Month: February 2022

Ever since starting Barbara F. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” the parallels between unrest in other countries and ours have been unnerving. International studies from 20 countries identify critical factors in democratic backsliding are factionalization and the politics of resentment fueled by “ethnic entrepreneurs.” Donald Trump is a classic type. In this century, social media acts as an accelerant. Where civil war breaks out, once-dominant groups who see their influence in decline start them.

We are not in the danger zone in this country yet, but warning signs are there. (We ranked there briefly after Trump’s attempted coup.) Have factionalized nations turned things around? South Africa was headed toward civil war and averted one, largely under pressure from the business community. If Walter has more examples than that one to offer, I’m haven’t read that far. “So there’s a chance” is not exactly comforting.

Cascading revelations about Trump’s Jan. 6 coup attempt have E.J. Dionne warning that while democracy itself was on the ballot in 2018 and 2020, it is again in 2022. Republicans are working feverishly under transparent rationalizations to restrict ballot access and to allow GOP partisans to overturn election outcomes they don’t like:

So why are Democrats not shouting from the rooftops about the need to protect democracy? One reason political consultants advance: Democracy issues are a tough sell with most voters, who are far more invested in their day-to-day problems than in a former president or a threat that still feels abstract.

“Making democracy a front-and-center issue is in competition with the malaise people feel over the economy, even if there’s a lot of good news about the economy,” Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg said in an interview. Voters, she added, “look at January 6 as something of a stand-alone event.”

That is what people thought of random attacks in other countries, Walter found. They see lone wolfs, not the packs. Citizens in multiethnic Sarajevo could not conceive of neighbor turning on neighbor until it happened.

Obama administration veteran Stephanie Cutter believes “the threat of Trump will not be enough to make suburban women vote Democratic” in 2022. Bu there is room for Democrats to talk about both economic concerns as well as threats to democracy.

Greenberg adds that a message that “voters should decide elections, not mobs or politicians” could get traction because “what people get upset about is that their votes don’t really count.”

Dionne concludes:

Democrats will be guilty of political malpractice if they fail to challenge Republicans to get off the fence. For their own sake and the country’s, they must demand that GOP candidates stand unambiguously either with or against Trump’s ongoing efforts to demolish American democracy.

This century has been a roller coaster of upset. The Republican Party under Trumpism looks to turn the United States into something antithetical to Americans’ prized sense of themselves. The September 11 attacks shook the country to its core, shattered its sense of invincibility. We turned to xenophobic madness and torture. War crimes.

Then came the economic degradation of the Great Recession. The election of the first Black president sent White America into T-party hysterics and eventually into Trump and insurrection. Covid-19 added to the cultural stress. If Americans really want to see a new normal (the old normal is dead and buried), they need to be the heroes they imagine they are while watching Marvel movies. They need to save democracy, save their businesses (if that’s what motivates them), restore their sense of stability and sense of mission. They need to turn out and vote to make America sane again.

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Texans voted for incompetence and Gov. Greg Abbott delivered — with a side order of death by freezing. Floridians voted for incompetence and Gov. Ron DeSantis delivered — with an even bigger side order of death- by-Covid. MAGAworld voted for incompetence and President Donald J. Trump delivered — with a bigger-still side orders of death- by-Covid, international side-eye, violent insurrection, an attempted coup, and the lowest democracy ranking since the country’s infancy (1800).

Abbott has a chance once more to deliver what his supporters voted for. As winter approached in November and with Texas Public Utility winterization rules not taking effect until Dec. 1, Abbott told Fox 7-Austin, “I can guarantee the lights will stay on.”

 This morning, over 50,000 are without power. Abbott on Tuesday modified his promise:

“No one can guarantee that there won’t be a load shed event,” the governor said in response to a question about how he would measure the success of the electric grid. “But what we will work and strive to achieve and what we are prepared to achieve is that the power will stay on across the entire state.”

Abbott did not say, “I feel that we must maximize our efforts,” but that is what he meant. Load shed event” is a technical euphemism for rolling blackouts.

Washington Post:

Tens of thousands of customers in Texas were without power Thursday morning as a major winter storm continued moving east across the United States, bringing snow, sleet and freezing rain to Midwestern and Southern states.

Nearly 53,000 power outages were reported in Texas early Thursday, along with about 15,000 in Arkansas, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide.

Alexandra Petri reminds readers that what’s past is past and cannot harm us. No need to look behind the curtain. The system worked:

We also learned that Trump wanted to seize voting machines. He actively pushed Attorney General William P. Barr to do that. Then he had Rudy Giuliani telephone the Department of Homeland Security to see about some seizing. Which Giuliani did! But later, when the plan evolved into issuing an executive order to authorize the military to do the seizing, Giuliani didn’t want to do it, and it did not happen. In other words: The system worked just as designed.

Yes, when we reached the coup stage of “ask Giuliani for his opinion about whether the military can seize voting machines,” Giuliani did exactly what he was supposed to do and spontaneously decided hedid not want to overturn the election. That is the robust protection the Founders built into the system! There was never any doubt Giuliani would for no clear reason determine he did want to support the rule of law and oppose having the military seize voting machines!

All the other people Trump leaned on ignored and disregarded him or pretended not to understand what he was tacitly asking. And it is fine, because those people are still in control of the elections — ah, what? They’re being hounded out? They fear for their safety, and the people who are trying to replace them have a much different attitude to election legitimacy?

Well, again, it’s probably fine. This was all in the past, where we keep everything about America that is bad.

You want incompetence, you get incompetence.

Petri reassures us all is well:

As long as we don’t read about the attempted coup or ask anyone questions about it when we invite them on the television, it’s nothing to worry our little heads over. It’s one of those bygones that we have to let be a bygone. Our system is foolproof, for the specified degree of fool that has tried, once, to overturn it so far!

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Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t:

In the final days of his presidency, Donald Trump seriously considered issuing a blanket pardon for all participants in the Jan. 6 riot, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Between Jan. 6 and Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump made three calls to one adviser to discuss the idea. “Do you think I should pardon them? Do you think it’s a good idea? Do you think I have the power to do it?” Trump told the person, who summarized their conversations.

Another adviser to the former president said Trump asked questions about how participants in the riot might be charged criminally, and how a uniform pardon could provide them protection going forward.

“Is it everybody that had a Trump sign or everybody who walked into the Capitol” who could be pardoned? Trump asked, according to that adviser. “He said, ‘Some people think I should pardon them.’ He thought if he could do it, these people would never have to testify or be deposed.”

So he was talking about pardoning them long before they were “treated so unfairly” by law enforcement. He supported them from the beginning.

Hmmm. When I first read about this I thought it was just another example of a wingnut Supreme being blatantly partisan while his allies wring their hands over Biden “politicizing” the Court by promising to name a Black woman. But it appears there may be more to it:

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is set to headline the Federalist Society’s annual conference in Florida over the weekend. It’s closed to the press. And while it may not be a great look for a sitting Supreme Court justice to speak at an ideological event, it’s not uncommon. Gorsuch has spoken at Federalist Society events in the past. In fact, all of the conservative justices on the Court currently have ties, in some form or another, to the conservative organization.

But part of what makes this year’s confab so intriguing are the prominent conservative names he will be sharing the program with.

Other guests lined up to speak at the conference include former VP Mike Pence, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Trump’s former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

All of these three were former MAGA world elite — though, notably, all three are also currently not necessarily in the the ex-president’s good graces. Trump is openly peeved at Pence and has been for some time, most recently admitting that Pence defied him when he chose not to certify the results of the 2020 election, and urging the Jan. 6 Select Committee to investigate Pence. Reports came out today revealing that McEnany recently met virtually with the Jan. 6 Committee and complied with the panel’s subpoena request for text messages as part of its ongoing probe into the violent Capitol attack.

In this way, at least two of those three big MAGA names are directly tied to lingering questions about the events that unfolded on that very important day. And that adds a layer of intrigue to Gorsuch’s appearance at the closed-to-the-media event.

I don’t know that McEnany is really on the outs with Trump. We don’t know how she testified. But the other two are definitely on Trump’s shitlist. Gorsuch himself can’t be a favorite anymore after he voted to let the national Archives give Trump’s papers to the January 6th Committee. And this meeting is taking place in Florida — Trump’s home turf.

With the Court likely to be weighing in on more cases springing from the January 6th Insurrection it’s intriguing to say the least.

The New York Times has done a deep dive on how badly the US has done with the pandemic and it’s sobering. But it fails to account for the real reason it has happened:

No, the country has not “failed” to vaccinate anyone. The right wing has persuaded their voters that vaccination is some kind of a conspiracy and the Republican Party has opportunistically benefited from it. The right has failed the country, not the other way around.

I’m sure that it would be nice to “convince its citizens to protect themselves” and the government managed to do that with the vast majority. The rest are mostly fools who believe it’s better to drink urine or take hose paste than a life-saving, free, accessible, safe vaccine. They should say this.

Or, as Roy Edroso put it:

No, science communication didn't fail — it was countermanded by a death cult demanding its members ignore it. https://t.co/43D8djDT9t

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) February 2, 2022

Trump: Some of these people are not guilty. Many of these people are not guilty. What they’ve done to these and in many cases they’re patriots. They’re soldiers, they’re policemen… Lindsey Graham doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about if he said that pic.twitter.com/M2RpSSu90c

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 2, 2022

After all the boot-licking he’s done, he doesn’t even get the benefit of the doubt:

Huck’s also taking Biden’s side in the Ukraine strategy which is bound to upset Commandante Carlson. How many days do you think it will be before he comes crawling back?

As for Trump’s comments, I think he’s made it quite clear now that he supports the January 6th Insurrection. He believes they were good people who are being treated unfairly for storming the capitol to try to stop the peaceful transfer of power. He’s not trying to hide it.

So, what now?

Whether you like it or not…

Dan Pfeiffer makes the case in his newsletter that despite Biden’s low approval ratings, Democrats should resist the temptation to run against him (“distance themselves”) in the upcoming campaign, as many strategists will no doubt advise. His reasoning:

Dems Need a Strong Biden: Presidential approval is highly correlated with midterm success. In other words, the more popular the president, the better his party will do in the midterm elections. Democrats should want nothing more than for Biden’s approval ratings to go back up to where they were last summer. As a party, we need to do everything we can to strengthen Biden. A midterm strategy based on criticizing the President and performative demonstrations of distance will have the opposite effect. These moments will weaken Biden and weakness makes our chances of winning reelection worse, not better.

The Map: Democrats can maintain the Senate and expand our majority without competing in a single state Donald Trump won in 2020. All of the key governor’s races are happening in Biden country. The House map is more complicated and we have some Democrats running in Trump districts, but as Dave Wasserman of the Cook Report pointed out, there are likely to be more seats that voted for Biden this cycle than voted prior to redistricting. There will, of course, be some Democrats running in Trumpy districts. Those candidates will need a slightly different strategy, but those instances should be the exception, not the rule

The Math: In 2022, our top strategic imperative is to reconstitute the coalition that came together to take the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020.
We can theoretically win the vast majority of these races without persuading a single person who pulled the lever for Trump. It’s hard to see how running away from or running down the Democratic President is a good way to accomplish that goal. This is not to say that it’s all about “turnout.” We know from Virginia and New Jersey that the Republicans are going to come out in droves. But our winning coalition consists of the Democratic base, people who got involved with politics because of Trump, and people who switched sides for the same reason. Persuading people to stay involved with politics or stick with the Democrats is not an easy feat, but treating the Democratic President as persona non-grata will make it impossible.

It’s a Distraction: Democrats are at a massive messaging disadvantage in this election. The Republicans spend more money on ads. They have Fox and the MAGA media; and Facebook’s algorithm to push the message in front of every laptop, tablet, and phone. Democrats must work harder and smarter to get the message out. Every ounce of time and energy needs to be dedicated to making the case for Democrats and against Republicans. Why would we ever spend a single newscycle, tweet, or ad reinforcing the Republican case against the Democratic President?

It’s Impractical and Stupid: By seeking out distance from Biden, Democrats will get all of the downsides and none of the upsides of the President. Hypothetically, let’s say that some of the candidates following this terrible advice manage to appear on stage with Joe Biden for the whole campaign. What do these political “gurus” think will happen? Will the Republicans give up trying to tie them to Biden? Are these consultants aware that photoshop exists and that even if their candidate never appears in a photo with Biden the GOP can still put them together in a campaign ad?

While the President’s numbers are down with Democrats, he still has the approval of approximately 80 percent of Democrats in most polls. His approval rating among Republicans is in the single digits. Among Independents, it’s typically in the 30s. Democrats are unlikely to outperform Biden among Republicans. To win, they need to do better among Independents, but criticizing and weakening a President who eight in ten of our most reliable voters support is a terrible way to achieve our goal.

I think he’s right. There is no margin in running from the president. It won’t work anyway. People aren’t that stupid. And it may very well antagonize base voters.

They need to run against the Republicans, aka the Trump cult. This shouldn’t be hard.

Generally speaking, the Washington press corps and, in particular, the political reporters at the New York Times are not ones to engage in hyperbole when it comes to Donald Trump. If anything, the paper of record has been downplaying the ongoing saga of Trump’s Big Lie and all the evidence that’s been piling up about what happened in the lead-up to January 6th recently. But this week’s Trump news seems to have shaken even their jaded attitude.

For instance, the Times’ Peter Baker tweeted on Tuesday, “Even for Trump it’s quite a week — first dangling pardons for capitol attackers, then admitting his goal was to have ‘overturned the election’ and now calling on the House to investigate Pence for not throwing out votes of multiple states so a president who lost could keep power.” Then the Times’ Maggie Haberman, appearing on CNN on Tuesday night, said, “it’s been a breathtaking couple of days.” This NYT piece by Shane Goldmacher headlined “Trump’s Words, and Deeds, Reveal Depths of His Drive to Retain Power” says it all.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Trump’s scripted comments at the rally in Texas over the weekend in which he promised pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists who were “treated unfairly” and called for protests against prosecutors who are investigating him. But that was just the beginning. On Monday, Trump put out a truly revealing statement (which some might call an admission of guilt.)

“He could have overturned the election.” This is an admission, and a massively un-American statement. It is time for every Republican leader to pick a side… Trump or the Constitution, there is no middle on defending our nation anymore. pic.twitter.com/Bp3dfn7cBe

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) January 31, 2022

Republican leaders have picked a side and it appears to be Trump’s. As usual, there hasn’t been much of an outcry about any of this. Oh sure, a few have said it’s “inappropriate” to talk about pardoning the January 6th rioters and there has been some tut-tutting about how “the process worked” but that’s about it.

Trump followed up his confession that he wanted to overturn the election by suggesting that the January 6th Committee should investigate Mike Pence if they believe he could have overturned the election and ask him why he didn’t do it. I would guess that’s Trump’s pathetic attempt at trying to clean up his earlier comment but it’s incredibly lame and self-defeating. He shouldn’t be pushing Mike Pence toward the committee — Pence’s closest aide and his lawyer both testified for hours this week.

It couldn’t have helped his agitated mood to see new details emerge about those crazy meetings in the White House after the election when he and his lawyers were trying to find ways to do exactly what he wanted Mike Pence to do on January 6th: overturn the election. I’ve been intrigued by the one that took place on December 18th ever since it was reported and I wrote about it just the other day. What we knew was already so nuts that it’s hard to believe it could be any loonier — but it is.

Recall that General Michael Flynn, Trump lawyer Sidney “Kraken” Powell and the former CEO of Overstock.com somehow got into the White House and proposed to Trump that he sign an Executive Order naming Powell as Special Counsel to investigate the alleged election fraud and order the military to seize the voting machines. What we didn’t know until the NY Times and CNN reported it this week is that Trump had earlier tried to get former Attorney General William Barr to have the Justice Department seize machines and Barr told him he could not do it because it would require probable cause and there wasn’t any. (Barr resigned not long after.)

We also learned that when the idea of an Executive Order to the Penatagon was shot down by Rudy Giuliani and others, Trump directed Giuliani to see if the Department of Homeland Security could do it. And there was reportedly yet another draft Executive Order drawn up to that effect. In the end, none of the Executive Orders were signed and no one agreed to seize the voting machines. (Just imagine if they had actually tried to do that …)

Until now, Trump has been portrayed as sort of passive in all this, simply receiving proposals from his minions and henchmen and not directing any of the action. It was never particularly believable except to the extent that he played the role of the mob boss who only has to quirk an eyebrow and his lieutenants know what to do. Fortunately for the country, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte points out, Trump was saved by his lackeys and accomplices, either because they were too inept to carry out the coup or because even they had reached the end of the line with his lunacy.

But Trump can no longer hide behind his henchmen. We now know that Bill Barr told him that seizing the voting machines was illegal without a court order which requires probable cause and there was none. Yet he still entertained the proposal that he issue executive orders to the Pentagon and DHS to do it anyway. And according to the Times, Trump also made overtures to state officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania to have law enforcement agencies take control of voting machines, which were rebuffed. He was clearly convinced that if he could get someone to seize those machines it could turn the tide and somehow overturn the election.

Was it that he believed Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn’s inane conspiracy theories that said the machines were rigged by the very dead Hugo Chavez or had been surreptitiously sent to Italy to have the votes changed? Or did he just think that making such a dramatic move would change the dynamic and make the state actors take action to change the electoral count? It’s hard to know. Trump believes that he can change reality simply be saying things over and over again (and it works on about 35% of the population.) Maybe he just thought he could will it to be true.

These latest revelations do show us just how different these days are than 48 years ago when it was revealed that Richard Nixon had tried to get the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into Watergate. That was known as the “smoking gun” in that case and it made dozens of Republicans and conservative Democrats turn against him. He resigned days later.

What Trump did was worse.

He tried to use the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security (and for all we know the CIA and the Department of Education too) to overturn a legal election that he lost. And his party shrugs. Worse than that he is the front runner for the nomination in the next presidential election. If, for some reason, he is actually held to account for any of this — or anything at all — it won’t be because the Republican Party lifted a finger to make it happen. 

Salon

Russian President Vladimir Putin has a sad. The U.S. and its allies are ignoring the autocrat’s legitimate security concerns, he claims. Russia annexed the Crimea in 2014, and Putin placed a 100,000-strong invasion force on his border with un-annexed Ukraine in recent months. Putin claims that NATO allies would be the aggressors if they allow Ukraine to join the western alliance (Washington Post):

In remarks to reporters at a Moscow news conference with the visiting leader of NATO ally Hungary, Putin said the Kremlin is still studying the U.S. and NATO’s response to the Russian security demands received last week. But he said it was clear that the West has ignored Russian demands that NATO not expand to Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations, refrain from deploying offensive weapons near Russia and roll back its deployments to Eastern Europe.

“While the Biden administration insists it will not allow Moscow to quash Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO, it has no immediate plans to help bring the former Soviet republic into the alliance,” the New York Times reported three weeks ago. Putin wants a veto on NATO membership.

The White House is not budging:

“When the fox is screaming from the top of the henhouse that he’s scared of the chickens, which is essentially what they’re doing, that fear isn’t reported as a statement of fact,” Psaki said Tuesday, as Western officials continued diplomatic efforts to defuse a potential further Russian invasion of Ukraine. “We know who the fox is in this case.”

Joining the back-and-forth, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov retorted Wednesday that Russia was a bear, not a fox, and “too big and heavy to climb on a henhouse.”

Yes. Seriously.

Associated Press:

Putin said the Western allies’ refusal to meet Russia’s demands violates their obligations on the integrity of security for all nations. He warned that a Ukrainian accession to NATO could lead to a situation where Ukraine launches military action to reclaim control over Russian-annexed Crimea or areas controlled by Russia-backed separatists in the country’s east.

“Imagine that Ukraine becomes a NATO member and launches those military operations,” Putin said. “Should we fight NATO then? Has anyone thought about it?”

NATO has generals and strategists whose full-time job it is to think about it.

Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper

Putin’s excellent gambit to fracture NATO and to recreate the Russian federation from its ashes has not gone well since Crimea, writes Fred Kaplan at Slate. Instead, he has reenergized a NATO alliance recovering its footing after an attack on its western front between 2017 and 2021 instigated by a former U.S. president and Putin puppet:

Putin had reason to believe things would go otherwise. He saw President Biden touting the Quad—the shiny new alliance of the U.S., Japan, India, and Australia, which would unify the Asian and Pacific allies and fend off a rising China—and may have figured that NATO had receded in importance. He also watched Biden bug out of Afghanistan, and while he may have sympathized with the move (his beloved Soviet Union was among those entombed in that graveyard of empires), he no doubt noticed the withdrawal’s rushed incompetence and the concern, if not panic, that it roused among U.S. allies. Meanwhile, the UK was out on its post-Brexit own; Angela Merkel had retired as Germany’s chancellor, leaving NATO’s largest, richest country in momentary flux; and French President Emmanuel Macron was seeking to take her place as the continent’s leader with a vision of Europe’s “strategic autonomy” from Washington.

Who knows whether all this was passing through Putin’s mind, but objectively it must have seemed a good time to make a move—especially since the pesky Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, was drifting ever further to the west, renewing his request for NATO membership, and U.S. officials were indulging him, saying they’d invite him in the club someday. Meanwhile, the U.S. was supplying Ukraine’s soldiers with weapons and sending American soldiers as trainers, along with corps of special forces and CIA agents, who were up to who knows what mischief.

Putin may have thought the threat of cutting off Russian gas supplies in winter might give some NATO members pause, Kaplan writes. If they didn’t accede to an agreement never to admit Ukraine, a combination of weather, economics, and political uncertainty to his west might gain him Ukraine without a shot fired. Just like Crimea. Things have not gone his way this time.

Donald Trump lost the White House and faces indictment. The Trump administrations’ incompetents have been replaced with skilled negotiators: Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, both experienced foreign policy hands. Biden himself spent years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and eight as vice president.

Instead of NATO floundering, Kaplan explains:

… Washington has put 8,500 more troops on high alert for deployment to Poland and Estonia, to shore up the eastern flanks of NATO. Poland and Britain have announced a “trilateral security pact” with Ukraine, and, though no one knows quite what it means, the two countries are in the meantime redoubling their recent arms shipments to Kyiv. Sweden and Finland, Russia’s thoroughly western neighbors, which have stayed militarily neutral for all these decades, are now mulling the prospect of joining NATO.

Now Putin has to figure out whether spilling blood is worth having the west’s banks freeze the accounts of Russian oligarchs he’s made loyal because he’s made them rich. Perhaps NATO resolve would collapse if he invaded. If he does not, how can he withdraw and save face.

“Nobody knows what Putin prefers,” Kaplan writes. Maybe not even Putin. “If he’s looking for an exit ramp off this highway to catastrophe, the question is how to get him to take it while giving him a way to save face. Simply backing him into a corner would probably push him to double down.”

There are signs diplomacy still has a chance. Unless some military miscalculation sets off the powder.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

There is a disconnect between how grassroots party politics actually works and how people think things work. Amanda Litman of Run For Something discussed some of that on Ezra Klein’s podcast. People see the hundreds of millions spent on presidential campaigns and think that money is somehow floating around the other three years of the cycle. It is not.

As Litman and James Carville observed, Democratic activists will pour $90 million into Amy McGrath’s doomed campaign to oust Mitch McConnell. But they won’t invest the same into thousands of small-potatoes races that build Democrats’ ability to compete and build their state benches. Plus, well-funded presidential campaigns don’t go into rural areas and model how it’s done. Nor do Senate or gubernatorial campaigns.

But in addition to chronic financial deficits at the state and local levels, and the lack of a command of media corresponding to that on the right, Democrats suffer from inertia. They do things the way they’ve always been done.

It is gospel that precinct organization is the foundation of the party. Has been for decades. That is still true from an organizational and election administration perspective. But what gets lost in that culture is that parties exist to elect their members to office. Period. All the rest is overhead.

Training geared toward precinct captains turning out their voters on Election Day is out of date. It’s not how elections have operated in decades. The majority of states have some form of early voting. Multiple states vote by mail. Training has not adapted.

My county spans 660 square miles. It has 270,000 residents, 200,000 registered voters. There are 80 Election Day voting places. Perhaps three dozen Democrats on the ballot in a presidential year. There are two and a half weeks of early voting ahead of Election Day at 15 or so locations scattered across the county. Anyone from anywhere in the county can vote at any one. These sites are not the responsibility of specific precinct captains. Yet, party trainings assume a precinct turnout model as though elections are still a one-day, 14-hour marathon at a time when two-thirds to three-quarters of the vote is cast before Election Day.

Where is the training to teach county committee chairs how to coordinate the efforts of all their campaigns and give support to the weakest? Where is the training to teach county committee chairs how to organize electioneering for two and a half weeks? How to ensure there are volunteers handing voters sample ballots, instructing them to vote not just the marquee races, but for the back-of-ballot races Litman hopes her candidates will win but voters often leave blank? Those volunteers have to be recruited trained, scheduled, supplied, and resupplied — thousands of volunteer shifts in a large county. And more on Election Day precinct chairs are supposed to schedule. What about training in how to organize a rides-to-the-polls effort? There are election protection attorneys to be recruited. And poll observers. There is literature to be designed, printed, and distributed in an orderly fashion so it’s not gone before Election Day.

Mechanics and logistics.

Naturally, the work (and budget) scales down for counties under 100,000, but it still needs doing. Precinct chair manuals are available everywhere online. But they don’t cover the above. Out of 273 pages on party administration, one state’s county chair manual serves up an entire half page on get-out-the-vote (GOTV) planning. One bit of helpful advice: “Organize rides to the polls.” How, exactly? Writers of these manuals assume people reading them already know what they’re talking about.

That’s why For The Win exists: for county leaders who don’t. To show them how to create a program with limited budgets and computer skills. One organizer said of state party materials, “It’s like they give you a small box of parts with no assembly instructions. You’ve written the assembly instructions.”

Learn how to run meetings somewhere else. Eight years on, you won’t find this available anywhere else.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.