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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat is your local Democratic Party doing to develop candidates and drive voter turnout?
I started a thread on this over the weekend and it sunk like a rock.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024511752
The replies, and this morning's post about Democrats not even running candidates in some races, are not encouraging.
I think it's important, so I'm trying again.
In Wisconsin, the Democratic Party is organized by County. Congressional districts, State Senate districts and State Assembly districts do not follow County lines.
As a result, I volunteer at two different County Party offices, and have observed them evolving over the past few years. Disclaimer: My knowlege of how things run in the offices is admittedly superficial. If I have mis-characterized anything here my apologies in advance, and a promise of a correction/update as I learn more.
But here's what I'm observing: Both offices are under new leadership in the last two years, and both seem to be getting stronger. Meeting agendas are provided in advance and well-written minutes are reliably emailed shortly following. Timely, interesting and informative speakers and forums are being regularly scheduled, and attandance is fair to good. There's energy and enthusiasm and a sense of quiet competency.
Both offices suffer from a lack of automated organizational tools. Email, snail mail and phone lists are not automated in ways that could make them more useful. There is little to no data sharing betwen offices, or between offices and the State Party.
Both offices are struggling to figure out how to take best advantage of social medial like Facebook and Twitter.
While there are some good candidate-development programs available to Democrats in the State, the local offices don't have anything resembling an effective candidate pipeline. There's no effective ongoing coaching of candidates regarding issues, nor help for them in developing the personal skills - effective public speaking, debate, presentation techniques.
Printed materials are put together by well-meaning volunteers, not skilled advertising professionals, and lack both the visual attraction and the subliminal psychology the other side uses so very well.
Finally, and so important, voter registration is underserved.
So, what does your local Party office do? What best practices can you share? What improvements would you like to see?
How can we make our local Party offices as effective as possible? How can we develop great candidates and provide them with great turnouts?
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Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)
Gothmog
(145,264 posts)We had 40+ precinct chairs at this meeting. We have recruited a number of good candidates for local races. We have one staff person from the state party and a county party employee working on block walking. There are 40,000 voters who voted in 2012 who did not vote in 2010. We have identified these voters and will be contacting each and every one of these voters before the general election. We are working with the Davis campaign and Battleground Texas.
We have a new webpage and we have Juanita Jean (her husband is our party chair).
Democrats are doing well in the major cities (other than Fort Worth). If we can win in the suburbs, then we can be competitive in the state.
My county is the former home of Tom Delay and we will have to work hard to turn my county. It is going to be hard but is doable.
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)the county has recently turned heavily Democratic.
The town party leadership changed much for the better around Obama's first run and coincidentally we had a huge rush of support. Wasn't to last, however, and though we're still sorta re-energized, it just isn't there the way it was then. Wasn't that long ago we actually advertised for local candidates.
Last year we had a perked up a little an had a good local slate, (including me--I ran for Trustee) but lost just about every office. We've got some new people in the local party now who think they have the trick. We'll see-- they showed up during the campaign last year and while they're not the reason we lost, well, we'll see.
Tonight we're having our monthly meeting with guest speakers from the Democratic club two towns over. They've been wildly successful and we hope to hear why.
(Threads about local politics always sink like a stone around here, unlike certain other topics-- as an experiment, I'm throwing PORN in here to see if it snags anyone doing a word search. And lets add-- Female dogs are called BITCHES just to make sure.)
