We Need 100 U.S. House Challengers in 2018.

There was an invisible anchor tied to the Democratic Party throughout this entire Presidential campaign.  Given the excruciatingly close nature of the final margin, it is no stretch to imagine that this anchor cost us victory.  Since they gained control of the House of Representatives in 2010, Republicans have created a situation whereby the Government has either had crisis or gridlock at almost all times.  Occasionally there were moments were some deal was reached to prevent chaos, but in terms of passing meaningful legislation things just ground to a halt.  Democrats did not have a serious plan to remove this gridlock because the “smart” people had determined that it was not possible. Perhaps it was impossible, but because this gridlock existed, Hillary Clinton was basically prevented from saying the words.” When I am President we will” and then stating her agenda. It was always about We will fight for, We will try.  Voters could never be certain about what she could accomplish because of this anchor.   

Republicans in the House also threatened investigations, impeachment, and grinding stand still if Hillary Clinton won. This was a very clever plan.  The middle class particularly in rural and shrinking parts of America saw very little progress under President Obama, in large part because of Republican obstruction. But whoever was to blame, the effect was the same.  This promise of unceasing Partisan War mattered.  The incredibly sad truth is that to a large degree despite the fact Hillary Clinton was much better prepared, knew more, cared more, understood more, it was likely Donald Trump and only Donald Trump who could pass big things because only he could have non-divided rule. In an era of hyper-partisanship, non-divided rule and only non-divided rule can actually get things passed.   So now Republicans have that despite not really having a popular mandate for it.  

How did we let the House get so out of range? There are a lot of answers but one of the biggest ones is simply about the level of effort we put in and how many seats and places we write off.  At the outset let us be clear, it is a nice idea and somewhat valuable to run people in all 435 seats. Perhaps some effort should be made to do this.  But the truth is very clear that about 150 seats are going Democratic and 150 seats are going Republican, and very little can be done about that.  But in the other 135 seats or so, Republicans hold an overwhelmingly lopsided edge, and Democrats compete in fits and starts. This has to change. Democrats have an obligation to run strong challengers in every single one of the seats which they could in theory win.  It is also incredibly important for the party to play the seat and not play the candidate. If based on past voting records, the district could send a Democrat, then a very strong incumbent may seem to provide a reason to back off but cannot be allowed to do so.  Because if we grant the premise of incumbent strength, then we cannot possibly gain the control we need. So we must ignore it

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          One of the major problems here is that we continue to place the burden of mounting a challenge on the challengers themselves. We tell candidates they need to raise huge amounts of money, and this scares off huge numbers of candidates.  It also dramatically limits who can run. We need to fix this. Our party now desperately needs challengers more than the challengers need us. It is therefore utterly essential that we find ways to encourage all kinds of candidates and help them raise money. We need to pledge to get every single one of these candidates who is willing to step up and run at least $ 1,000,000. We can ask them for a number of donors to prove they have sufficient support but not a dollar amount which only benefits the elite.  If we are looking for places to get this money, one good place to start is with our members of Congress who raise about a $ 1,000,000 a year and barely need a penny to get re-elected.  Democrats in safe seats should be putting 25% of what they raise into this sort of funding of challengers.  Huge amounts of the DCCC online money needs to sent to candidates, and local party organizations also need to step up and make sure candidates are funded.  We need to recruit 100 challengers in the seats we can win. We need to back them to the hilt, and we need to try in every winnable district and ignore any possible naysayers.  

Pillar 1. Permanent and Local.

In our first post on this blog we identified six pillars needed to revive the Democratic Party and chart a path to electoral victories.  We also briefly sketched some ideas about the costs and structure of reform.  

The Six Pillars for remaking the Party are

·      Permanent and Local,

·      Membership Driven and Service Providing,

·      Focus on Young People Constantly,

·      Communicate Information and not just Advertising,

·      Call Time is Killing the Democratic Party and 
        We need to innovate, innovate, innovate.  

     

These six pillars will help build a party that can do the hard work ahead of us.  Today we will dig into the first pillar.

 Permanent and Local.

          Many ideas and assumptions stand behind this pillar (and others), and we will expand on each as time goes on.  But the basics are really simple. There are way too many places in this country where the Democratic Party is on or near life support.  We don’t mean to denigrate some of the hard work being done by local Democratic parties in these areas. But despite this work in huge parts of the country, the Party seems not to exist.  For example, in Pennsylvania, one of the states that tipped the election, Trump took more than 60% of the vote in 49 out of 67 counties.  In a great many counties his totals were even higher.  We’ll tackle Pennsylvania specifics in a later post, but for now it’s important to note that the Pennsylvania pattern was repeated in hundreds of counties all across America. 

The goal of permanent and local is to reverse the downward slide.   Local is the first step.  We need to be in all of these counties. The danger we are fighting is very simple to understand.  A party culture can begin to dominate.  All of your neighbors start voting the same way, and the holdouts begin to wonder why they are holdouts. Even the people who stick with you become less likely to speak up because they don’t want to be the only one dissenting.  This process can turn a 2-1 county into a 3-1 county, and that kind of bleeding can kill you. Obviously, the Party’s challenge stems partly from the message and the issue set, and some of the noise that surrounds our national media environment.  We will address all of that later too, but as a clear first step up showing up in more places will help.

 We also risk a somewhat similar problem in our base areas.  This is where permanent is more important than local. Turnout will drop if voters sense that politicians only come around when they want a community’s votes but not the rest of the time.  Swooping in also has a generally disrespectful feel even if it works. The problems faced by people are constant. The Party’s ability to fix them should be too.  

          There is another key advantage of permanent and local.  By doing things this way, and by not skipping anywhere, we send an unmistakable message that we care about the entire country through our physical presence and people on the ground. This signal helps to short circuit the discussion of which groups the Democratic Party should focus on or care about. Obviously, as an election approaches, more resources must go to where Democrats do better.  But by starting with the signal that we want everyone’s vote equally, we skip difficult and potentially unproductive conversations by merely committing to be everywhere.  We tried being smarter and targeting only some voters. 2016 was the result.  

Conclusion:  Permanent and local will not fix everything.  We will need to flesh out the additional five pillars, but this is the place to start. 

No Voter Fraud, No Understanding, No Leadership

  On Wednesday, we spoke about how important it is to remember that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. This was a bad fact for Trump and thus important to highlight for keeping our movement going.  It has become very clear that this is a fact Trump hates. Hillary Clinton got more votes. Donald Trump hates this fact, and, as with all facts he hates, he has begun a systematic effort to make it not true.  This pattern began with his very first loss in the Iowa Caucuses, and he does it with all electoral defeats.  There is a potential method to this madness, in that his attacks on the voting system even in victory will potentially allow him to spin any subsequent electoral weakness as fraud and thus undermine the very pillars of democracy.  This approach might well be a systematic attack, or it could also be Trump’s psychological lashing out. Both are troubling.

But for today we are going to focus on a slightly different arena, and one that has sweeping implications for what we face.   Trump now makes the wholly unsubstantiated accusation that there were millions of illegal votes despite his winning.  What this shows without a shadow of a doubt is that he does not have the slightest idea of how voting in America works.  In all but one state, we have voter registration. At the time of voter registration, you have a responsibility to show documentation proving who you are, and you have to swear under penalty of perjury that you are an American citizen.  The people who run elections are constantly checking and rechecking for a voter’s eligibility and as a consequence of this entire system, almost no one who is here illegally successfully casts a ballot.

This does not mean there are absolutely no unlawful voters, but there are so close to none as to render it basically a non-issue. It is disconcerting that the President-Elect does not seem to know this very basic fact about how our democracy works. Instead he wants to believe the delusions of those who suggest millions of people would commit a serious crime, in order to vote in an election, and yet that they would do so in a way which would not even guarantee the person they were voting for a victory.  This is just kind of nutty.  

While it could be the case that this is all political posturing, it is worth stressing repeatedly how important it is to understand how things work if you are going to be in charge of them.  This is not simply about voting either.  While the country clearly has problems, and critics can point to lots and lots of examples of things not working, on the whole in the United States of America things work. They can be made to work better. They can be made to include more people. They could be more efficient.  They could be more humane.   But the basic systems we have work. To lack an understanding of how they work is to be unable to govern.   

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Problem.

It’s hazardous to challenge those on our side of the aisle over strategy and direction, particularly when it’s important that we all hang together on principle in opposition to impending threats to the values we hold dear.  So let’s starts with the basics. The people who work at Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are doing their best. They believe in what they are doing and also believe what they are doing is good for the country and the party. Unfortunately, they are mostly wrong about the effects of their efforts. 

Background 

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is a political organization that works hand in and hand with the Democratic Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. It is known as the DCCC and will be referred to that way here.   It is run primarily as a membership organization with Democratic Members of Congress paying dues and then receiving services where needed.  Focus is placed on Members who might lose and on efforts to pick up seats.  It’s hard to doubt, however that the DCCC prioritizes current members of Congress over challengers.  

This system was set up primarily during the Democratic Party’s long reign from 1930 to about 1994 when the Party was pretty much the permanent majority party in the House.  Since the 1994 Gingrich Revolution, the Republicans have been the Majority Party for all but 4 years.  Yet much of the DCCC system and many of its practices remain connected to its twentieth century belief system.  For a Majority Party supporting members over challengers makes sense. For a Minority Party, this is a disaster.  When you are a Majority Party, making every challenger prove himself or herself in fundraising makes sense. When you are a Minority Party, you need challengers more than they need you. 

And that brings us to the matter of the e-mails. The DCCC has become an absolute beast at raising money online. Starting in 2006, Democrats started annually raising about $50,000,000 or $ 60,000,000 online.   With each cycle that sum of money only seemed to increase.  Regardless of wins or losses, the amount of money the Party was able to bring in online accelerated.

  In 2004, the DCCC raised $92,000,000; by 2014, that total was $ 206,000,000. This was a tremendous windfall, but despite this added cash, the number of Democratic seats from 2004 to 2014 actually fell.  There are lots of reasons for this and blaming the DCCC is probably not fair.   But what is also the case is that the financial windfall has not benefited Democratic prospects nearly as much as one would expect from an approach that the DCCC repeats cycle after cycle.

What is more the means by which this windfall has been generated has downsides.  The DCCC has sent me roughly 600 e-mails since June 1^st.  Almost all of them are purely emotional pleas for cash with almost no appeal to reason, nor any acknowledgment that Democrats were not really in contention to regain the House. The DCCC also sent e-mails suggesting that the money would be used to fight Trump, when no reasonable person could expect this money actually to go toward fighting Trump.

More than that, the DCCC used almost all of its overflow cash on its independent expenditure wing.  This has three major problems. The first is that the independent expenditure arm spends almost all of its money on television ads, and there is serious question about the effectiveness of this spending.  Second, the independent expenditure arm is independent.  It can’t coordinate with campaigns.  This means that the data from the field, the wisdom of the candidates, and the campaign team’s strategic thinking must, by law, be ignored.  Third and this is probably the worst of it, while candidates get discounted ad rates from television stations as a matter of law, the DCCC independent expenditure arm does not get these discounts.  Accordingly, small online donors who fund the DCCC are paying higher rates than if they gave directly to candidates. This is horrible because it literally wastes scarce resources.  The technology already exists for one click donation to a set of candidates, and so this independent expenditure approach is not a practical requirement.  Instead, this system is maintained to keep officials in Washington, D.C. in control of the money.   Once a small dollar gift is in the hands of a candidate, D.C. loses control over it. But we have now had a long enough history of allowing D.C. to control these decisions for us to realize that this simply is not working. As importantly, the current e-mail system, bombarding our most loyal supporters with over a 100 e-mails a month just from the DCCC is a disaster, not to mention that the DCCC success has bred nearly identical copycats. These copycats compound the negative effects of flooded inboxes.  

       There are potentially better uses for small dollar donations than going to the DCCC independent expenditure offices.  To some degree the passion and commitment of these donors is being squandered because we don’t build a connection between donors and the recipient of their funds.  These donors are often talked at but very rarely talked with.  The DCCC needs to focus its efforts on high donors and wean itself of excessive independent expenditure cash to allow space for more grassroots efforts, located at the party proper not within its Congressional arm. The DCCC needs to stop siphoning so much money that should be available to the whole party but which now goes to the DCCC because they got a head start at e-mail and are currently the best attracting these dollars.  This will obviously be a hard change to make, but it is one that needs to be pushed. 

A quick peek into the math: Hillary Clinton got a lot more votes, and we should never forget it.

What sets my work apart is a true passion for digging into the numbers. This can be seen in my previous blog, The Scorecard:  http://www.thescorecard.us/ .  I plan to continue updating The Scorecard once a week, but it offered mostly straightforward non-partisan analysis.  Now that the election is over, I am turning to arguing strenuously for our side.  There is no doubt that the Nov. 8 result is incredibly disheartening.  As a consequence the steps we will be advocating are dramatic, but it’s important also to take a step back and realize just how close this election was.

  Here is the first and most important thing to remember. Hillary Clinton got more votes than Donald Trump, and this is not by some small tiny factor that can be fairly overlooked or forgotten.  Hillary Clinton currently has basically 2 million  more votes than Donald Trump and almost every bit of reporting suggests this number is continuing to grow. I am tracking it here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133Eb4qQmOxNvtesw2hdVns073R68EZx4SfCnP4IGQf8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=19 on a site from David Wasserman at Cook. 

For Clinton supporters and other progressives reading this the underlying reality is incredibly important. You live in a country where more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump.  The margin is not that small. Whenever you are confronted with the idea that Trump is in charge, or Trump is all powerful, or Trump is this or that, remember you live in a country where more people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump. As for how Trump won the electoral college, that’s where the margin was tiny.  The final three states he got which put him over the magic 270 were Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.  The combined margin in the three states may end up at roughly 100,000 votes.    The results were terrible but the margins were razor thin. That means if we do the work we need to do and democracy is maintained, things can still right themselves.

 The amount of work ahead of us is unimaginable, but the path forward is clear.  And if you begin to doubt yourself or our cause, remember Hillary Clinton got more votes. Hillary Clinton got more votes. Hillary Clinton got more votes. We will check back in when the counting is done.

Not who, what!

The Democratic Party is electing a new Chair, and we have quite a few thoughts. But our most important conviction is that the crucial question about the next Democratic Chair, is not who it is going to be. Far too often Americans tend to fixate on the personalities.  Voters like the people who are like them or agree with them.  It’s understandable to want your wing of the party to prosper. Many did or did not believe in Bernie Sanders. And it through these lenses that it is tempting to view this race. 

Focus on choosing a champion is an entirely human and somewhat rational mindset, but it is what we need as much as possible to break out of. Who the next Democratic Party Chair is going to be is not the right question.  The right question is what will the next Democratic Party Chair do. In our first letter, (each section of which we will expand upon as we go), we set forth very clear ideas as to what the party should do.  Every Candidate for Chair should be similarly challenged to present a real plan for what the party is going to do?  

Looking at the two leading candidates so far, we have a decent idea as to what they will do based on the past.  Howard Dean’s tenure at the DNC and the success we had then are to my mind underrated.  In 2006 and 2008 Democrats had big wins up and down the ballot with Dean as chairman. The Congressional Party and then later the Obama campaign made it seem as if Dean’s tenure at the DNC had nothing to do with that success. But since it was both of those entities that oversaw catastrophic failures in 2010, 2014 and 2016, it seems Dean’s role should be given a most positive view. He did a lot of good things at the DNC, including adoption of the 50 state strategy. Although competing everywhere may seem like a non-optimal use of resources, it sends a message about being national, broad-based and unwilling to give up. There is even a decent amount of evidence suggesting that treating a state like it is competitive has the effect of making it more competitive.  This is a positive sign. 

Congressman Keith Ellison is the other leading contender. He also has a strong record on some of these issues.  In particular, and for what he deserves the most credit, he used his Congressional campaign with energy and judgment. He determined quite rightly that all of a Congressional campaign’s money can be used to drive turnout in a very blue district.  Because he did that it seems, quite frankly, that Congressman Ellison’s work is the difference between Minnesota staying Blue, in 2010,2014 and 2016 and the contrary fate of next door Wisconsin.  The only minor downside to Ellison is that being in Congress is a full time job. We need DNC chair to be a full time job.  Moreover a sitting Congressman is more likely to bow to the Congressional Party, even when that is not the right decision. 

These are both good choices, and more may be coming online. (There already are a few more names being floated, but they are not yet as serious).  The key question for any such candidate is what he or she will do, not whom he or she is. We cannot get caught up in the personalities; yet there are some signs that is already happening.  What the DNC chair will do is the crucial question.

Introduction

We are Reform the Democrats.  We aim to avoid unproductive disputes over ideological positioning for the party. Instead we stand for the fundamental notion that the only way to find out what people want is to ask them. We believe that far more effort must be put into people and less into TV.  We believe that Young People should be at the center of what the party does. We have attached a preliminary memo sketching the direction we think the party should take. But more important than any one idea is unwavering dedication to coming up with new ideas and trying them. As kindly as possible, we will also point out longstanding and destructive habits of the Democratic Establishment. Join us.  The clock is ticking.  And we need to Reform the Democrats. 

How the Democrats have to Change.

In writing this it is almost impossible to quite comprehend the level of damage that we are surveying.  In truth, there is some risk this memo is simply too late.  But since there seems to be no other option than to try.  We shall.

November 8^th‘s horrible result was very difficult to predict and arrived via a razor thin margin; yet it still tells us a great deal about the path forward.    Our Party, the Democratic Party, is one that has failed to communicate with the American People on a very basic level.  We generate an unceasing and nearly endless discussion of what to say and what policies to back.  But these conversations are largely amongst ourselves.  What they fundamentally lack is a blueprint detailing how and when you should talk to people and whom you should talk to.  Our Party exists primarily as an invasion of “organizers” and also on your T.V. screen. Millions of dollars are spent on advertising and e-mail inboxes overflow with pleas for money at a near constant drip.  The result is transient group of political organizers with no roots in communities going door to door, every two to four years and a completely lost concept of community.   Fundamentally the Democratic Party has to re-orient itself into a fixture in people’s lives and provide help for the people whose votes we require year round. 

 Permanent and Local

                The people who represent the Democratic Party and its candidates in any given election should be local people, and they should be hired for the job on a four year basis.   One of the most powerful drivers of human behavior is peer-pressure.  That pressure is much more powerfully applied when you know that if you disappoint the person, you will have to see them again.  We need to have people with earned credibility in the community speaking to the community. We need to be around. Since we absolutely need to get members of the community to do most of the real work in their communities, we need our organizers not to be transient, because a transient person is easy to dismiss.

Membership driven and service providing. 

                People need to feel a real sense that the Democratic Party is something they belong to not just once every two or four years but as a part of their lives on nearly a daily basis.  We need a hub through which all things flow.  We also frankly need to provide things that people want.  The Democratic Party should be a resource for baby sitters, and dog walkers because that helps make believers lives easier.   We need to run food pantries, and educational classes, and community gatherings, and even sometimes parties.   Interconnection is what makes people want to do things more than anything else.  By providing services we can also help to begin collecting dues.    People happily pay $ 10 for all sorts of streaming and delivery services. We need that kind of income stream so we can be permanent and local.

Focus on Young People constantly.   

                The Democratic Party has a truly terrible record when it comes to outreach to young people.  They are expected to knock on doors and make calls, and move half way around the country to knock on doors and make calls.  They hear from us, often through celebrities, only once every four years with about three months to go in the election. They are then roundly ignored for the rest of the time. In midterms they are almost never targeted.  Young people don’t vote and thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.   We win the young by large margins but the falloff in turnout among the young causes huge amounts of our mid-term pain and also certainly brought us defeat in this agonizer to end all agonizers.

Communicate Information not just Advertising.

                As someone involved in politics I must have received 15,000 campaign e-mails in 2016.  I am somewhat atypical, as I am on more lists than almost anyone, but the volume is insane.  Nearly every single one was a request for money in one form or another.  The ability to raise money online has been incredible, but it has come at a steep price.  E-mail could be an exceptionally valuable tool for the spreading of information. But instead that tool is nearly entirely crippled by the absolute flood of e-mail people get. Oversaturation is absolutely poisonous. It might be possible to get someone to read one e-mail a day, but when you get dozens they all disappear.  This may seem like a small, inconsequential point, but it speaks to the larger issue.

Call Time is Killing the Democratic Party.  

                The Democratic Party is infected with the plague of call time. What that means is that many Democratic candidates get into a room for 3 to 4 hours a day and call those who are financially able to make a contribution of anywhere between $ 500 and the national limit.  It is those candidates who can succeed at this task, and only those candidates, who then receive additional funding support from the Democratic Party. This limits utterly and dramatically the kind of people whom we are able to run and therefore the voices that we hear from.   Our candidates become far too elite.  We also compete in far fewer places than we should for the simple reason that in some places no one with background and ability to raise money steps up to run and then we walk away. Instead, we need to find ways to run campaigns for less, but also find ways to fund them that will allow the candidate to spend time with people, talk to people and be a voice which is different.

We need to innovate, innovate, innovate.

               These are just a few quick ideas.  I am sure there is better stuff I have not thought of yet and encourage readers to write in with more, more, more.   There’s no premium on an exact path.  But there is urgency like never before to try new things, to get people truly involved, to increase everyone’s level of engagement.  Organizing takes effort and more importantly time.  The mid-terms will be here before we know it.

Structure And Cost

Rough Cost Estimate  $600,000,000 per year:

One Regional Organizer per 60,000 people will require 5,000 total, full-time organizers.  Virtually all will be local.  

Salary and benefits will average $ 75,000 a year with appropriate regional variations.   – Annual Cost of Organizers – $375 million

Each Regional Organizer needs two part time youth organizers.  Salary for these at $15,000 for total cost of $150 million

10 Deputies per Regional organizer (“DRO’s”) 1 for every 6,000 people (Mostly volunteers - Precinct captains are best approach but precinct size varies a lot)

1 Volunteer Neighborhood Organizer for 300 voters (20 Per DRO)

Offices for all regions, Programming at the Deputy Regional Organizer level  

Funding Source: Dues paying Democrats again.

Secretary Clinton received roughly  62 million votes.  We need 1 in 6 (or roughly 10,000,000) members to pay $ 10 a month. This activates this entire plan. They need to know that a lot of their money is staying local.  We need lots of events for members, and a physical presence staffed year round so organizers can speak with their neighbors.