I got nothing to do tonight.  I can help do some legwork.

ttagaris@yahoo.com

Tim

That means challenging and removing moderate Republicans.

It doesn't matter that they are moderate if they go to Washington and vote for the right wing leadership that currently control Congress. Better to appeal to the moderates and simply tell them that a vote for Chaffe is a vote for Frist.

We also need to secure state legislatures in the blue states so we can dictate districting and take advantage of our electoral power in these states.

They want to play games in Texas...let's show them what the heavy population blue areas gets us in the House!

I don't care much about the district-by-district vote counts directly, but it would have been nice to get enough more Dems to the polls to pass Prop 72 and require large corps (read Wal Mart) to provide health care and pay for at least 80% of it.

The way I see it, we don't get healthcare reform until the corporations demand it. Right now, the healthcare battle pits employees against employers, with the argument being over who pays what % of a rapidly rising rate. We need both groups fighting against a perverse system that consumes massive amounts of wealth and doesn't even manage to place us among the healthiest of countries.

1. Best reason to increase turnout in safe blue districts isn't to push the national popular vote total up in Prez years, but to win statewide close races, as Chris Gregoire and Dan Mongiardo can tell us. (I assume someone on this blog will tell us when Chris Gregoire finally wins, or doesn't win, WA-Gov; I don't live in WA and I'm tired of looking at the Seattle Times updated vote-counting site.)

2. I remember reading somewhere that safe R districts always had higher turnout than safe D districts (except maybe Montgomery County, MD), because safe D districts almost always have high numbers of people who don't drive, need help getting to the polls, can't wait in line for a long time, or don't speak English; in safe R districts everybody has a car. Can we get equal turnout? (Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to raise turnout, of course; just asking whether equal turnout is a reasonable goal.)

Trust me, we know about this sort of problem. Northern Santa Barbara County should be a goldmine for us, but with turnout on the order of 30%, the GOP wins local elections, and spawned the guy who won our only competitive state senate race.

Rather than treat this as a problem of averages, each district needs to be targeted individually, and with issues. A minimum wage ballot initiative is a good place to start, and a great petition to have at voter reg tables.

Obviously, improving the process for accepting citizenship applications (which can and often do take more than 12 years to process) would help, but until we succeed in that, it will be very difficult to reach the same turnout levels as the rest of the state.

Small potatoes, in some ways. But given the very real upstate NY/NYC division which tends to make upsate rural counties go GOP, very encouraging small potatoes. Personally, for me, even though I'm a newbie to local politics and indeed as any sort of activist to national politics, & though the national results of course are depressing, I'm pretty damn excited. I know it's only an assembly seat, but we were given no real chance of taking it and we did. There are a lot of young, enthusiastic Dems around here, and even slightly older cynics like me are energized for anything in 2006.

As to the thread topic, I know we had great turnout and it did wonders for us. In what is a pretty much a rural county we had an impact and are making NY bluer. There were a lot of factors playing into this, but an enthusiastic local team was key.

My union (SEIU) sent over 2000 people from safe Dem states to swing states all across the country. I am sure that other organizations and individuals did likewise.  Winning the popular vote is nice but we had to focus our resources on winning the electoral vote.

Too bad we lost prop 72 by such a close margin.  If these activists had stayed in Cali, we probably would have pulled it off but Kerry would have then lost by a landslide.

It might to be hard to make this CD turn blue (were are in the birth place of the free republic), but shouldn't be outside of the question to pull it to 60-40 or 55-45, which as you say makes a big difference nationally.

I noticed the same thing in briefly looking at the voting results for VA CD's.  In the 8th, we had a huge push (volunteer action approaching battleground state level).  We won resoundingly, but the incumbant R's in the 10'th and 11'th CD's still pulled in more votes than our winner (all 3 winners faced equally weak challengers).  Granted, Moran has some baggage, but I don't think it can be all chalked up to that.

I think the effect you're seeing comes down to local party organizations.  The R's have churches that are willing to be political.  What kind of face to face organizations do we have (that don't involve bused in volunteers)?  Our local precint structure is dormant at best.  We best figure out how to get that operational again or envision new community structures.

I'm not real happy about our state party, but I'm not sure how to go about changing it.  Maybe I'll  take a hint from DFA and run for dogcatcher in 2006, although actually those sorts of local races are very competitive in my area.