On Iowa Press the other day, State Auditor Dave Vaudt ducked the question of whether he would consider running for Governor in 2010. While Vaudt doesn’t have much of a public profile, he’s still one of two statewide Republican elected officials and has few negatives attached to his name. However, it’s worth noting that Vaudt would not have been in the position to even contemplate a 2010 run for Governor if the Democrats had bothered to nominate a candidate to oppose him in 2006. While leaving legislative seats uncontested hurt Democrats in 2006, failing to run a candidate for Auditor hurt Democrats even more. With the sole exception of Denise O’Brien, who narrowly lost her underfunded campaign for Secretary of Agriculture after it was revealed that she didn’t feed her cows, every statewide Democrat won by a healthy margin and Democrats made gains statewide. If Democrats had found a distinguished nonentity to merely place his name on the ballot, Vaudt probably would have been defeated. Instead, there is now a Republican statewide elected official who can plot a run for Governor from inside the heart of state government.
Election day was over a month ago, but we haven’t posted, because it’s hard to write a summary of something that speaks so well for itself. Across the country, people reacted well to the progressive agenda put forward by Democratic candidates on all levels. Here in Iowa, we won both legislative chambers and Terrace Hill. We held onto Boswell’s Congressional seat and picked up two more (one quite unexpectedly).
All of us here worked very hard, whether it looked that way on this web site or not. I had to stop blogging because of my job with the party, but I wouldn’t have had the time to write even if I had wanted to, and I think the rest of the Grinnell College Campus Democrats felt the same way.
Personally, I want to thank all of the volunteers I dealt with on our campus and in Poweshiek County. The amount of work people were willing to do was at once staggering and inspiring. Locally, we helped Eric Palmer defeat Danny Carroll for State Representative and helped elect an all-Democratic County Board of Supervisors. Even though it was stressful and trying and kind of sucky at times for all of us, winning the way we did makes everything worth it.
I remember in the weeks after election day, cable news heads and columnists talked about whether the election was more an acceptance of the Democratic agenda or a rejection of the Republican one. For some reason, conventional wisdom seems to claim that it was more the latter than the former, but I’m skeptical.
When I went door-to-door as a canvasser or dealt with folks in our office, I sensed a renewed interest in Democratic positions. Maybe we did a better job of communicating our agenda this election, but I think a lot of it was just that people were more interested in hearing what we had to say. People finally decided that they’d had enough, and they changed their minds.
And, I cannot emphasize this enough, WE WON. Look for more blogging from us here, as more of us finish recouperating and gloating and decide to start writing again.
You’ve probably noticed that our blogging has been pretty light in the past week or so, as we’ve been focused on preparing for on campus satellite voting. Well, yesterday was the big day, and I think it went very well.
Four hundred and nineteen people cast ballots in the Forum South Lounge, including 50 new voter registrations. In 2002, only 95 people participated in satellite voting, with only 200 students voting at all. We’ve already doubled turnout on campus, and we’ve still got a month to go. Our 25+ volunteers, some of whom even wore fake mustaches in solidarity with ‘stached campus favorite Eric Palmer, should be very proud of themselves.
We did experience some hurdles in the morning, as there was confusion amongst the county auditor’s volunteers about whether students needed to reregister to their dorms instead of using the post office as their address, as it has always been done. This would have meant reregistering the entire campus, including the hundreds of first-years who registered since August. By mid-morning the problem was cleared up, and the wait to vote got cut quite a bit, to our relief.
I think a lot of us were also frustrated by the reaction of some of our peers to our GOTV strategy. By definition, any successful GOTV effort looks a little harassing. Grinnell has a (loveable) tendency to be a bubble for liberal idealists, and so the idea that number of votes is the bottom line determining who governs our country is a little hard to swallow for many. A high-gear GOTV campaign is also pretty startling to our usually quiet campus. The truth is, it’s worth it to annoy five people to get to the one who doesn’t know there’s an election going on. I hope when the dust settles, our peers will be forgiving of our incessant door knocking, calling, flyering, and well, harassment. When we have a Democratic House giving Bush a run for his money, Chet advocating for education and women’s rights in the governor’s mansion, and Eric Palmer raising the minimum wage in the State House, it’ll all be worth it, I promise.
All told, a valiant effort. Thanks to everyone who put in hours and hours of volunteering, and to everyone who voted. We’ve made a great start, and now it’s time to gear up for the dash to the November finish line.
We here at IowaProgress didn’t get an email or anything about this, but Sam Sedar mentioned last night on his show, the Majority Report, that Denise O’Brien will be on their show tonight. Sounds like they’ll probably talk a little about the state of the Democratic party in Iowa, among other things. The show airs 6-9PM Central.
A reader has been pestering us to post about Leonard Boswell’s MySpace for a little while now. I saw that Ed Fallon also had one, so I thought it’d be a good time to post some thoughts about how campaigns use the internet.
I’ve thought for a while that most political campaigns — especially in Iowa — use at most about 10% of the Internet’s potential for connecting with voters and organizing supporters. This campaign season is better than past ones here, but still, I’ve signed up for most of the Iowa campaigns’ email lists, and I get fewer than one a week from all of them except for Nussle’s. (Some, I’ve never gotten any from, even though I’ve signed up on their web sites. So maybe there have been errors with signup, too?)
The IDP sends out emails pretty frequently, but this week I’ve gotten about six emails with exactly the same thing each time (about a Medicare Press Conference), and that’s just annoying.
MySpace is nice, but it isn’t going to connect a campaign with rural voters all that well. And emails are good, but they usually only work for people who have already pledged support, because no one else signs up on an email list.
What could be improved? For one, the web sites themselves could all stand to be a lot more usable. That means things like taking more advantage of whitespace, making site organization more logical, making content more readable, and making the design easier to look at for long periods of time.
But it also means more interactivity. Real blogs would be nice (I haven’t seen a single thing I’d call a “blog” on any Iowa sites, even though Fallon claims to have one). Also, the photo galleries should be updated more regularly, so that candidates can say “check my web site to see if your picture got taken today!” at all of their appearances. That’ll get people to the web sites and keep them thinking about candidates.
In general, it seems like the people at the top of campaigns often see web sites as much as a liability as a tool, and that’s not helpful. I’ve been offering my help around to some campaigns, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to help out a little bit with this stuff.
For the money, there’s no better marketing tool than the Internet. Someday, everyone will realize it.
This week has been busy for many members of Campus Democrats. Fallon and Blouin visited last week, we produced a podcast, we conducted interviews with campaign staffers, we set up a pretty ambitious GOTV/voter reg. strategy for tomorrow, and we tried to coordinate visits from all three campaigns. All of our events are open to the public, so please feel free to show up; and, if you’re a Poweshiek County resident, register and vote! (All county residents who are U.S. citizens are allowed to register and to vote at our Satellite Voting station.) The polls are open from 9 to 4.
Here’s the schedule of candidate visits:
Ed Fallon: 11AM meet-greet outside Alumni Recitation Hall (ARH)
Chet Culver: 12PM lunch/rally in Loose Hall Lounge
The candidates are coming rain or shine, so if weather gets bad we’ll have new locations for the outdoor events nearby. And if you’d like to volunteer to help coordinate things, meet the Campus Dems representatives outside ARH; someone will be there for most of the day.
Campaign interviews with representatives of the Fallon and Culver campaigns will be up over the next 24 hours.
Tonight, the Grinnell Campus Democrats met, and here’s what we discussed:
We’ll be holding satellite voting for the primaries 28 April. We’re postering campus with issue grids for the gubernatorial candidates, and, if possible, democratic candidates for other offices.
We’re also coordinating volunteer opportunities from the campaigns. We passed around signup sheets for volunteers that we’ll forward on to our contacts with the campaigns.
Campaigns are probably going to make stops on campus before our primaries. We’ve heard back from both Blouin and Fallon, and we expect to hear from Culver, too. It looks like Blouin will probably come on the evening of the 23rd.
Our blog (this site) is doing well, with a lot of visits every day. The Fallon and Blouin campaigns have agreed to do interviews. We might get promotional materials.
We have a lot of volunteer opportunities. In particular, Eric Palmer’s new campaign manager (who seems impressive) is already looking for interns and volunteers for the summer. (We already passed around the signup sheet.) Danny Carroll, his opponent, likes to think that we’re hippy “East Coast Liberals” who are all pinko activists. Let’s show him.
We’ll be hosting a GOTV workshop to make sure that we’re a well trained force for the party during this election season. The date of it hasn’t been determined.
We passed around a signup sheet for students who will be around during the summer doing other things. We’ll use the list to random requests for volunteers when extra people are needed. And maybe for parties.
The administration might let us install a “Student Activism Center” in the new campus center. There are planning meetings for the next two nights: 10:20PM in the Coffeehouse on Wednesday; 7PM in the North Lounge on Thursday.
And, finally, it looks like the father of a current student is running for governor of South Dakota. We may have some opportunities to help that campaign, too.
Just a reminder: Grinnell College Campus Democrats’ meetings are intended to help us coordinate efforts to cause progressive change. Anyone from the community who would like to raise a concern or promote a cause is welcome to attend on Tuesday nights at 7:30PM in the Forum Coffee House. Email democrat@grinnell.edu if you’d like to join us.
The DNC has this post to its “blog” about its 50-state strategy. I know I’ve heard people talking about how great it is (and perhaps it really is a novel approach), but I wonder how far down it really goes. That is, will they be helping random campaigns for State Representative, or just high-profile campaigns like Governors, US Congressmen, etc.?
I guess we’ll find out how “grassroots” the plan really is this summer, which is also when we’ll find out how many states the DNC is really going to be pressing in. I know Iowa’s on the list somewhere, but is it really a top priority?
Hurray for a birthday spent at the Poweshiek County Dems Convention! Some candidates’ spokespersons dropped by, and Andrea McGuire professed that she had forced Blouin to swear to support choice if he wanted her on board. Right, I bet that’s how the conversation went.
We broke into preference groups, and Fallon and uncommitted each received 3 delegates. Blouin and Culver each got 2, but I’m pretty sure the Blouin people had to convince some uncommitteds to come over in order to be viable.
At one point Danny Carroll wandered into the hall lost, but I’d still say the high point of the day was probably the announcement that someone had found a pack of unmarked pills in the bathroom. Multiple attendees offered to take them and see what happened.
