Just stumbled across this months old post by Raven Brooks, Top 5 Lessons at Netroots California, and the successes and failures of 2010.

Two key takeaways from his takeaways:

The first session of the day featured a great presentation by Seiji Carpenter at David Binder Research and Bryan Blum at the California Labor Federation filled in a lot of detail on some innovative things labor did this cycle. You can find Seiji’s presentation here and I’d encourage you to page through it. There’s a lot of meat to this presentation, but I wanted to highlight a few things.

[...]

* The campaign and IEs were able to focus on key demographics. They prevented Whitman from building a base among women. Undecideds moved toward Brown. Latinos came home to Brown and turned out in record numbers (a special shout out to SEIU’s Cambiando campaign here). Working class voters favored Brown. And in a historic shift Asian Americans overwhelmingly broke for Brown.

* Labor ran a program called Million More Voters that was intended to target voters with similar qualities to union members, and they identified 2.8 million people. Asian Americans were more than twice as likely to be targets so they invested a lot of time in researching those communities, something that hasn’t been done on a large scale in California before.

And

A wide spectrum of organizations put in a lot of voter contact work here, made some impressive new moves this cycle, and increased funding for these activities.

But this has been a debate that’s raged on for a while in California. Most of the money spent in campaigns is for TV time. Our consulting class makes big money pushing this tactic so it’s hard to advocate change and more effective uses of that money. I think this election began to show the effectiveness of field operations in California in ways other cycles haven’t. Some of the biggest wins here were won without large budgets for TV.

With Brown (and Reid in NV), mid-summer criticisms seemed warranted.  Both campaigns were getting rolled by opponents who repeatedly self-destructed and were allowed to regain footing.  But, as Brooks writes, we were wrong.  Reid's margin was ludicrously slim, considering the opposition, Browns much better.  But both went old school, and won.

California will be 2010's story of progressive organizing success.  A relative success?  Sure.  Flawed?  Brooks describes a lack of coalition between orgs, and the familiar clash of independent field organizing and the consulting culture permeating campaigns.  But there big wins in defeating Prop 23 and protecting redistricting reform.

There's no revelation here, but it's somewhat comforting to be reminded there's always a simple truth at play, regardless of the odds: Talk to more voters, and win.

Cross posted from www.21stDems.org/blog

The 2008 election presents an incredible opportunity for Democrats to take control of our government and build the foundation for a long lasting progressive movement in our country. But to win in November, we will have to contend with a desperate Republican Party that has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to divide and deceive the American people for their own partisan gain. To cut through all of the GOP propaganda, Faux News misinformation campaigns and right-wing radio hate speech Democrats are going to have to get out and talk face-to-face with voters about our vision for America and how we will put this country back on track.

At 21st Century Democrats, we are working hard to play our role in the progressive infrastructure. We train activists in the art of field organizing and then put them on campaigns all across the country so they can go out and talk to voters about our candidates and our vision for the future. On June 4-8, we will hold our National Field Organizer Training: Major League Action at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Over four days of intensive training, we will transform up to 200 activists into prepared field organizers that can be dropped anywhere in the country and start making a difference right away.

You can learn more about our MLA training here.
Or, if you're all ready to go and would like to reserve a spot in the training you can register here!

Our organization seeks to build a more progressive America not only by electing more progressive Democrats, but also by building human capital within the progressive community. Training a young person to be a field organizer helps us not only in the current cycle, but gives that person a skill that will be valuable in every election. Thankfully, there are a lot of great groups like The Center for Progressive Leadership, Democracy For America, The New Organizing Institute, Wellstone Action! and many others that train progressive activists, organizers and candidates.

If you want to get more involved with the election this year and build some organizing skills for the future, please consider attending our Major League Action Training and/or one of the other great trainings put on by our progressive allies. Or, if you can't make it and would like to help pay the travel expenses and registration fees for a dedicated young progressive to attend our training you can donate to our Field Organizer Fund. The better we are at finding and talking to our neighbors about the issues that are important to them, the more successful we will be in November and the more likely we are to build a true progressive movement in this country.

Mark Lotwis is the Executive Director of 21st Century Democrats.

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Cross-Posted: Reform Florida's DECs

With the essential elements described in Party Building Basics: Part I, the big question remains: now what do we do? This post, like all posts here at Reform Florida's DECs are full of broad overviews, big ideas, with some specifics thrown in for good measure. However, every county in Florida is different. Each county has its own constituencies, its own unique issues, and its own colorful personalities and institutions. There is no such thing as a "one size fits all" model for Florida's DECs to effectively build themselves up to be effective political institutions. The following ideas I present in this post are meant to serve as an outline - not an exact blueprint for success.

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Last week, Grassroots Campaigns Inc's DCCC canvassers in Madison, Wisconsin protested because they were not earning minimum wage--after a bunch of blogs on the right and the left picked up on the story, the DCCC cancelled its contract with GCI.

But the lack of a living wage is just the beginning of the problems with GCI's operations. As Greg Bloom wrote in his series on MoveOn PAC's Leave No Voter Behind campaign, GCI's model has caused severe damage in the field because of a "crisis of leadership" in its management. A veteran of MoveOn/GCI's Operation Democracy read Greg's post and passed it to me, and together with a number of other veterans--we call ourselves the MOFOs, the MoveOn Field Organizers--I feel that it's imperative to show that the crisis continues. In Martin's post yesterday, a couple of people asked what our motives are: it's to expose the ways that GCI is failing its organizers AND failing to run an effective campaign for MoveOn. At the end of the week, we will post a set of recommendations of actions that MoveOn can take to begin to resolve this crisis. If you find our stories compelling, and you agree this issue must be addressed by MoveOn, please send an email to Eli Pariser (eli@moveon.org) and cc us at ChangeGCI@gmail.com (or contact us there directly, and we will update you with further information about how you can send a message to MoveOn).

My name is Kelly Nagy - I've worked on numerous environmental and social justice campaigns, as well as local community issues and Senate electoral campaigns. I was the National Director of the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) for almost 3 years.

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There has been a lot of discussion recently on this blog about Grassroots Campaigns Inc, which has contracts with the DNC and MoveOn, among other organizations. Last week, GCI's DCCC canvassers in Madison protested because they were not earning minimum wage--after a quick burst of outrage, the DCCC cancelled its contract with GCI.

But the lack of a living wage is only the beginning of the problems with GCI's operations. As Greg Bloom wrote in his series on MoveOn PAC's Leave No Voter Behind campaign, GCI's model has caused severe damage in the field because of a "crisis of leadership" in its management. I am here to say that the crisis has continued into MoveOn's 2006 operations. Myself and a number of other veterans of Operation Democracy--we call ourselves the MOFOs, the MoveOn Field Organizers--read Greg's posts and came together to talk about what we could do to help change the situation. This post will be the first of our series of testimonials that will expose the ways that GCI has failed its organizers, and failed MoveOn's campaign. At the end of the week, we will post a set of recommendations of actions that MoveOn can take to begin to resolve this crisis. If you find our stories compelling, and you agree this issue must be addressed by MoveOn, please send an email to Eli Pariser (eli@moveon.org) and cc us at ChangeGCI@gmail.com (or contact us there directly and we will update you with further information about how you can send a message to MoveOn).

My name is Martin Casas. In the last five years, I've been a field organizer and campaign manager for more than half a dozen progressive campaigns.

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