraising — things campaigns can and should do for themselves — or precinct organizing state parties teach every year. I’m trying to teach under-resourced and less-experienced counties the raw mechanics, the nuts-and-bolts no one teaches for coordinating a countywide effort to elect all their candidates. It’s about tasks that supplement, not duplicate, what candidates and their campaigns are already doing. It’s about how to make them happen with little money and minimal computer skills. In fact, I de-emphasize “techy” answers many retirees (often a county’s volunteer base) will struggle to master. Basic Office software can do a lot.

A lot of planning goes into a county committee’s election operation, things like appointing election judges that by law (here anyway) go through the party infrastructure. As I wrote the other day, affiliated groups getting people to promise to vote is terrific. Once they arrive, convincing them to vote for all the down-ballot candidates they’ve never heard of (school board, for example) builds a party’s farm team for state legislative and federal offices. Recruiting and supporting down-ballot candidates and point-of-sale electioneering for important ballot initiatives (and state judges, where applicable) has to happen in 3,141 counties. And it doesn’t happen on its own. It takes planning, mechanics, and logistics.

An experienced election protection attorney from Boston was in our headquarters on GOTV Weekend in 2014. On Election Day, he walks up three hours before the polls close and says, “I’ve never seen an operation like this.” Now, we’re exporting it.

With so many post-2016 activists facing their first-ever general election, For The Win may help bring them up to speed fast. Democrats need more than good candidates and money this fall. They need county-level teams with “game.”

We’ve touched 2,300 counties in 48 states and given webinars for dozens of NC counties. Over 1,000 have downloaded For The Win since last August.

Winning starts with a plan. So does fundraising.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Friday Night Soother