Every four years, people who otherwise pay no attention to politics get revved up over the presidential horse race. Others never do. Local canvassers report knocking door after door where citizens are unaware there is an election coming. Readers of this blog may find that stunning, but that is because they are readers of this blog.
Much of what people think they know about party politics they learn from watching the presidential contest every four years. Their image is as distorted as the billions spent on presidential races. They leave the impression that that kind of money is floating around party politics the other three years. It is not. Not even remotely. It’s common to encounter election-year volunteers who think local Democratic Party officers get paid for the hours they put in. In Miami-Dade County, Fla. (pop. 2.8 million), maybe. But in bright-red Toombs County, Ga. west of Savannah (pop. 27,000) you won’t even find a county Democratic committee. The Facebook page still online hasn’t been updated since mid-September. Other pages from nearby counties are dummy pages someone set up in 2017 that were never used. A third of Georgia lives in 134 counties under 100,000 in population.
Why should you care? Because you can’t win if you don’t show up to play. Because Democrats running in statewide races and presidential campaigns clean up in bright, blue cities only to have their clocks cleaned in rural places where their organizations are moribund or nonexistent. Because clusters of small, rural counties elect state house and senate members who will redraw state and federal district maps in 2021. Because big statewide and presidential campaigns care about votes in bulk and I need them — you need them — where they matter to winning district races or to winning U.S. Senate seats Democrats now forfeit to the GOP. And if not to win outright, then to shave GOP statewide margins. When last North Carolina went blue (2008), it did so by under 14,000 votes.
I tell For The Win webinar and training participants:
In 2010, directly and through groups he funded, Art Pope, North Carolina’s own mini-Koch brother, threw nearly a million dollars at state Sen. John Snow’s district in North Carolina’s western mountains. Pope groups targeted Snow with two dozen mass mailings. One attack, Mayer wrote, was reminiscent of the infamous Willie Horton ad from 1988. Even after all that money, the last Democratic senator standing in the far west lost his seat by 161 votes in a district spanning 8 counties with an average population under 30,000 – by 2/10ths of 1 percent, less than the undervote in each of the district’s two largest counties.
I addressed the boom-and-bust funding of campaign seasons last November, but smaller counties never see booms even in presidential years. Democrats’ organizing model is like waiting for the Olympics every four years to start training, then blaming losses on weak candidates and weaker messaging. Elections are not just contests of ideas. They are contests of skills. Skills that don’t just manifest on demand.
Three weeks ago, I did some email coaching for a new, western-state county chair in a red county that had been dormant for decades. It’s a start.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. 2,600+ counties contacted, roughly 900 “opens,” over 400 downloads. (It’s a lead-a-horse effort.) Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.