This Is How We Do It #8- Moral Imperatives and Responsibilities

This is the last of the "This is how we do it" posts. Again, if anybody has any questions about anything seen in these posts, please contact me at matthewcarnold@gmail.com.

#8- Responsibility

The Republican Party represents bad values. They have the most effective campaign mechanisms ever known and I am openly jealous of that. But they govern atrociously, and that’s what affects lives. Conservative values hurt people. Governor Barbour has tried to take away healthcare for the sick and the infirm, he stopped legislation that would have made milk cheaper for children, and he has continually engaged in nepotism, feathering the nests of those who share his last name at the expense of the Mississippi family. There is no better example of what Republicans do when they are given the opportunity to govern.

As standard bearers for the Democratic party, which at this point is the only opposition to these incredible forces of greed, you have an obligation to win. You owe it to the staff and volunteers that invest themselves in you. You owe it to the party, from Gov. Dean to your local county chair, that invests its resources in you. You owe it to yourself to leave it on the field. You owe it to the tax payers of Mississippi, for whom you are probably the only reliable hope. Our party is on a precipice. If we falter here, we’ll suffer through two, maybe three election cycles of bad policy and corrupt government. Twelve years in the woods- an entire public education. You have a responsibility to win. Go do it.

Much love to Gene O for reposting, linking, and commenting on these at Sociable Loner .

This is How We Do It #7- Spending Priorities

#7- Spending Priorities

Some helpful indices to guide your priorities for races that don’t buy media:

Values, conviction, and zeal are more important than anything else, but those are things you can’t buy.

Talking to people (direct voter contact) is the most important thing you can buy.

After you’ve paid for your contact through canvassing, direct mail and phones, you can buy things that reinforce your face to face contact like signs and bumper stickers.

Yard signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, knick knacks, polly-wogs, and all of the other attending stuff of political campaigns cannot inspire people to vote for you. And yes, they are going to have to be inspired. Contact with a human being is what inspires them.

In fact, I have noticed a tendency over the last few election cycles: The campaign that spends the most on “feel good stuff”, free t-shirts, pens with the candidates name on them, pizza parties for volunteers, etc… loses. This is more than a tendency I think. It may be a Law or Theory, depending on which term applies.

A good way to prioritize your money in a race where you don’t buy media would be something like this:

Literature for canvassing

Website

Yard signs

Direct Mail Pieces

Paid Canvassers

Phone banks

Various stickers and accoutrement

This Is How We Do It #6- Create Contrasts

#6- Create Contrasts

You have to draw contrasts. Don't be afraid of being negative about republicans because you may end up having to work with one when you're elected. The likelihood that you will win your election and that you'll be working with more democrats when you're in office is directly proportional to the number of times that you say "democrats are good and republicans are bad because..:". Elections are a choice between change and more of the same. James Carville, a most qualified southerner, came up with that. There's no middle ground, no waffling. Those are the kind of distinctions that voters interpret as character. A man who knows that he's campaigning for change and says so is being honest with himself and his audience. Voters base their decisions on who they believe is telling them the truth. We're lucky. The status quo here in Mississippi is a disaster. We can blame that on them and it'll stick.

I Can't Say It

But He can. This is the sum total of my "This is How We Do It" posts, except that I try to be positive, educational, and support my candidates and my party. This guy doesn't put sugar in his medicine.


http://geneo.wordpress.com/2007/05/19/fighting-the-last-war-mississippi-gubernatorial-edition/#comment-30

This Is How We Do It #5

#5- The Dale Carnegie Strategy for Political Campaigns

Unless your club includes roughly 478,xxx registered voters in Mississippi, being insular is a detriment. Open up. Make friends. Influence others. It’s called Direct Voter Contact. You can’t represent people you don’t know intimately.

#4- BE A DEMOCRAT

#4- Be A Democrat.

Don't run from the label. Already, there are campaigns who are omitting the word DEMOCRAT from their campaign literature. It does not appear on Eaves' website. He pulled this trick when he ran against Pickering. He fell about 6 percent short of the traditional democratic performance. It might be because the base didn't know there was a democrat in the race. Democrats around the country won because they had D by their name in '06. Mississippi isn't at that point, but you can't excite your base without it. Be liberal and be proud of it. Liberal doesn't mean you're a baby killer or any of the other third grade quality labels they stick on us. It means that you're progressive, that you think about the future, that you're concerned about the welfare of all the people, and that you will be a results oriented leader. If that doesn't describe you, then you probably need to hang out with George Dale.

The truth of the matter is that for the first time in recent memory, the national party is a place where you can be a Christian, pro life, pro gun, an economic protectionist and still be welcome. They're spending money in Mississippi through the 50 State Strategy. Hug them and squeeze them for all its worth. Do their dance.

#3- The Perks of a Professional Staff

There are bonuses to the staff equation besides having a full fledged pedigreed team of number crunchers. You get two things-- some continuity between campaigns, and you get some respect. I'll use the Lt. Gov race as an example for both points. The Franks campaign just hired a professional operative, AJ Carrillo, to run its operation. Best move they could have made. In 2006, Carrillo was slaying a giant Republican incumbent in the CA-11 and replacing him with a guy who's an alternative energy consultant and, by all reports, a stupefying boring math geek. A.J. has relationships. He has relationships with his former boss, and his former boss's donors. Want to get an immediate net roots bump? Let Carrillo call Rep. McNurty and send out an email to his supporter list. West Coast money flowing to Jamie Franks from Mooreville, MS? Absolutely.

And consider the actual story posted on Magnolia Report. It was glowing. They said that Franks had hired a big shot campaign manager who was fresh from slaying popular incumbent republicans in a conservative district. That plays well in the press, in the political circles, and in the donor circles. The last thing MR printed about Franks was "the fact that he raised less than 30k in the previous year indicates that there's not much enthusiasm for his campaign." That's a big difference. It's not the kind of difference you can expect when your campaign manager's previous job title is "office manager."

#2- Know Your Enemy and Copy What Works

#2- Know Your Enemy and Copy What Works-

The Republican party has been training operatives in how to do direct voter contact, target, motivate, and mobilize a pretty small percentage of the population in order to get massive electoral victories since at least the late 70’s. There is no such thing as a ‘local republican race.’ Absolutely every candidate they recruit has access to all of their knowledge, all of their infrastructure, all of their operatives and all of their money. Know that on GOTV weekend, there will be dozens of Capitol Hill staffers flown in from DC who have run the 72 Hour Program so many times that they can run it with directions written on the back of a cocktail napkin. I have seen them pull seven points out of GOTV through the 72 Hour Plan.

In order to compete with that, you have to get real staff. In a top targeted million dollar race, there are endless numbers to crunch and those numbers ultimately determine where you're going to put your resources. This is not a game to be eyeballed. Saying to yourself "15% of the white vote and the same turnout we've always seen from the 2nd district" doesn't do it. There are big numbers involved that by their very nature cannot end in three zeros. There's targeting, micro targeting, consumer preference composite modeling, thirty-one flavors of research, and that barely scratches the surface. Nobody expects a candidate to know all of this and there is even less expectation for them to learn it. But you should know that there are hundreds of people who make their living working on campaigns. The majority of them have 202 phone numbers. Seek them out. Call them, be prepared to pay them a seemingly egregious amount of money, and delegate your entire operation to them. They know these numbers. Yes, this leaves you powerless for a few months while you're campaigning. But you get to govern. That makes up for it. I promise.

This is How We Do It #1- Understanding What A Campaign Does

M. Arnold

This is the first of a series of posts about some things that my beloved Democratic candidates need to do in Mississippi to put up a fight this year. For more information about how to do the things mentioned in these articles, go to Democracyforamerica.com or Wellstoneaction.com

#1- Understand what a campaign does

If you’re going to run, know what a campaign is supposed to do. It doesn't build up the party base. It doesn't serve as the vehicle for a grand social plan, policy plan, or ego trip. A campaign persuades voters, identifies those voters that have been persuaded, and delivers those voters to the polls on election day. One sentence. If your campaign is doing anything other than those three things, or especially if it's not doing one of those three things, you need to take careful stock of your organization and your political future. If your campaign strategy doesn’t center around direct voter contact, you might not have one.

Understand that Mississippi is not special, at least not in any way that can't be discerned by a decent poll. Our people do not have a cultural background that's any different from SC, NC, TN, GA, AL, KY or LA. In all of those states Democrats forced competitive midterms in what were thought safe seats and we picked up congressional seats in those states. None of them had anything resembling the blowouts we had here. We have lost the majority of our statewide seats in the last three election cycles. We are on the verge of losing control of both houses of the legislature. This is a sign of the end times. Whatever it is that we, as a party, and the folks running the campaigns do has not worked. It should be changed. Not updated, not bolted on to or retooled. It should be thrown away and a new plan developed. Things that do not work should not be repeated.