I noticed this article today. It was right after I read a post at the DFA blog. Someone at the Cincinnati fundraiser yesterday asked Howard Dean why he doesn't take credit for things. I thought this was a nice answer.
We talked a little bit more, I mentioned that he never takes credit for what he does and he said that he has found that if you let others take credit for what you do, more gets done.
MyDD has a write-up about Harvard University's Elaine Kamarck's paper on the 50 State Strategy. It sounds like it may be a pretty favorable review, though not totally definitive.
A summary:
http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol4/iss3/art5/Assessing Howard Dean's Fifty State Strategy and the 2006 Midterm Elections
Throughout the 2006 midterm elections, the press wrote about the conflict over campaign strategy between Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and his counterparts in Congress, Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emmanuel, the heads of the Senate and House campaigns, respectively. Schumer and Emmanuel, as well as other Beltway strategists, disagreed with Dean's "fifty state strategy" to build the party across the nation, arguing that DNC funds should focus on the races targeted by the congressional parties.
This essay explains, in part, why Dean's popularity suffers in Washington – even after decisive Democratic victories – and why he continues to have support outside the Beltway. It also provides preliminary evidence that Dean's fifty-state strategy paid off in terms of increasing the Democratic vote share beyond the bounce of a national tide favoring Democrats. Recommended Citation
Elaine C. Kamarck (2006) "Assessing Howard Dean's Fifty State Strategy and the 2006 Midterm Elections," The Forum: Vol. 4 : Iss. 3, Article 5.
Available at:
http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol4/iss3/art5 I can not get access to the full article because apparently my library is not a subscriber. MyDD has a write-up about it, so I will quote from it.
Chris Bowers writes about the article:
http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/1/11/142551/346"Harvard University's Elaine Kamarck has produced a paper that tries to quantify the impact of the fifty state strategy on House races in the 2006 elections, "Assessing Howard Dean's Fifty State Strategy and the 2006 Midterm Elections". You can read the paper here, and guest access is not hard to get in order to peruse the entire text.
It is worth a read for anyone interested in the debate over narrow targeting and television air time versus the fifty state strategy and on the ground organizing. From page four of the paper:
By the end of Dean's first year in office, the fifty state strategy was in full swing. The DNC was paying for 183 people working for state parties as part of their coordinated campaigns. Most of this work went on below the radar screen.
More from Chris Bowers:
"I admit I was unaware of the wide scope of the fifty-state strategy--183 paid organizers is quite a large amount. It is certainly a very expensive electoral and party-building strategy that shifts a huge amount of funds away from television advertising during the final few weeks of the campaign in selected, narrowly targeted districts. Assessing the effectiveness of this strategy with an objective eye thus becomes increasingly important, since tens of millions of campaign dollars are at stake, and both those within the Democratic party infrastructure who favor the fifty-state strategy, such as state party chairs, as well as those who oppose it, such as consultants for Democratic campaign committees, stand to either gain or lose a huge amount of money depending on the scale to which the strategy is implemented."
He quotes from Elaine again...wish I could see the article.
As Table 1 indicates, those congressional districts where the DNC had paid organizers on the ground for over a year more than doubled the Democratic vote over what would have happened due to forces outside the control of the Party, such as the war in Iraq and the unpopularity of a Republican President. This is a powerful testament to the value of a long-term party building approach. Gains in the Democratic vote occurred where the Democrat won and where the Democrat lost. The Democratic candidate won in 20 of the 39 districts where the DNC had organizers but this should not detract from the accomplishment of dramatically increasing the vote in those districts. In some places the organizer's initial and primary responsibility was to increase the vote in order to impact statewide races. In others the Democrats created a swing district where there had been none before.
...."For the sake of brevity, Table 2 summarizes the results of the analysis. It suggests that, in the absence of significant amounts of DCCC money, the presence of a DNC organizer in a congressional district puts the average Democratic increase in the vote significantly above what would be expected simply given the anti-Republican currents in the country in 2006.
Chris presents a little summary.
"While I am not convinced by the amounts of money she lists as independent expenditures by the DCCC in the districts in question (her figures seems very low),
overall, the message is clear: the paid organizers in these key districts led to a substantial increase in the Democratic vote share over 2002. Some may question whether a gain of three to eight percentage points is worth the huge amounts of money the DNC spent to employ these organizers, but I think it definitely was.
I believe that field organizing has much longer-term effects than television-based forms of voter contact, which will benefit Democrats in the targeted areas for many election cycles to come almost no matter who the future Democratic candidates in those districts may be."
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