Keeping Up With the Bushes
The spokesman for the State Democratic Party, Blake Zeff, confirmed to me that they're rolling out a nascent field program called "Neighborhood Network," under which volunteers around the state focus on bringing around their own communities in a kind of neighbor-to-neighbor, Amway-style political marketing most recently associated with, say, the Bush campaign in Ohio.
So far, the volunteers are on the phone to Democrats in their areas, asking about their concerns. But asking people to convince their neighbors is the new-new-thing in political organizing, after the whole college-kid-with-PDA thing didn't work out so well for the Democrats in 2004.
Running the program is a longtime organizer named Kenny Diggs, who ran the field operations for the labor-backed Voices for Working Families.
It's really great to see prominent dems start to do this - tho other campaigns have done this kind of stuff before of course. But 2 notes:
1. college kid with PDA is not bad - it's good, and should be funded even more than last time. Just because Bush won does not mean it's a bad campaign tactic, especially when layered into a neighbor to neighbor/friend to friend program.
2. the DNC has to implement this stuff in a serious way on a national scale in the big election years. And they don't seem close to ready. What's also scary is that they bascially have to share responsiblities with moribund state parties, which is a big problem. And the local parties and clubs... jesus.
I agree with Pete, groups like ACT that were on the ground and on the ground early in 2004 I think did make a difference. I know there was research done to show effectiveness (don't have at my fingertips) but don't write off the value of a good field component just bc of '04 outcome. Field and grassroots isn't the panacea some make it out to be, but it is still crucial to campaign success.
None of this is new - it is just new to Dems who didn't do it properly. The Republicans have this down to a science, and anybody could have seen a mile away that the Dem tactic of plopping Upper West Siders into the suburbs of Ohio or Pennsylvania was never going to work.
The neighborhood concept was also used to great advantage during the Bloomberg campaign with the Neighbor to Neighbor program. Postcards were written by people to other folks in their zip codes and to their friends - some even had pictures of the person on them.
True field ops works, and all this has been working on the R side [at least in other areas] for the past several cycles. I somehow get the feeling that the Dems will not get it right, however...