I was only able to attend the Saturday session of this weekend’s e-board meeting, under the strange and foreboding Anaheim skies – the fire in Chino Hills nearby blotted out the sun during the midday, you could actually stare right into it – but there were some interesting happenings:

• The Progressive Caucus meeting featured a debate between two candidates for party controller, Eric Bradley (the incumbent) and progressive challenger Hillary Crosby.  It was good of both of them to come to the caucus and express their views, but Bradley’s contentions (some would call them alibis) for why the party didn’t do quite as well in downballot races this year were kind of preposterous.  First, he claimed that money moved into some races late because nobody knew Barack Obama would do as well as he did.  This is insulting on a variety of levels.  First of all, Obama was leading by as much as 28 points in some polls as far back as June, and was never seriously threatened in any polling.  Second of all, I don’t see how it matters, in terms of who you spend money on, how a race that is out of your control is faring.  The next thing that Bradley said, echoing something I hear a lot at these CDP meetings, is that we cannot disclose information to the membership of the party on financing because “we cannot let the Republicans know what we’re doing.”  We might as well let them know, considering that hiding the information hasn’t brought us much good.  Also, the entirety of the information that Crosby and progressives like her are seeking is a) already readily available in FPPC and FEC reports and b) sought AFTER THE FACT so we can make intelligent decisions about what worked and what didn’t.  There is a bias toward secrecy there that is quite disconcerting.

• In the general session, there was a continued set of numbers given to prove that the CDP did everything it could to win downballot races.  Art Torres mentioned 1 million live GOTV calls and $12.5 million spent.  These are all nice numbers (although Obama’s California campaign made 1 million calls a day in the week leading up to the election), but if the results are essentially nothing, recapturing seats that were gerrymandered to benefit Democrats to begin with, then the question of effectiveness must be asked.  We had a very good session about that with a group of committed activists who ran phonebank operations and local headquarters and state campaigns, and the information was very illuminating.  First of all, we have got to end the practice of being one of the only two states in the country not using the DNC Voter File and VAN software.  The data is supposedly better in the current set we use, but that can be bought out and integrated into the VAN.  I heard about numerous problems with the statewide Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool that made it essentially useless.  

Second, there needs to be more empowerment at the local level.  The stories I heard from the organizers at DP-SFV (the Democratic Party of the San Fernando Valley) on how they funded their headquarters and made the best use of volunteer time, for example, was great.  In the last week, however, the folks running the campaigns from Sacramento got very top-down in their approach and made all kinds of mistakes that the locals had to fix.  It discouraged volunteers and organizers at the local level.

Finally, there has to be off-cycle organizing so that prospective volunteers are brought up with a culture of impacting their own communities instead of driving off to Nevada every four years.  This includes finding and capturing the local groups who worked so tirelessly for Obama this year.  They need to have it explained and drilled into them why staying local and effecting change inside California is so important.  And organizers need to be paid year-round to help bring that about.  Finally, they need to be in EVERY county, not just the populous ones or the most contested ones, to impact those statewide races for 2010.  For his part, Chairman Torres said he is committed to finding organizers and capitalizing on all the energy we see now, and I think we need to hold him to that.

• The above steps make a good criteria for the next party chair, and that race was the buzz of the session.  Right now we have three candidates: Eric Bauman, chair of the LA County Democratic Party; Alex Rooker, current first Vice-Chair; and the legendary John Burton, former State Senate leader and Congressman.  At first I figured that Burton would have locked up so many endorsements from legislators who he’s known forever that this might not be much of a race; however, Rooker won the endorsement of the CDP Labor Caucus, which is very significant (if not totally surprising, as Rooker has longstanding ties to labor).  I don’t know if you’re aware of who pays for campaigns in California, but the labor community could have a lot to say about who’s the next state party chair.  In addition, a tough three-way fight with two candidates from the North and one from the South could give the Southern California candidate an advantage. (CORRECTION: Rooker is from LA County, which would give the advantage to the northern candidate)

I’m inviting all of the candidates to visit us at Calitics and offer their vision of where they want to take the party.

So we haven’t had a great deal of time to throw this together, and we aren’t entirely sure of who would be willing to participate.  So here’s what we’re going to do: anyone who would like to discuss what went well and what went not-so-well in the 2008 election cycle, and what could be improved for the future, at this weekend’s CDP executive board meeting, should meet after the general session outside the hall at 12:00.  At that point, we’ll have a better understanding of how many people we will having participating, and we’ll find a place to congregate.

Feel free to email me about this: david-dot-dayen-at-gmail-dot-com.  Hope to see some of you tomorrow in Anaheim.

In addition, I wanted to again highlight Join The Impact, a series of marches and protests against Prop. 8 tomorrow, throughout the country.  You can find your protest location here.  Unfortunately, lots of us at Calitics, including Robert, Brian, Dante and myself, will be at the e-board meeting tomorrow.  However, through the wonders of Soapblox, we can front-page your stories from events all over the state and the nation.  So please, if you’re attending any of the marches, please post a diary and tell us about it.  We should have coverage from at least Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Diego and Albuquerque, NM, already, but it would be great to have a panoply of voices.

This is something I’m just whipping together on my own.  But based on the feedback on what I’ve been writing about the California Election Day campaign and some additional offline requests, there seems to be a desire to get together at this weekend’s CDP executive board meeting in Anaheim and go over what went right and what went wrong.  So, I’m taking ownership of this.

We can do it on Saturday, though I have no idea when or where.  The meeting is located at:

Sheraton Park Hotel at the Anaheim Resort

1855 S. Harbor Blvd.

Anaheim, CA 92802

I’m looking over the agenda, and the best time would probably be during the social from 5:30-8pm, but I wouldn’t be able to personally attend.  Otherwise, we’d have to do it during committee meetings, caucuses, or lunch.  Lunch might work best, actually, between 12:00-1:30.

I’m making this open-source, so I’ll cede to everyone’s best judgment.  Comment here on when you’d like to do this and if you can attend.  Also what you would like to see covered.  And of course, we’re going to have to find a place for this as well.  There is a coffee shop inside the Sheraton called Cappuccino Cafasia that might work, as well as Molly’s Kitchen, also at the Sheraton.  And there’s an IHOP across the street!

Please get this out to your lists so I can get some feedback.  Thanks.

The numerous issues inside the No on 8 campaign, and their disappointing mismanagement, has finally bubbled up into the traditional media (we were talking about it a week ago).  The SacBee writes about the trouble at the top:

Key staff members – including the campaign manager – were replaced in the final weeks as polls turned dramatically against the No side. Their replacements say they found an effort that was too timid, slow to react, without a radio campaign or a strategy to reach out to African Americans, a group that ultimately supported the measure by more than 2 to 1.

Gay marriage supporters are looking to the courts to overturn the decision. But if another political campaign is waged, said Dennis Mangers, co-chairman of the No on 8 Northern California Committee, “we’ll have to do better.”

No on 8 campaign manager Steve Smith was shoved aside three weeks before Election Day, after he was slow to counter TV ads in which the measure’s supporters claimed that same-sex marriage would be promoted in schools if the measure failed.

And Smith was replaced by a committee – half the consultant class in Sacramento went through the revolving door of that campaign.  And they set about to answer unchallenged ads from the Yes campaign and get on radio.  But the message remained somewhat timid, and the campaign didn’t put much effort into minority outreach or field operations.  Late volunteers were told to go out on a street corner and wave signs.

What’s remarkable is that the best activism and creativity I’ve seen from the LGBT community in years has come in the immediate AFTERMATH of this vote.  The talent was out there, but wasn’t channeled during the campaign.  Activists are using wiki-based technology to set up a national day of action on November 15 called The Impact.  A comedy troup in LA used the Yes campaign’s own words to “advocate” for prohibiting divorce.  And Utah lawmakers are turning the tables on the Mormon church by using their alleged tolerance to make major advances for gay rights in the Beehive State:

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints have said they do not object to rights for same-sex couples, as long as those rights do not infringe on the integrity of the traditional family.

Now, gay-rights activists and at least five Utah legislators are asking the Church to demonstrate its conviction.

The group Equality Utah says the Church made the invitation, and they’re accepting it. “The LDS Church says it does not oppose same-sex couples receiving such rights as hospitalization and medical care, fair housing rights or probate rights,” said Mike Thompson, executive director of Equality Utah.

These actions are useful to the future of marriage equality nationwide, and could be the backbone of a smarter, more grassroots movement.  Why were they not tapped at all for the No on 8 campaign?

Yesterday, Connecticut granted marriage equality to all its citizens, offering a glimmer of hope.  I am convinced that justice will eventually prevail.  But you have to treat the campaign like a campaign, and use the assets at your disposal.

I received a lot of feedback on my piece about the disappointing California election results and I want to thank everyone who participated.  A few points:

• The CDP has a version of Neighbor-to-Neighbor called Neighborhood Leader.  The program asks for a commitment from the activist to talk with 25 friends on multiple occasions throughout the year.  I don’t have metrics on it, which would be nice to know, but my suspicion is it needs to be expanded.

• There is a lot of back and forth about the extent of the ground game here in California.  Many have written in to talk about the field operation in key districts and field offices throughout the state.  Some have said that I overlooked this element, including all the doorhangers and phone calls made inside the state.  Others have told me that the calls tried to shoehorn too many messages into one (I did have experiences calling for multiple propositions and a candidate at the same time, which ends up shortchanging all of them) and that the results on the ground in general were unfocused.  And the insistence from some to talk about field elides the point.  Even if I grant that every targeted legislative campaign had the most aggressive and far-reaching field program in American history, the facts are that most of these campaigns lost, and so it’s time to come to terms with the fact that the type of organizing done in the state isn’t working.

• Some have suggested that Democrats, in fact, did not underperform the Presidential ticket in House races, but I think a lot of this is fun with statistics.  Yes, House Democrats in California may have done better than Barack Obama, but that would be because a substantial number of them had token or no competition.  Like 30 out of 53.  While on the chart at the link, it appears that California exceeded the Presidential numbers, the proof is in the lack of pickups despite a 24-point blowout at the top of the ticket.

• Other local organizers have the right idea.  I’m going to reprint this comment in full:

We ran a very intensive and very grassroots effort in Monterey County with more than 1000 volunteers (5 fold increase over 2004) that was by and large successful, got some newcomers into office and saved some progressive incumbents from conservative challengers.

We did all of this without CDP help.

We were offered use of the CDP voter database which in many ways was quite inadequate when it came to mapping and would have costed us money.  We were also offered 1000 doorhangers on Thursday before the election (we have 80,000 Democrats in Monterey County).

Instead we commissioned our own slate mailers and door hangers and mailed and hung 80,0000 and 30,000 respectively in conjunction with the local unions.  We used the VAN through CAVoterConnect for free with great results for us. We were able to manage our volunteers with it and we used it for all of our phone banking and Neighbor-to-Neighbor activities.

Here is what the CDP could have done – and can still do for future campaigns:

Support the VAN and help all local parties get access.  Help integrate State VAN with Obama VAN.

Conduct more capacity building, especially in how to run county-based campaigns, along the lines of Camp Obama but applied to state and local races.

Provide a template for door hangers that local parties can buy into instead of having to go out and design their own.

Work toward a more modular – bottom-up campaign.

Vinz Koller/ Chair/ Monterey County Democratic Party

I particularly want to emphasize the VAN, the California VAN is for some reason not integrated with the DNC’s Votebuilder program, which doesn’t make much sense to me.  There ought to be an effort to clean up all that idea in the off-year to get it ready for 2010.  Votebuilder is simply easier to work with and can be managed by volunteers.  And since there will be off-year elections this year, it can be test run.

• I don’t think I ever blamed the Obama campaign for draining the state of resources, but let me say again that I don’t.  In addition to many of the best volunteers leaving the state, many of the top organizers, including most of labor, left as well.  And Obama’s election was crucially important for a variety of reasons so you can’t blame them.

• Therefore, the biggest thing California Democrats can do to reverse this disturbing trend of the “political trade deficit,” sending money and organization elsewhere and never importing anything, is to argue for and pass the National Popular Vote plan, which would force locals to organize their own communities in a Presidential election.  If the Electoral College were offered as a system today, it would be found to be an unconstitutional violation of the principle of “one person, one vote” as determined by the 14th Amendment.  It shrinks the pool of competitive states down to a geographically significant battleground, and has made California irrelevant – again – as it has been for Presidential races for a generation.  A disruptive change like the National Popular Vote would go a long way to changing how campaigns are conducted in Presidential years in California.

Back in 2006, I and a lot of other grassroots progressives were angered that California showed little to no movement in its Congressional and legislative seats despite a wave election.  You can see some articles about that here and here, when I explained why I was running as a delegate to the state Party.  And frankly, I could rerun the entire article today, but instead I’ll excerpt.

I’ve lived in California for the last eight years.  I’m a fairly active and engaged citizen, one who has attended plenty of Democratic Club meetings, who has lived in the most heavily Democratic areas of the state in both the North and South, who has volunteered and aided the CDP and Democratic candidates from California during election time, who (you would think) would be the most likely candidate for outreach from that party to help them in their efforts to build a lasting majority.  But in actuality, the California Democratic Party means absolutely nothing to me.  Neither do its endorsements.  The amount of people who aren’t online and aren’t in grassroots meetings everyday who share this feeling, I’d peg at about 95% of the electorate.  

I mean, I’m a part of both those worlds, and I have no connection to the state party.  I should be someone that the CDP is reaching out to get involved.  They don’t.  The only time I ever know that the CDP exists is three weeks before the election when they pay for a bunch of ads.  The other 23 months of the year they are a nonentity to the vast majority of the populace […]

Only two Democrats in the entire state of California were able to defeat incumbents last November: Debra Bowen and Jerry McNerney.  Both of them harnessed the power of the grassroots and used it to carry them to victory.  They also stuck to their principles and created a real contrast with their opponents on core issues.  The only way that the California Democratic Party can retain some relevance in the state, and not remain a secretive, cloistered money factory that enriches its elected officials with lobbyist money and does nothing to build the Democratic brand, is by building from the bottom up and not the top down.  By becoming more responsive to the grassroots and more effective in its strategy, we can ensure that California stays blue, which is not a given.  This is a long-term process that is in its third year, and will not happen overnight.  But it’s crucial that we continue and keep the pressure on.

In 2008, we experienced that most anomalous of events, a SECOND wave election in a row.  Barack Obama won the biggest victory at the top of the ticket in California since WWII.  And yet, the efforts of downticket Democrats yielded only minimal success.  This is despite a decided improvement in the party in terms of online outreach and voter registration.  So something is deeply, deeply wrong with how they’re conducting campaigns.

I’m going to lay out the good, the bad and the ugly on the flip and make some suggestions as to what we must do to improve this for the future.

The Good

This wasn’t a wipeout at the downballot level.  The voters agreed with the Calitics endorsements on 8 of 11 ballot measures, with 1, Prop. 11, still too close to call.  We did manage, at this hour, a net gain of two Assembly seats, which could expand to three if Alyson Huber in AD-10 has some luck, and a gain of one Senate seat if Hannah-Beth Jackson holds off Tony Strickland in SD-19.  It is true that those numbers, 50 in the Assembly and 26 in the Senate, would be high-water marks for this decade.  And we came close in a few other seats that we can hopfully capture in the future.  In the Congress, we have thus far gained no ground, but a couple seats, CA-44 and CA-03, look well-positioned for the future, and with Bill Durston set to run for a third time, his increased name ID and the closeness of partisan affiliation in that district should make it a targeted seat at the national level.  

Voter registration was the driving factor here.  In red areas, Democrats did the leg work of registering thousands upon thousands of voters and making uncompetitive seats suddenly competitive.

The Bad

They forgot to turn those new voters out.

What shortsighted CYA masters like Steve Maviglio and Jason Kinney fail to understand, apparently, is the concept of opportunity cost.  When you have Barack Obama on the top of the ticket winning 61% of the vote, it is simply inexcusable to have gains that are this modest.  Maviglio doesn’t tell you that AD-78 and AD-80 were gerrymandered to be Democratic seats, so essentially we got back what was expected in the Assembly, and with a 106-vote lead, who knows what’s in store with SD-19.  The concept of a wave election is that such energy at the top of the ticket will necessarily trickle down.  And that’s what I based my initial projections on, that Obama would make “out-of-reach” seats suddenly competitive.  But he didn’t.  And there are two reasons for that: ticket-splitting and voters that stopped at the top, causing a significant undervote.  I don’t have numbers for Obama at the district level, so it’s hard to be sure about ticket dropping, but the ballot measures are generating about 600,000-800,000 less votes than the Presidential race or Prop. 8.

If you want a further analysis, djardin did a great analysis comparing Barbara Boxer’s share of the vote in 2004 in Assembly districts, when John Kerry was on top of the ballot, against the vote share from the Assemblymembers who were built for the district in 2008, with Obama.  The numbers are astonishing.

District Candidate       Boxer Vote      2008 AD Vote

*78 Marty Block                      57.9%               55.0%

*80 Manny Perez                   57.5%               52.9%

*15 Joan Buchanan               52.6%               52.9%

30 Fran Florez                 49.8%               48.3%

26 John Eisenhut                 48.6%              48.3%

10 Alyson Huber                 48.1%               46.2%

*pickup

In most of these races, the AD candidates are slightly underperforming the 2004 Boxer vote.  The exception is Joan Buchanan in Assembly District 15.   Buchanan may have been helped by demographic changes in the district.

It’s simply ridiculous that any district candidate would underperform the Boxer vote, after four years of incredible registration gains and a 61% performer at the top of the ticket.  It’s inexcusable, and nobody inside the party should be feeling good about missing out on the second wave election in a row.  These moments don’t happen often.  And these failures are what lead Yacht Party leaders like Mike Villines to crow about how “Republicans will still be empowered to protect Californians from higher taxes.”  He knows that he keeps dodging bullets and doesn’t have to worry about a backlash for his party’s irresponsibility.

These expectations are not unrealistic and this is NOT about gerrymandering, regardless of what fossils like George Skelton say.  Alyson Huber, Linda Jones and John Eisenhut had virtual parity in terms of registration in their districts.  Fran Florez had a much higher Democratic share.  Obama should have carried them to victory.  Thanks to him, Democrats took multiple state houses and made gains all over the country, in far more difficult circumstances.  There are systematic barriers to a progressive wave here right now.

So what is to account for this?  It’s important to note that the problems we saw with the No on 8 campaign should not be viewed in isolation.  They are a symptom of the poor performance of the consultant class here in this state.  No ground game?  Check.  Maviglio is crowing about the fact that they had a lot of volunteers on ELECTION DAY.  That’s too late.  Based on what I’ve heard, the CDP dumped all their door-hangers on the local parties, who had no volunteers to hand them out and instead relied on the Democratic clubs to do it.  That’s dysfunctional and disorganized.  Furthermore, that makes clear that no money was put into field – door knocking, phone banking, etc.  Instead, the consultocracy again relied on slate mailers and a modicum of TV ads, hoping the IE campaigns, which spent over $10 million, would take up the slack.  There was a low-dollar donor program, and it netted something like $200,000, which doesn’t pay for two days’ worth of spots, and it didn’t start until 8 weeks out.

There’s no sense of urgency, no notion of the permanent campaign.  Did ANY CDP messaging mention the yacht tax loophole?  Did they exploit the Republican budget, which was unnecessarily cruel?  Was the drive for 2/3 used as a banner across campaigns to frame a narrative on the election?  Were any issues put to use?  No.

Part of this is what I call our political trade deficit.  We export money and volunteers and get nothing in return.  The energy and effort put into the Obama campaign locally was impressive, but it didn’t translate into anything locally.  

California is a state that was expected to vote heavily for Obama. California donors accounted for perhaps 20% of his record-setting $640 million-plus. In the final days of the election campaign, Californians provided even more for the Democratic nominee: They volunteered.

Even though California was not a swing state, Californians still mattered. Some took leaves from work to knock on doors and traveled to the battleground states of Virginia, Colorado, Ohio and others. They even have a name, “bluebirds,” people from blue states who flock to Republican strongholds and swing states to help Obama’s campaign.

Jack Gribbon, California political director for Unite Here, the unions that include hotel and restaurant workers, oversaw an independent campaign focused on the swing area of Washoe County in the battleground state of Nevada. Knowing that Las Vegas and Clark County, in which the city is located, would probably vote for Obama, Gribbon sought to help swing the more conservative Reno-Sparks area toward the Democrat.

Using multiple voter lists, Gribbon targeted 16,000 voters, most of them with Spanish surnames, many of them Democrats and some of them newly registered.

It’s incredible that Californians can be so easily motivated to contribute to a national effort, which requires a lot of work on their behalf, picking up and moving across the country, but they cannot be tapped for a local ground game.

But I don’t blame Obama on this.  He’s trying to win an election.  It’s not his fault that he’s more charismatic or more of a volunteer magnet than the California Democratic Party.  The point is that the party has to supplement this, by working in off-years and early in the year to build a grassroots base.  And there’s a blueprint for this.  It comes from Howard Dean.  This was part of his memo after the election:

Governor Dean’s first step was to assess our Party’s strengths and weaknesses and put in place a strategy to address those issues.  Dean developed a business plan to rebuild the Democratic Party, modernize our operations and expand the electoral map.  The emphasis was on lessons learned and best practices, and it included the following key components:

·  Rebuild the Infrastructure of the Party – After assessing the needs on the ground, we hired full-time permanent staff in all 50 states, trained staff and activists, introduced new measures of accountability, and developed a unified technology platform. Over the past four years we’ve held 140 trainings for candidates, campaign staff, organizers, Party leaders and activists in all 50 states.

·  Upgrade and Improve the Party’s Technology/Modernize the Way We Do Grassroots Organizing –  Over the past four years the DNC has made significant investments in technology, creating a truly national voter file, improved micro-targeting models and developed 21st century campaign tools that merged traditional organizing with new technology.

·  Diversify the Donor Base – Shifting the emphasis of Party fundraising to include both small donors and large donors, the DNC brought in more than 1.1 million new donors and raised more than $330 million from ’05 – ’08. The average contribution over the last three years was $63.88.

·  Amplify Democratic Message and Improved Outreach – Created a national communications infrastructure to amplify the Democratic message and reach out to groups we haven’t always talked to and expand the map to regions where Democrats have not traditionally been competitive – including the South and the West.

·  Professionalize Voter Protection Efforts – Created a year-round national, state and local effort to ensure that every eligible voter has the opportunity to vote.  

Those are the bullet points, but the details are important.  Training and deploying full-time staffers throughout the state is very desperately needed.  They could implement a version of the Neighbor-to-Neighbor program that proved so successful nationwide.  The DNC voter file is an amazing tool that I have had the opportunity to use.  California, a leader in technology, ought to have the most comprehensive online database of its voters in the country, which we can use for micro-targeting and outreach to distinct communities.  And finally, this is about PERSONAL CONTACT AT THE STREET LEVEL.  Two years after I campaigned for delegate on a platform of making the party present in people’s lives year-round, not just at election time, that is still not a part of the picture.  This is why everybody walks away to go volunteer and donate elsewhere.  They have no connection to the state party, no interest in the state’s issues, and are in many ways contemptuous of the efforts of state politicians.  They haven’t been drilled on why the government is unmanageable thanks to the 2/3 rule, and they haven’t internalized the urgency of why that must be dealt with.

The silver lining is that these thousands of California-based volunteers, who learned organizing on the Obama campaign, could actually be channeled and put to use by the CDP if they chose to do so.  The role of the next state party chair in this effort is crucial.

Quite simply, what has been tried isn’t working.  In two election cycles with massive gains at the national level, in California we have crumbs.  Something is deeply wrong.  Something is broken.  And that must be fixed.