I'm ticked at the my state's Dem Party

[LittleClarkie]

Listening to other Dems after the elections got me steamed. From what I'm told, our state party charged for smaller campaigns to be included in the "coordinated campaign" with our Dem Governor. If you'd paid, we'd mention your name when we phonebanked. If you didn't, you were just "and the rest of the Dems".

Also, the State Party charges for use of their database of voters. And the main HQ in my county seemed to resent that one of the lesser campaigns was operating out of their space, even though, since they'd paid to be part of the coordinated campaign, it was their right to work out of that space. One of the organizers apparently thought that volunteers who could have worked for the coordinated campaign were being swiped to work on individual campaigns. It was the other way around actually. If I came in to work for one candidate, I generally signed up to work at HQ as well. I did get that vibe when I showed up at HQ and mentioned I was picking up literature for a particular candidate. I got a vibe like I was intruding somewhat.

I wasn't much involved in Clinton's campaign, but folks have said that he was pretty good at getting himself elected, but not so good at bringing other Dems with. Fair or unfair, that's the impression I'm getting from our state party. They're pretty good at having their hand out for money, but sending help down to the local level doesn't much happen.

Don't they know that the stronger we are, the strong they will be?

This is a new revelation for me, and I'm just wondering if there's something I can do to help the situation. Any suggestions?

[eridani]

1. Not quite that bad in my state--

--still, there are issues of access to voterfiles. The solution is to get deeply involved in the running of the state party, so that you or someone you elect will be in charge of rules and bylaws.

[GenDem]

2. In my county, I believe that

the state party gave a percentage that covered some of our operating expenses, but did not dictate how we ran our ground operation. As far as database access, we were able to get any voter lists that we wanted from our congressional candidate. In NY, we had Spitzer polling miles ahead, as well as Hillary. That left almost our entire focus on our very competitive congressional race. It is interesting to speculate how we would have executed if we had more than one competitive race, and how the state party and individual candidates would have dictated how we would have divided up our energy. That is a scenario for another election.

It seems to me that your state wasn't really following the 50 state strategy laid out by the DNC. Then again there are so many groups; state dem committees, DNC, DCCC, DSCC, county committees, all competing. When we opened our HQ we decided as a committee that we would be running things our way, and it turned out to be the most organized, fully operational HQ's that we had ever manned. I believe in Dr. Deans strategy to start at each precinct. It will trickle up.