Much has been written about how Jane Kim beat San Francisco's "progressive machine" last week to win the District 6 Supervisor race. But a precinct analysis of the election results tells a far bigger story, and explains how she pulled it off. Just like Howard Dean's Fifty State Strategy helped Democrats win nationwide, Jane Kim was everywhere - and conceded no part of District 6. Debra Walker carried the North Mission and a few progressive pockets, but racking up margins in some core precincts is not enough when your opponent actively contests every neighborhood. Kim beat Walker in the Tenderloin (where she had a better operation), and easily won the Chinese precincts - but also carried places like Treasure Island and the Western Addition. And as Jane's field coordinator for condos in Eastern SOMA, I'm very proud she won those precincts by a landslide - as we were the only campaign to show up. These were the Rob Black voters of 2006, but Kim proved that even a progressive can win those neighborhoods - if you bother to talk to them.
With a conventional wisdom that would make David Broder blush, the New York Times issued a dire warning to Democrats yesterday: 2010 will be a bad year, no incumbent in Congress will be safe, and expect to spend much of the time playing defense. Here in California, progressives should not let such talk intimidate them, and focus on playing offense. No matter how angry voters are at Democrats and Congress, they hate the Republicans even more. California has eight red congressional districts that Obama carried in 2008 (with demographics in their favor), so there's no reason not to have credible challengers everywhere. I met recently with such a candidate - Beth Krom from Orange County's 48th District.
BANGOR - "Welcome to the real Maine," said Regional Field Organizer Gabi Bérubé as I arrived yesterday at the "No on 1" office in Brewer, just across the Penobscot River from Bangor. That's what Mainers up here call their part of the state, and it's where I am spending the rest of my time on the campaign. I asked to go to Bangor because I wanted to help our field effort in more challenging places, after "No on 8" spent too much time last year preaching to the choir. The Bangor office covers everything north and east of here - in other words, two-thirds of the state's land mass. Replicating Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy, "No on 1" believes we have gay marriage supporters everywhere - and it's our challenge to organize them. But we're also targeting the University of Maine in Orono, whose 11,000 students make it the largest college in the state. Mobilizing young people on campus - and turning out identified supporters in rural areas - will prevent us from getting creamed in northern Maine, which will help us win statewide.
Iowa Independent makes an extremely disturbing allegation: the Obama campaign is not integrating downticket campaigns into a "coordinated campaign" structure. Instead, local Democratic staff are being fired and replaced with Obama staff:
At least 20 employees of the Iowa Democratic Party have been demoted or fired and a coordinated state-wide campaign was essentially disbanded, replaced by a focus on the presidential bid of Sen. Barack Obama.
Details are sketchy, but the changes could have an impact on November's legislative races, with field staff that was previously working for down-ticket races now being placed on the payroll of Obama's presidential campaign and working almost entirely on its behalf.(...)
Several sources familiar with the plan told the Iowa Independent that Iowa's Democratic elected officials -- from Sen. Tom Harkin to the leaders of the Iowa House and Senate -- had signed off and paid fees to participate in the coordinated campaign, which is a method by which Democrats pool their resources and avoid certain campaign redundancies. By June 1, Democratic Party employees had been deployed across the state to work on the coordinated effort. According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, by June 20, the Iowa Democratic Party had 28 salaried employees working in its Des Moines headquarters and in the field.
By mid-June the Obama campaign had deployed its own staff to Iowa to lead its general election campaign here, a move that is typical for a presidential nominee. But Obama's campaign began to assign organizers to parts of the state where the coordinated campaign already had a presence, and insiders began to wonder why. In the past week and a half, the answer to that question has been slowly revealed.
Obama's campaign demanded that its own staff replace existing staff in places where there was overlap and cast aside several opportunities to cooperate with down-ticket candidates between now and November, another source familiar with the negotiations said. Essentially, the state coordinated campaign was disbanded and replaced by the Obama campaign organization.(...)
The situation mirrors what happened in Colorado, where the Obama campaign announced last last month it would not be joining the state's coordinated campaign and instead would operate alongside it.
Obama sent dozens of staff to help out with Bill Foster's special election in the Illinois 14th congressional district, and has also sent campaign staff to all fifty states. As such, what is really disturbing about these charges is that the promise Obama's campaign and movement held out for a fifty-state strategy that supported downticket candidates everywhere could be a mirage. If local staff are being fired, coordinated campaigns are being abandoned, and everything is replaced with Obama-focused infrastructure, then this isn't really party building, it isn't really a fifty-state strategy, and it isn't really a movement. It is, instead, an entirely top-down organization serving a single purpose: electing Barack Obama.
As Matt wrote several weeks ago, Obama is indeed consolidating all party infrastructure. He also seems to be discarding several important aspects of Democratic and progressive infrastructure as part of this consolidation. While one can made an argument about the value of 527s (or lack thereof), laying off local Democratic organizers who were working on a coordinated campaign up and down the ticket, and replacing them with national staff from other areas of the country, is simply not justifiable. That is an anathema to the fifty-state strategy, and to the principle of building up the party everywhere.
These are just allegations, so I will reserve more incendiary judgment for now. I will be very interested to see more details emerge on this story, both in Iowa and in other states around the country.
Update: Just talked with a couple of staffers in a different region, Update New York. There will be a coordinated campaign for congressional and state senate races in the local hotbed, Rochester. It will not be impacted by the Obama campaign. So, this does not appear to be the case everywhere. One possibility is that this is only happening in the uber-swing states, like Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia. Not a total disaster, but still not great. Looking for more info.
Survey USA has released fifty-state polls for the general election. When looking at this data, keep in mind that about one in twenty polls is way, way off (there are 100 polls here). Here is the Clinton vs. McCain map, which is Clinton 276-262 McCain:
Solid Clinton--77 (eleven or more points): AR, DC, IL, MA, NY, RI
Lean Clinton--126 (six to ten points): CA, CT, FL, ME, MD, OH, VT
Toss Up--135 (five points or less): DE, HI, IA, MI, MN, MO, NJ, NM, OR, PA, TN, WA, WV, WI
Lean McCain--136 (six to ten points): AL, CO, KS, KY, LA, MS, NV, NH, NC, OK, SC, TX, VA
Solid McCain--65 (eleven or more points): AK, AZ, GA, ID, IN, MT, NE, ND, SD, UT, WY
Solid Obama--163 (eleven or more points): CA, CT, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, NY, RI, VT, WA, WI
Lean Obama--66 (six to ten points): CO, DE, MA, MN, NM, OH, OR
Toss-up--186: (five points or less): AK, FL, MI, NE, NV, NH, NJ, NC, ND, PA, TX, VA
Lean McCain--25 (six to ten points): IN, MO, MT
Solid McCain--98 (eleven or more points): AL, AZ, AR, GA, ID, KY, LA, MS, OK, TN, UT, WV, WY
Despite seemingly similarity in their performance against McCain, this breakdown shows real differences between Obama and Clinton in the general election. Against Obama, McCain's "solid" and "lean" states only add up to 123, while Obama's add up to 229. In a matchup against Clinton, the "solid" and "lean" states are of equal size: 201 for McCain, and 203 for Clinton. In other words, while McCain and Clinton appear evenly matched, McCain is only able to keep it close against Obama by running up a series of narrow wins in the toss-up states.
An important pro-Clinton caveat on these polls is that they were taken before Clinton's successful night on March 4th. Since whoever has the momentum in the primary tends to have the momentum in the general election, I expect her to start performing better against McCain after those victories. An important pro-Obama finding from these polls is just how utterly myopic and stupefying her campaign's argument about "states that don't matter" actually is. Obama puts a whole range of supposedly deep red states into play, such as Alaska, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, and even Texas (although Clinton doesn't do too bad in Texas herself). There are other ways to win outside of the 2000 and 2004 paradigm. To insist that there is no way to break out of the electoral maps of recent elections is not only depressing fatalistic about Democratic chances, but it actually reinforces the Obama campaign's assertion about Clinton not being able to break out of the political arguments of the past. A new map is clearly possible, as long as we put the effort into actually running a 50-state campaign. Heavy Democratic campaigning in Texas has even put that state into play (and heavy Democratic campaigning in Ohio has virtually put that state out of play). Over the next two months, I salivate over what heavy Democratic campaigning in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Indiana can accomplish.
During the two years I spent as a union organizer on the volunteer and professional levels, I was part of campaigns that successfully unionized over 2,000 previously unorganized workers. Those workers who now have unions are all graduate student employees of universities (TAs, GAs, and RAs), and would generally be considered creative class. I point this out to pile on to what Mike wrote below:
God knows there is nothing wrong with a little old-fashioned working-class populism, as I have advocated many times in my day. But I don't see how it adds any working-class voters to the Clinton cause, and it has great potential to drive your numbers down among what some of us call creative-class voters (those who work in universities, the arts, media, high-tech and in small businesses like architecture, engineering and law firms), many of whom are still wavering as to whom to vote for.
I would add that it isn't working class populism as such that is the problem, but the implication coming from Buffenbarger and even Bill Clinton that the interests and cultures of working class and creative class progressives and fundamentally opposed. As a former union organizer who has mainly held creative class jobs in my life, my experience indicates quite the opposite. In fact, while I have never had a latte, one time while organizing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I remember sharing a type of vanilla tea I like quite a bit with all the other organizers in the office. And they all liked it, too.
In addition to envelope stuffers growing tired of being told what to do by higher-ups who always seem to lose (read my earlier article on that point here), there is another aspect of the Democratic activist class war that is emerging over the nomination campaign. The activist class war also breaks along the lines of those who feel they have been taken for granted by higher-ups in the Democratic Party, specifically grassroots progressives and deep-red state Democrats, and those who do not. Consider machinist union President Thomas Buffenbarger blasting progressive creative class activists yesterday (more in the extended entry):
STATE BLOGS
