Chris Bowers For Committeeperson, Ward 27, Division 23
by Chris Bowers, Fri Jul 22, 2005 at 12:34:09 PM EDT
Let me prvoide some background on why I attended this meeting. Although I have no desire to hold public office, a realization that has become more obvious to me the more I have become involved in politics, ever since Seth Williams lost the Democratic primary for District Attorny here in Philadelphia, I have been thiking about running for party office. To be more specific, I had committeeperson in mind, which in Philadelphia is the equivalent of precinct captain. This is actually an elected position held on primary day every mid-term election year.
My desire to run for local party office stems from several factors. For starters, the Philadelphia Democratic Party is one of the most extreme examples of Unreformed Democrats I have ever encountered. Secondly, I think being a local precinct captain, if it is done well, is perhaps the best example of pure democracy anywhere in the world. Talking to your neighbors about politics, helping them register to vote, and doing GOTV work in your own 'hood is really about as good as representative government can get. Third, I just straight up love that sort of work, which is one of the reasons why I liked being a union organizer. Fourth, I really don't think any party should be in the business of bossing primaries by having the central committee structure endorse a candidate without letting the party members decide for themselves. This sort of stuff happens all the time here in Philadelphia nad Pennsylvania, and I would like to help put an end to it.
All of these reasons aside, the number one reason why I have been thinking about running for commiteeperson is that even though I have lived and been registered to vote in Philadelphia's 27th ward for five consecutive years now (and a sixth year from 1997-1998), never once has a local commiteeperson come to talk with me. ACORN has stopped by. MoveOn contacted me several times during the 2004 campaign, twice coming to my door. I have voted in this ward six times now, and not a single time was someone from the Democratic PArty standing outside my precinct distributing information. I did meet a Republican doing it once.
In other words, I wanted to run for committeperson because I have grown convinced that the local Democratic Party simply isn't doing its job. It is endorsing candidates in primaries, but it never seems to contact voters and explain why it is doing so. Enough was enough, I figured. If someone was going to stop me from becoming one of the local precinct captains (two people are elected in each division, aka precinct), then they were going to have to do so by actually contacting more voters than me. Quite frankly, that seemed perfectly fair. To tell you the truth, my bet was that I would run unopposed.
So anyway, that is why I went to the meeting. Neighborhood Networks, which started just a couple months ago, is interested is developing a precinct-by-precinct progressive structure in Philadelphia that will at different times, strive to compliment, assisst, reform, and superceede the Philadelphia Democratic party. I had spent hours over the the Committee of Seventy website trying to find out who the party officials in my precinct and wards were, but to no avail. If anyone was going to both know this information and bother giving it to me, Neighborhood Networks was it.
It took almost an hour of mingling and a decent amount of sitting through long-winded speeches advocating the need for reform of the Democratic Party before I finally found the person I was looking for (Side note: I really shoulnd't complain about people speaking their mind about the party at meetings like this, since I am able to do so everyday on a platofrm far larger than the ones they have. Oh well--it still doesn't keep me from being frustrated at what I feel is endless repetition). His name was Don Engel, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania who also lives in Ward 27 and who had recently acquired the entire list of Philadelphia committee persons and ward leaders (how, I have no idea). He had done this so recently, and it was such an anormous amount of information, that he still had not scanned most of it into electronic form. When he does this, I believe it will be the first tiem such information has ever been available to the public in an easily accessible format.
What his data showed, rather shockingly, was that even in heavily pro-Democratic regions such as Philadelphia, the party remains in desparate needs of warm bodies. In Philadelphia ward 27 alone, a region that went 83% for Kerry, 22 of the 46 committeeperson slots were empty (and several had been filled since the formation of neighborhood networks over the last two months). In fact, in all of the twelve wards west of the Schuykill river (West Philadelphia), there were 69 entirely vacant committee seats. Since ward leaders sometimes list names of commitee-persons who don't actually do anything, who knows how high the real number is.
It is one thing to say you want to reform the Dmeocratic Party. It is quite another thing to realize that you can just take it over because you realize very few people are participating within it. This is, indeed, something that we need to do, because a lack of a vibrant party structure has very real consequences at the ballot box. Using the information I scribbled down from Don, today I went ot the committee of seventy website and compared Kerry performance and voter turnout to the percetnage of committee seats filled in each of the twelve West Philly wards. Three of these wards, the 6th, the 27th and the 44th had more than 15% of their committee seats vacant. Look at how they performed in the 2004 Presidential election compared to the other nine wards with greater than 85% of their committee seats filled:
Kerry Turnout Committee 6, 27 and 44 89.53% 58.30% 67.5% The other 9 91.40% 64.18% 94.1%The three wards with the least participation within the Democratic committee had noticeably lower performance rates for Kerry, and significantly lower turnout among registered voters (the turnout figures in the chart above were among registered voters, not the voting eligible population). Had the three wards with low committee particpation rates equalled the Kerry and turnout performance of the other nine wards, it would have increased Kerry's statewide margin by 2,805 votes. In some states, like Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Nevada and New Mexico, that was very close the the overal margin of victory. It would have taken only 32 more people for those three wards to have an equal percentage of committee persons. That is almost 100 votes per person.
Anyway, it is time for me to come to the point of this typo-ridden story. After looking for two months and waiting for almsot eight years, I finally found out from Don that both of the committee seats in my division were indeed filled. However, they were only filled int he last two months, after theentirely inefective previous leader of Ward 27 was removed by the central committee. Because there were so few actual committee members at the time, rendering an election among committee mebers impossible, they installed a new leader. Now that I finally know who these people are, I will talk to them about what they intend to do about imporving our voter registration, voter contact, and GOTV efforts int he neighborhood. If I find what they are doing to be satisfactory, I won't run. If not, then I'll be up for office next year. Who knows--maybe I'll even run for ward leader if I win.
The point is this: as much as we rant and rave about how reprensible we find the lack of communication between party leadership and the grassroots, as much as we may hate the bossing of primaries and as much as we are frustrated by what seems like a lack of effort on the part of our party leaders, the party is wide, wide open for the taking. If this many committee seats are vacant in an area such as West Philly that votes 90% Democrat, it must be much, much worse in other areas. It is in this sense that we can think of our reform efforts to be as much an attempt to help the party rather than to take it over. Sometimes, it will be like conquering Antarticia, since you will receive about equal resistance from both. It is about both reform and assistance to a small group of people who might not always be doing what we like, but they certainly aren't getting a lot of help in what they are doing. We all know that talking to your neighbors about politics is more effective than moving to a swing state for two weeks and talking to strangers, so why shouldn't you run for committee person if you have never been contacted by your local precinct captain? I know I am going to do so. It is a fifty-state strategy, it is local, and it very well might be uncontested. It is almost too perfect.
My campaign starts on Monday. Hopefully I'll have a word processing program installed by then.
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