Two points in the Run Every Race discussion

Greg points to this story about an ongoing effort to build the Democratic Party in Nebraska that encompasses one of the main points of the Run Every Race mantra that many of us have been chanting.

Determined to rebuild their party after a decade of decline, Nebraska Democrats are embarking this week on an ambitious 93-county grassroots strategy.

A regional training session for Democratic activists and candidates in North Platte this weekend is the marker jump-starting a determined bid to create a two-party state.

"This will be a concerted effort to build a structure in all 93 counties (and) compete in areas that now may be considered hostile," said Barry Rubin, the Nebraska Democratic Party's executive director.

One of the main goals we have in mind for the idealized 254-county strategy here is improving (in some cases, building from scratch) the Democratic infrastructure in Texas. I say it's much easier to get people involved, especially in a way that makes them want to keep at it after the election is over, if they're directly supporting a friend and neighbor instead of some far off person they'll likely never meet. Once you've got that going, then you can integrate into the larger whole. Obviously, involvement and assistance from the state party is key to ensure that integration takes place.

Next is this LA Times piece on the push from grassroots and blog activists for a more aggressive effort to recruit and support candidates in the Congressional elections. The usual nattering about why supporting longshot candidates is there, and I think this comment by Mimikatz sums up my feelings on the subject about as well as anything. We're still capable of prioritizing where our scarce recources go, and to get back to Item #1 in this post for a moment, one of the tasks we'd ask of the pioneer candidates is to assist in the party infrastructure building out there by getting people involved, tapping into previously ignored donor populations (again, it seems to me that people will be more likely to throw a few coins at someone they know or can get to know than someone they don't), and delivering the message to places it isn't now going. It's two sides of the same coin, and the goal, even more than hitting an unexpected electoral jackpot, is to grow the base and eventually turn some of these longshot races into more competitive ones. We won't succeed everywhere, of course, but we'll certainly do better than we would have by doing nothing.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on August 10, 2005 to Election 2006 | TrackBack