Like me, readers are probably tired of watching Democrats’ early vote leads in the cities evaporate on Election Day when returns come in from dozens of smaller red counties.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) blames it on Democrats’ lack of “core competencies.” She means Democrats at the national level. She should turn her attention to lack of local competencies. An insane amount of money and effort goes into winning races that should go into “party building” so Democrats can win races.
The Washington Post examined what happened to the projected blue wave last week. Political parties in general have “become hollow — top-heavy at the national level, weak at the state and local levels, and lacking a rooted, tangible presence in the lives of voters and engaged activists alike.”
The patronage machines are gone. Mobility, sprawl, and the general “atrophy of civic life in the later 20th century” left local committees, as I’ve said before, with all the institutional vigor of a men’s fraternal organization.
Here is where Barack Obama blew it:
If any individual can bring order to these unwieldy components, it is the president. Yet paradoxically, the Democratic Party has suffered the most under Democratic presidents. Republican presidents going back to Eisenhower have systematically invested in their party’s organizational capacities at the national, state and local levels: funding local party-building initiatives, assiduously recruiting activists, volunteers, and candidates, teaching campaign techniques, and launching fundraising systems. Democratic presidents, in contrast, have repeatedly emphasized enacting policies over party-building.
As Ocasio-Cortez correctly pointed out, Obama failed to sustain the momentum of his groundbreaking 2008 and 2012 campaigns. He diverted the best talent, data, and analytics into Organizing for America, an outside 501(c)(4) group legally prohibited from coordinating with the Democratic Party. The Democratic National Committee (DNC), for its part, abandoned Howard Dean’s much–admired 50-state strategy. When Hillary Clinton inherited the DNC in 2016, she found it “on the verge of insolvency,” riddled with bad data and riven with internal strife. Before leaving office, Obama acknowledged he failed as a party-builder: “We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.”
The problem is most state parties are underfunded and lack the bandwidth to do grassroots party-building. Party-building is not really the Democratic National Committee’s remit. Nor is it in the portfolio of the DCCC or the DSCC. They are essentially caucus campaign PACs. Anyway, high turnover in those organizations makes long-term planning tenuous at best.
When I first conceived For The Win, a friend formerly with the Clinton White House looped me in with the DNC’s political director, an Obama campaign veteran. He liked the concept and asked to see the finished product. In April 2016, his office called to ask if it could distribute the primer to the 50 states. A few weeks later, however, Hillary Clinton cinched the presidential nomination. Team Obama was out, Team Clinton was in. And that was that. The guide went nowhere. That is why I distribute it to county committees myself. If no-name-me sent it to state parties, it would die in committee.
The Post notes that in Nevada former senator Harry M. Reid “professionalized and grew the state party” there. It has a permanent staff and full-time positions in field work and opposition research, etc. This gives Nevada Democrats the ability to organize over “longer time horizons than the next Election Day.”
The Trump-era “Resistance” brought many new players to party politics, including women who rose quickly to take control of local party committees in those small red counties. (I know of two.) Once in place, they would find few resources and little training for them in coordinating a months-long, get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort. Party “basic training” assumes that by the time someone is running the county, they’ve picked up what they need to know by the seat of their pants over multiple election cycles. Bad assumption.
One state’s 273-page county chair’s guide devotes an entire half page to GOTV planning. It includes such handy advice as “Organize rides to the polls.” It assumes the new chair knows what that is, has seen it done, and has some conception of how to organize it, when to start, how to promote it, how many volunteers it would take to coordinate, etc. Like I said, bad assumption.
There is much work to do.