Brain really not functioning: citation for my previous post:
- Get rid of caucuses
- Tell Iowa and New Hampshire to go fuck themselves.
- Keep superdelegates. They’ll be less of an issue if there aren’t stupid caucuses with a shitbag like Sanders winning and the media pretending there’s a horse race.
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My choice is the dark horse candidate, Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Liberal mayor in a red state. Rhodes scholar. Gay.
In my opinion the most critical issue facing the Democratic party is that they’ve lost so much ground at the local and state level, which feeds into losing a lot of ground at the national level legislatures. They’re effectively betting the farm on having a rock star presidential candidate. Which doesn’t work when you don’t. It doesn’t even work very well when you do, since you can’t really achieve very much without the support of the legislature.
So my feeling is that worrying about their positions on super-delegates or caucuses and primaries is a distraction. I’d much rather see a DNC that can competently and vigorously support local and state level candidates. One where they’re playing a long game and not only having more of an impact on local and state level policies but also building up a deep pool of strong candidates at the national level. Honestly, with that in place I think the presidency thing will sort itself out. As it stands, they’re at a terrible disadvantage and I think it is naive to think that 2018 and 2020 is going to have a hugely positive outcome.
So I would support whoever I felt would be most capable of implementing a successful “50 state strategy”. I think all the candidates for this position have at least talked about that. I’m not in a good position to understand who might be the best candidate to actually implement this.
As a more general point I think the American focus on the presidency is actually quite unhealthy. I understand why it happens, and that its just easier to think about and report on, but I wish people would insist on, and show more interest in, more coverage of more local races. Oh well. I have no idea how to fix that.
I’ll support whoever commits to running people for EVERY electoral position in the country. There are way too many unchallenged GOP House members, state lege positions, governors, county commissioners, etc. Hell, find candidates for dog catcher and run them! There are way too many unchallenged Republicans in local, state and national offices. How can Dem voters vote for Dems if there are no Dems running for them to vote for?
My choice too. I like that he’s young and outside the establishment.
Or at least, in the interim, change the rules so they work like Republican caucuses, with ballots.
Factual question for slightly nerdy foreigner: who votes for the party chair? I get the impression that party structures are much looser, and as a result, possibly more opaque with you than with us.
Handicapping is tough.
Per CNN, "Aides and vote-counters for several candidates say they believe Perez – who says he has commitments of support from 180 of the DNC’s 447 voting members – has a narrow lead over Ellison.”
But from The Hill: Ellison holds edge in DNC race: survey
It’s the Committee (as in Democratic National Committee) itself that votes for the head-position. Wikipedia has:
That language comes from the DNC site: https://www.democrats.org/organization/the-democratic-national-committee
I’m a bit unclear on the “200 members elected” in the states bit, and don’t see additional explanation of it on the site. That information is surely in the Charter and Bylaws–but it’s not entirely clear. It seems to be the same thing as the delegates to the National Convention, determined via:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.democrats.org/Downloads/DNC_Charter__Bylaws_9.17.15.pdf
That sounds good, but is economically not possible. The parties “invest” money in candidates expecting, in the vast majority of cases, an immediate return. Some longshot races may be funded with the idea of building up the party in that specific area for future races, but neither party is going to spend much money on running a candidate in a sure loser race just so they can say they did. They’d rather use those funds to bolster their chances in tight races.
Yeah, thanks in advance for your future decision to stop helping the party with your advice.
Suicide strategy. Waste money running in every Kansas State rep seat. Siphon money away from suburban Chicago or Detroit to do it.
Hire Jeremy Corbyn as a consultant too, while you’re at it.
Not showing up for state legislature races is exactly what’s led to our current hollowed-out Democratic Party that was in dire trouble the moment we lost the White House. Fuck that shit.
Look, if every state has 100 state delegates and 40 state senators (we’ll ignore NH for purposes of this discussion), and we can skip 10-12 states where we’re already doing fine at that level, and we have $1000 of seed money available for each candidate: that’s $5.6 million. And usually these races are every 4 years.
*
If the Democratic Party can’t afford $1.4M per year to field a full team in state legislative races, something’s very broken about the Democratic Party.* Just sayin’.
Hell, let them set up a fund for exactly this purpose with $50K in it for starters and a goal of $1.4M/year, get the word out that it’s there, and see if there are enough people like me out there to make it viable. I know I’m far from the only one who puts this at the top of the list of things they’d support if the Dems did it.
But fuck-all if I’m going to give to the DNC just to watch them find new ways of pissing my money away. I’d had it with that years ago.
The other thing I’d like to see the national Democratic party put some money and staffing into is an institutionalized support system for candidates for state legislature.
For instance, the party should make sure that they have to handle as little of the back-office stuff as possible. The state party, with money from the national party if needed, should take care of grabbing URLs for the candidates’ websites, setting up a skeleton website with the ‘donate’ button feeding into an account managed by the state party, and an address for contributions by check that the state party handles as well. They’d funnel the money directly back to the candidates, but the state party HQ staff would keep track of all the contributions and handle all the paperwork and reporting associated with that end of things.
The party could also publish a ‘here’s what you actually DO when you run for state legislature’ booklet for prospective candidates, giving guidance about everything from what groups are good to contact who might welcome you as a speaker to how to get free media in a positive way. And perhaps even hold a ‘boot camp’ for first-time candidates.
Or funneling the sort of detailed demographic information about the candidate’s district that the previous Presidential campaign surely collected, so that the candidates knew where to best spend their time knocking on doors. Ditto any voter registration lists for the district that were obtained by higher-level candidates.
And the thing about this sort of stuff is that you don’t have to set all this stuff up once for each candidate, so it’s a lot cheaper than giving money to each candidate to do it on their own.
And it would lower the bar for prospective candidates considering a run. The more support the party can provide, the less they’re on their own and having to every wheel involved in running for office, the less daunting it would be to run. And the less daunting it is to run, the more candidates step up, the more races you win, and the more of an experienced pool of candidates you get, so you have fewer first-time candidates that you need to help, and less money is needed to help them.
This isn’t exactly rocket science, one would think. But if they’re doing it, they’re sure being quiet about it.
Perez missed by one vote in the first round of voting. A few minor candidates dropped out, including one particularly whiny Bernie Brat. Perez should lock this up in the second round of voting and can get started working on building a strong center left party to crush the Republicans.
Perez takes it and names Elllison deputy DNC chair. Time to take the fight to the Republicans
The son of Dominican immigrants who spent years of his life as a Civil Rights attorney is “the insider”?
He strikes me as being far more effective as an administrator, which what the job calls for than Ellison, though I have nothing against Ellison and know people who’ve met him.
That said, his “Reichstag fire” comments were incredibly stupid.
Tom Perez, “strong.” Ha!
Well, I guess the DNC will continue to be useless now.
Why do you think getting rid of the caucuses is a bad idea?
Wouldn’t you agree that primaries are more democratic?
If not, then why not?