Our apologies for being a little quiet here on Calitics this weekend.  The convention has been a wee bit hectic for all of us. We’ll get you a more detailed recap soon,  but there were a few details that were worth sharing.

In the Insurance Commissioners race, Dave Jones was able to squeak out the endorsement.  It was certainly a dramatic race, with both campaigns doing a really good job of rallying support. But in the end, Dave Jones’ progressive base was simply too much for Hector de la Torre to overcome.  The endorsement won’t necessarily bring a big windfall, Chair Burton has said that they won’t be spending any money in primaries.  But, hey, Jones will now get that lower postage rate that everybody was seeking.  Of course, the cache of the Democratic Party endorsement will be quite powerful on the mail that we will likely be seeing coming out of Jones’ campaign very shortly.  I like both of these guys, but in the interest of full disclosure, I did end up voting for Dave Jones. Either will make a much better insurance commissioner than Steve Poizner, that’s for sure.

In the LG race, Gavin Newsom won the outright vote, but didn’t get the endorsement. I know the Hahn folks were trying to spin this as a win, but I just don’t get it.  Newsom had already declined to seek the endorsement a while back, and it was Janice Hahn’s campaign who forced the issue. If I recall correctly, the vote was about 57-43 52-42 in favor of Newsom. Which, considering Newsom’s past, is fairly respectable. But, again, I’m not entirely sure why we went through the process. Perhaps Garry South figured it would make Gavin work and might cause some sort of game-changing drama.  That clearly didn’t happen, and Hahn is still looking for some way of overcoming Newsom’s advantage in name ID.

On the Props, the resolutions committee went the right way on all the props, and we’ll approve them.  They supported Prop 15, the fair elections initiative, and Prop 13, a measure that would change the way seismic retrofits are taxed.  They opposed Prop 14 (“open” primaries), Prop 16 (PG&E Power Grab), and Prop 17 (Mercury Insurance power grab).

General session is about to start, and we’ll wrap up the festivities, approve reports of the committees, and perhaps get a chance to vote on a few endorsements. I know at least one campaign was trying to get signatures, but I don’t know what came of it.  A full recap to come soon.

What am I talking about? Well, let’s start from the fact that John Myers is all over this California politics stuff.  He went through the most recent finance filings and found that the CDP had received $10,000 from Anthem Blue Cross?

Really? John Burton, as chair of the CDP, thought it was cool to solicit and take money from Anthem Blue Cross? One of the groups he was railing against during the waning days of the health care fight?

I was sort of amazed by that and needed to get to the bottom of this.  So, I called up the CDP and said “What you talking about CDP?”

Turns out, the check arrived, unsolicited, from Anthem Blue Cross late in the work day.  The staff, being a bit hesitant about a $10K check from a big health insurer, set the check aside for Chairman Burton’s approval.  However, this being 24-hour reporting days, the staff, in constant reporting mode, wrote it up right away and filed it.

I’ve been told, and have no reason to doubt it, that the check was never cashed, and will not be cashed. It will be returned promptly.

But, this brings up a good question. Should the party return such unsolicited funds? Certainly, we should not be courting these companies, that much should be in no question at all.  But, if they are dropping off checks, couldn’t the party use that money against the insurer?  Spend it sending mail into swing districts to support representatives that will support single payer health care?

Yeah, they wouldn’t send any more checks, but so what? Anthem knew who they were sending the check to, John Burton, who wrote and got passed SB 2, one of the most progressive health care reform packages ever passed in America. Of course, ABC didn’t like that, and spent heavily to repeal the measure. (Correction: Anthem Blue Cross didn’t actually get involved in SB 2, but have been involved on the wrong side in pretty much every other health care fight in California)

What say you, Calitics folks? Would you have cashed that check?

(For identification purposes only, I’m the Executive Director at Netroots Nation)

Last week yet another poorly crafted Jerry Brown email went out to his email universe. That’s not news, I’ve been cringing at their emails since they first started sending them. Most cringe worthy so far? Jerry Brown’s ring tone.

The subject line was decent, “You wouldn’t believe…” works for me. But the rest of the email violated about every best practice that’s been written for emails. Here’s some simple ones from Blue State Digital for starters.

There’s this weird screen capture of a YouTube video that actually goes to YouTube instead of their donate page (you just lost anyone that intended to donate with that link). Instead of highlighting specific text 2-3 times in the email they opted to use these weird huge contribute images. The email is rambling and without focus. The type is small, nothing is bolded to catch your attention. There’s all sorts of other links to distract you like facebook, etc.

And at the time it was originally sent the lowest contribution you could make without entering something in the “other” box was $100 even though they asked for $10, $25, whatever you can give in the email. And the highest donation was $51,800–now where’s my credit card that’s got that much spare room on it?

You can see a partial shot of it here.

Epic FAIL, the conversion rates have to be terrible.

More on the flip about how Jerry Brown’s email “best practices” are infecting the California Democratic Party and Alberto Torrico’s campaign for Attorney General…

But now this is spreading like a virus in some bad end of the world thriller movie. And it’s doing serious violence to online organizing knowledge.

The California Democratic Party decided to forward Brown’s email this past Thursday night to everyone on their list. They didn’t change a thing, they just forwarded this crappy email verbatim with a little header on top from Burton. You can see a partial screen shot of that here.

And then on the same day Torrico sends something very similar, but actually worse due to lack of focus, to his email list. See that partial screen shot here. I mean hey I’m a Kamala supporter so maybe that’s ok 🙂

Brown has obviously been in politics a long time, and the combination of his team running with these techniques and the CDP supporting them is providing some kind of weird signal to others to adopt them. If Brown’s doing it this must be what it feels like at the top of the game.

So in the hope Brown’s people, CDP people, and folks with other campaigns that read Calitics see this, please stop looking to these emails as examples.

* If you want to follow some good models look at what groups like Courage Campaign, MoveOn and OFA are sending out just to name a few. You’ll notice that fundraising emails are short, carefully constructed and focused, make specific asks, and if there is a video it’s on the donation page. Messaging, unfortunately, is a much longer conversation. But technique is important.

* There’s all kinds of help out there ranging from national consultancies like Blue State Digital (you know, the folks that worked for Obama) to folks like Trilogy Interactive to close to free help like New Organizing Institute provides to scores of articles and blog posts written on the subject. I love Wired for Change tools as much as the next guy but just having their toolset doesn’t cut it, you need to know how to use it.

* If you’re running against an insanely well funded candidate like Meg Whitman, as Brown is, then you need to take online organizing seriously and do it right. It’s an incredibly low cost multiplier to every other aspect of your campaign: fundraising, field, messaging, media, volunteers. All you need to do is look at the story of how a 1 term Senator named Barack Hussein Obama beat one of the most well established and financed candidates in recent political history. It wasn’t by sending emails like this.

~~~

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Some events to watch at the CDP E-Board from San Diego.

CDP inside baseball time.

I made a post earlier about the CDP Legislative Action Committee that I refuse to link to because it was that shoddy.  Essentially, the piece implied that there was a subcommittee meeting in Sacramento this upcoming Tuesday because John Hanna was unhappy with the way the Committee currently functions.

That’s not at all true, and I apologize for the implication.  After further discussions with more of the people involved, I have come to realize that there are plenty of issues with the Legislative Action committee as it currently stands that need resolution, including, but not limited to:

Message consistency.  The Party already has two policy committees–platform and resolutions.  Should the Legislative Action committee be a third policy committee, or a legislative action “branch” of the other policy committees?  Should the Legislative Action committee only support bills for which it can find a precedent for party support in a resolution or in the Party Platform?

What types of bills?  Should the committee consider federal, state and local bills, or just state bills?

Gut-and-amend.  If the committee supports a bill that then gets gutted and amended in a legislative session, how can the Party’s support of the bill be rescinded?

Propositions.  Should the LAEOC consider ballot measures?  Technically, props are legislation, but currently those decisions are handled by the Resolutions Committee.  There’s some inconsistency there.

Those are some of the key issues, though there are plenty of other logistical issues involved as well–and in this, we haven’t even discussed the “action” portion of the Legislative Action Committee’s responsibility.  Bear in mind that I still stand by everything I wrote about John Hanna’s solution to these problems–his emails do speak for themselves, after all–but it was severely wrong of me to imply that that’s the only reason the Rules Committee was meeting on this topic.

If it were up to me, the Legislative Action committee would convene to decide a slate of key California bills (including propositions) the Party should support, in conjunction with the Resolutions and Rules Committee, and should then be tasked with developing a Legislative Action Plan to promote the passage of those bills.  If any of these bills were to be substantially gutted and amended, the Chair would have the discretion to rescind the Party’s support.

Maybe I’ll submit that as written testimony–even though I’m not any committees any more.

In my previous post about the Wally Herger (R-Redding) incident wherein he praised a self-described “right-wing terrorist” as a “great American”, I lamented that there was no good video to really put the incident in perspective.

Fortunately, the CDP has corrected that: they’ve found the full video.  I got this from the CDP communications team just a little bit ago.  Enjoy.  You know, it’s sad.  Congressman Herger spends the entire time watching the guy rant with a wry smile.  And given the fact that most of the crowd appears to be terrorist sympathizers, there’s nothing he can really do without incurring the wrath of his constituency.  Just watch as Congressman Herger–who no longer deserves that title, if he ever did–chooses demagoguery over loyalty to American values and ideals:

Pathetic.

Incidentally–if you’re interested in helping the CDP publicize Wally Herger’s despicable actions to his constituents, just click here.

While there are whiffs of deal in Sacramento this weekend, via John Myers, I’m at the CDP E-board meeting. You can catch my tweets here.

The CDP released a new training program, focused on changing some of the red disticts into blue.  You can find information about the training here.  While we have majorities pretty much everywhere, the 2/3 rules pretty much dictate that we need more seats.

Meanwhile, the Progressive Caucus is having some break out sessions. The first is about the budget with Sen. Hancock and Asm. Torrico. Later Sen. Mark Leno will talk about single payer healthcare, he has inherited the bill from termed out Sen. Shiela Keuhl.

X-posted at Progressive Sundae

The special election to replace Ellen Tauscher in CA-10 is taking an ugly turn. The CDP has announced that its endorsement caucus will take place on August 1, and I’m already having flashbacks to Migden-Leno and the 2008 CDP convention.

You see, even though major flaws in the endorsement process were exposed over a year ago, nothing has changed; nor is there, at least to date, any apparent desire on the part of the CDP to address a situation where powerful outsiders are invited to skew the outcome of endorsements in local races.

I’ll do my best to explain it all on the flip…

First a brief lesson in how the endorsement process works in a special election. The chair of the party picks a caucus date and location, and all the members of the California DSCC (Democratic State Central Committee) who live within the district meet and cast their votes. In order to win the endorsement of the CDP, a candidate must receive 60% of the votes cast by these local party members.

So what is the DSCC and how do you become a member of it? Well, statewide, the DSCC is comprised of about 2800 people. Approximately one-third of them are elected by County Central Committees every two years; approximately one-third of them are elected through the ADEMs every two years; approximately one-third of them are appointed by elected officials (or nominees) and serve at their pleasure.

So the Central Committee and AD delegates serve for fixed two-year terms, but the people appointed by the electeds can be changed purely at the whim of their elected. And, as it turns out, there is no requirement in the CDP bylaws that the electeds select their appointees from within the district they represent.

So now that the endorsement caucus has been set for August 1, we can start to examine who will be showing up to vote that day. There will be members elected to the DSCC through the Central Committees of Alameda, Contra Costa, Sacramento, and Solano Counties — but only the ones who physically reside in CA-10. So, for instance, if you’re a DSCC member elected by the Solano Central Committee and you live in Fairfield (CA-10), you can attend the caucus; but if you’re a DSCC member elected by the Solano Central Committee and you live in Vacaville (CA-07), no dice. Same thing goes for the AD delegates. But it’s an entirely different story for the appointees of the electeds.

At least in theory, every Democratic state officer, Senator, Congressmember, State Senator, and Assemblymember in the entire state could dismiss their current appointees and replace them with people who live within CA-10 and are therefore qualified to vote in the caucus. And that’s a lot of appointees. The CDP Bylaws (PDF, Art. II, Sect. 2, beginning on P. 2) spell out how the appointees are allotted:

• State Officers — 6 delegates each
• US Senators — 6 delegates each
• US Congressmembers — 5 delegates each
• State Senators — 6 delegates each
• State Assemblymembers — 5 delegates each

(And those nominees who ran for the offices listed above but did not win their election are allowed to appoint ½ the number of delegates as their elected counterparts — either 3 or 2, depending on the office).

So what’s happening in CA-10 right now? Well, reports have surfaced that the campaigns are pulling out all the stops to get electeds to replace their appointees with CA-10 residents.

So, several of the CD10 Democratic candidates’ campaign teams have in the past couple of weeks lobbied elected officials from up and down the state and asked them to appoint as their delegates folks who live in the 10th District and support their respective candidates.

As a result, the number of delegates in the 10th District has expanded to as many as 300, sources say. Reports put state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier in the delegate count lead over Lt. Governor John Garamendi and Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan.

Well, that makes sense. A cursory look at the endorsements listed on the major candidates’ websites shows the following:

• Joan Buchanan:  Not listing her endorsements at this time.
• John Garamendi:  Five Congressmembers and one Assemblymember, for a total of 30 potential appointees.
• Mark DeSaulnier:  One state officer, four Congressmembers, eleven State Senators, and eight Assemblymembers, for a total of 142 potential appointees.

Now, we currently have no way of determining whether the electeds who have endorsed are backing up their endorsements by appointing CA-10 residents (or, for that matter, whether electeds who have not formally endorsed are doing likewise). But just speculating, based on the raw numbers, it would look like Mark DeSaulnier is going to be the big winner of this sweepstakes. After all, he has a lot of friends from having served recently in both the Assembly and the Senate, and he has a major Congressional cheerleader in Rep. George Miller.

Indeed, if that 300 number is accurate, there’s already more stacking taking place than occurred even in the Migden-Leno conflagration of 2008. It’s exactly this kind of raw power play that turns loyal local Democrats who have been plugging away on behalf of their candidate into cynics who end up walking away from Democratic politics. And I’m saying this as someone who definitely leans toward supporting the beneficiary of this cronyism.

Here’s the thing. Whether they find the practice acceptable or repugnant, all campaigns are going to play the hand they’re dealt. And when the CDP bylaws offer candidates the opportunity to exploit the delegate selection process, they have to take it; frankly, they can do no less.

But, you know what? It doesn’t have to be that way. We now have a CDP chair who campaigned on the issue of reform. John Burton has been giving a lot of lip service to “grassroots activists”; yet here is a perfect example where the local stakeholders are being pushed aside by the electeds who are stacking the deck against them. If Burton really intends to walk the talk, he might want to start by taking action to amend the bylaws so that electeds are required to appoint their delegates from within their district.

It may be too late for CA-10, but this kind of rigged endorsement process should never be allowed to happen again.

Presented without comment for your edification.