Is Howard Dean's Strategy working?
By J Map Comments (19) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
"All politics is local", is a phrase all political pundits know by heart. Yet, when Howard Dean revealed his plan to transfer money from the DNC to state and local committees he was said to be wasting valuable resouces. Later, in the final weeks of the campaign when the RNC held a $17.8 million advantage over the DNC, many in Democratic circles were calling for Dean's head.
However, Even though the RNC had a huge financial advantage in the final weeks of the campaign, the RNC failed to stem the tide and put enough Republicans over the top to maintain control of Congress, or at least the Senate. Could Howard Dean's strategy be part of the reason why Republicans lost so badly? An example of his strategy in action is below the fold...
In August, Howard Dean sent $100,000 to lowly Delaware as part of his "50 State Strategy." Delaware is a State that has gone for the Democratic Candidate for the past four Presidential elections. All pundits agree Delaware is a solidly Blue state.
The Delaware Republicans were putting up the most experienced prosecutor, with a 6-1 favorability, as their candidate for attorney general. The Democrats ran Beau Biden, who's never prosecuted a single criminal case in Delaware. In the final weeks of the campaign, the Republican Ferris Wharton, and two Republican state senate (farm team) candidates held leads in the polls. That all changed however, in the final 72 hours of the campaign.
Turns out, the Democrats used the DNC's $100,000 to pay for 2 field representatives who engineered the largest GOTV effort the Democrats had ever put forth in Delaware's history. The state party used that money to rent 36 vans for union workers and paid college students to go door to door and drag Democrats to the polls and pull the blue lever. It provided the difference as Beau Biden won by a few percentage points. Both of the Republicans hoped-for farm team candidates lost badly as well.
While Dean's strategy may have seemed initially to be a poor use of limited resources, it effectively destroyed the Republican Party in Delaware. Even the respected centrist Mike Castle received 10 percentage points less than what he's accustomed to each election day.
Across the country, blue states were able to use the DNC's funds to solidify their ground game. Just look at what happened in Pennsylvania. In the midwest, the DNC was able to finance the state efforts in Indiana and Ohio, which rejected Republicans left and right. In the south, where Dean was criticized wherever he went, The Democrats were able to win a US Senate Seat in Virginia and a house race in North Carolina.
Republicans have criticized him everywhere with "scream contests", and Democrats have disagreed with him internally. Yet the week after the polls closed it wasn't the DNC chair who had to resign and whose replacement was being debated.
would the result have been 144 slashed tires?
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Bipartisanship = give + take. Republicans give. Democrats take.
You are right about the unions and the vans. However, in Sussex County, home to 1/5 of the voters and 25% of the Republicans, we hit all our turnout goals. The difference was that we had a ton of crossover votes. The margin for our Republican state auditor in the county was 16,000 votes, but for our Republican attorney general candidate, it was only 3,000 votes. For some reason, he didn't resonate with downstate voters and Beau Biden did, at least enough to blunt the downstate advantage.
There were turnout problems in Delaware, and we just had to fire our state party paid staff due to funding issues, but we were victims of the "send Bush a message" wave as much as anyone.
We could use some RNC money next time.
...and in UT, and...
I think we'll avoid wasting scarce resources, thanks.
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Even those who learn from history are surrounded by those doomed to repeat it.
You must be right. We need to save those precious resources for important things, like GOTV and issue ads for people like Lincoln Chafee.
For a state like Delaware, with R's holding one-third of the Congressional delegation, the majority in the state House of Reps and 9 of 21 state senate seats, to be written off as lost forever and a waste of resources is disheartening.
I think Dean would be a bad President, but I think it is smart for Democrats. Nebraska 3rd one of the most Republican areas in the nation a Republican won with only with 55%.
Congressman.
I'm really not that impressed that Kleeb managed to get 45% of the vote in NE-03 in an awful Republican year with a divisive primary -- when it was open in 1990, Dems only lost it by a few hundred votes. I don't care if the 50-state strategy gets a bunch of candidates to 49.9999999% -- they still lose.
Fact is, the majority of Dem pickups that aren't directly attributable to Republican implosions came in the Northeast and Midwest -- exactly where Democrats SHOULD have been competing. Had Dean sent the money that was used to hire organizers in Nebraska to NY-25 or PA-6, he might have a couple more seats that Republicans would never get back, rather than picking up the occasional seat for a term or two.
It's an example of the power of long-term thinking over short-term reaction, of strategy over tactics.
The Democrat campaign structure in Red America had fallen apart, demoralized and empty except for little hotbeds in college towns. They needed to work on their infrastructure and leverage their netroot forces. They did that, I think.
Howard Dean is a liar† and a bit of a kook, but he's also a shrewd pol and effective speaker, yaaaargh or no yaaaargh.
Evil men hide from the truth, but good men stand upon it.
† - being a Democrat who speaks, he has few options.
The Democrat candidate in Wyoming lost by a few hundred votes. A loss is a loss for sure. But the fact that Democrats almost one in Wyoming and Idaho-1 shows that it makes sense to compete in more states.
I don't know that the Republicans should adopt a 50 state strategy. But the national party should do more to build state parties in some key blue states.
Barbara Cubin is our At-Large representative for Wyoming, and the lady I voted for in the midterm elections. Well... voted "for" would be much too strong of a word. Honestly my vote was cast for one single purpose: against Gary Trauner.
Here in Wyoming, nobody likes Barbara Cubin. Even the Republicans in the state (which is a lot of us, we are the second reddest state in the country) don't like her. She's out of touch with Wyoming, spends to much time in Washington, doesn't get anything done, and acts like a rubber stamp for Bush - for better, worse, or indifferent. She has no idea what's going on in her own state. Add to that the fact she is prone to verbal gaffes that border on racism and insensitivity and you've got a real winner of a candidate.
And finally, Cubin promised to term limit herself to only 6 terms in the house when she first got elected. Well, guess what 2006 was? You got it: her seventh term in office.
The only thing that saved Cubin in this election, and in other elections, is the fact that the Democrat Party in Wyoming always brings liberals to run against her. Gary Trauner was a liberal from the city of Jackson (the only liberal part of Wyoming), who grew up and did the college thing in New York. Had the Wyoming Democrats run a moderate candidate in the mold of our democrat Governor Freudenthal, he/she would have severely spanked Cubin in the election.
The 48% of the vote that Cubin got in the election was 48% of Wyoming opposed to Trauner, not for Cubin. We can't afford that in the future, which is why I intend to write to Cubin and the state Republican party demanding a better, new, and fresh candidate in 2008.
And Trauner did not receive any money from the federal Democrat Party. Cubin did, and Gary made that one of his main attacks on Barbara: "Thousands of dollars of Washington money is pouring into Wyoming to support Barbara Cubin. I am only using Wyoming money and Wyoming support." So Dean's 50 state strategy wasn't a factor here.
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Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same. -The Fray, "All At Once"
Lynn Cheney should run for the at-large Wyoming seat. She'd be awesome. :-)
Then she should run for one of the senate seats if they come available.
Honestly, I think that it'd be awesome if Wyoming had two Senators named Dick and Lynn Cheney. :-)
but I have never jumped on the bandwagon criticizing Dean's 50-state strategy. In fact, I consistently commented on other blogs when the DNC chose him to be their chair that it was a great move for them.
The 50 state strategy was always about long term vision for the party, something we need to look at as a party as well. Our vision is extremely narrow if we believe the electoral map will always look similar to 2000 or 2004.
For example, what does it look like for the Republican party to rise from the ashes in places like Oregon, Washington, even California? How can we rebuild the GOP infrastructure in the northeast? Instead of automatically conceding those areas to the Democrats, why not work to restore the party in those areas. It won't pay off in 2008, but it might in 2012 or 2016.
At some level, I almost respect Howard Dean for his vision. Almost.
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Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same. -The Fray, "All At Once"
Im not a registered dem or republican but i am ideologically aligned with the democrats - even more so now that the tent is wider. But I would LOVE to see a 50 state strategy on the GOP side. The only thing is, though, that it must be a similarly big tent. You have to be willing to let the GOP candidate in Oregon have room to be more socially liberal than the one in Indiana. It really boils down to whether the right way forward is to enact ideologial purity or to go for the big tent approach, and the 50 state strategy just wont work with the former.
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Dean Nation is now Nation-Building: Purple politics, muscular liberalism, principled pragmatism
...and haven't in the past, either, I suspect that it's a bit too soon for the Democrats to pop the champagne on it just yet. Those State Party structures were decaying for decades; two years of relative attention and cash may not be enough to revitalize them.
The real danger for the Dems is... never you mind. :)
The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC.
Howard Dean's 50-state strategy is a common tactic used in business. If a competitor moves into an area where you are strong, you hit them back by moving into an area where they are strong so that they have to divert resources to shore up their stronghold, which are resources that they can't expend expanding onto your territory.
It's a common, well proved strategy.
The strategy, and I have said all along was the only way Democrats would ever begin to win again would be to cede the social arena to Democrats. Bring in socially conservative Democrats (whether or not this is true) to conservative areas and they have a fighting chance. Now however, the Democrats have the House and Senate but owe a debt to the conservative Democrats that allowed them to win with those conservative Democrats also knowing that they are one pro-abortion vote from being booted out of office. So you cloned Ben Nelson a few time and put him from different states. Great strategy for a midterm, but what do you do in 2008 if Heath Shuler or Tester or even Harold Ford Jr pulls a Zell Miller and endorses the Republican because you've nominated Hillary Clinton or Gore? That's Dean's danger, and one that we should stay out of . The GOP is supposed to be a conservative party and there are millions of conservatives that we aren't getting. African-Americans are very socially conservative (which is why Steele would be such a great RNC chair) Hispanics are also conservative-both largely untapped markets aching for a Reaganlike realignment, especially Blacks who more than ever are starting to feel like they are being taken for granted-a message all of the Black candidates echoed when they ran, and a message that the GOP should stick to.
"Five years after 9/11, the worst attack on American homeland in our history, the Democrats offer nothing but criticism and obstruction, and endless second-guessing. The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut-and-run."-George W. Bush
I am not saying that his 50 State strategy actually makes a great deal of sense but if anything your post illustrates clearly the wages of complacency.