Cross Posted from Reform Florida's DECs and Florida Progressive Coalition

Not all DECs have a lot of clubs. In fact, some have no clubs at all. In Marion, we have 10 chartered clubs, all geographically based. So its important for us to have some level of coordination. Its just as important for all DECs who have clubs to have a club coordinator, or someone who works solely with club leadership.

There's more...

Bumped--Chris

Since I work in web marketing and development, I thought I would do a quick analysis of the Democratic 2008 Presidential Website Campaigns.

Notably Richardson, Vilsack, Kucinich and Clark all do not own their own .com name and should considering buying theirownname.com name even if the current owners want tens of thousands of dollars, because type in traffic is real.  If Clark launches his campaign he should permanently redirect clark04.com to his new campaign site to hopefully make the new site rank more quickly in the search results.  Edwards and Kucinich have the only 2 current democratic campaign websites opting not to use www in front of the domain name.  

Richardson may have the worst search rankings, with Wikipedia dominating [Bill Richardson] in Google, and a broken DeanForAmerica.com site outranking his campaign website for his own name.  Your search results may differ slightly from what Google just served me.  I think candidates should strive for their campaign site to outrank the website for their current office.

Many websites are now using 3rd party javascript for analytics and goal tracking.  If a site doesn't use JS analytics, it may still use server logs for some web stats.  It does not appear that any of the campaign websites are paying for web analytics, and Google Analytics is popular choice.  I have not looked at Sitemeter.com in a while, but I imagine that Google Analytics is  much more full featured, and the campaigns using sitemeter should consider switching.  

Hillary is the only one using MS Win/IIS.  I only identified one content-management system in my research, Kucinich.us uses drupal.  If you know what open source or proprietary publishing systems other campaigns are using please let me know.  

I may look at the campaign's Google Adwords and other PPC marketing in the near future.  EmergencyCheese on Youtube has some cool videos tracking each candidate's YouTube campaigns.

There's more...

Not seeing an exisiting diary, I decided to create one.  Candidate filings for Congress, among other races, started April 24 and will end on April 28.  According to the Georgia Secretary of State's website, Democrats have officially filed in seven of the thirteen districts.  

Incumbent Democrats Sanford Bishop (2nd District), Cynthia McKinney (4th District), John Lewis (5th District), John Barrow (12th District), and David Scott (13th District) have already filed.  Democrats have found challengers in Reverend Jim Nelson (1st District against Jack Kingston) and John Bradbury (9th District against Charlie Norwood).  McKinney has a primary challenger in Hank Johnson and Scott in Donzella James.  Additionally, incumbent Jim Marshall (8th District), and challengers Patrick Pillion (3rd District), Stephen Sinton (6th District), Allan Burns (7th District), and Paul Blackwell (10th District) have not filed yet.  That adds up to eleven seats contested by Democrats.  We are currently, to my knowledge, not contesting the 11th District.  While it has a Republican incumbent and leans Republican, it is certainly not unwinnable.

The Republicans are officially contesting nine seats.  Incumbents Jack Kingston (1st District), Lynn Westermoreland (3rd District), Tom Price (6th District), John Linder (7th District), Charlie Norwood (9th District), Nathan Deal (10th District) and Phil Gingrey (11th District) have filed, meaning all seven Republican incuments intend to run for re-election.  Additionally, Republicans have found challengers in Mac Collins and James Neal Harris (8th District, presumably against Jim Marshall), Max Burns (12th District against John Barrow), and Deborah Honeycutt (13th District against David Scott).  The race for the 8th District nomination is the only current Republican primary.  Presumed Republican challengers Brad Hughes (2nd District against Sandford Bishop), Catherine Davis (4th District against Cynthia McKinney), and John Konop (6th District Primary) have not filed.  This adds up to Republicans intended to challenge 12 of the districts.  They other race, in the 5th, is not winnable by a Republican.

There's more...

Well, let's face reality and have some fun at the same time. We all know that any Candidate must have a website. Some are intricate, well designed...some are done on FrontPage and look pretty good and some are...well...just awful. First impressions, like in every other area of life, last the longest, so The Political Dogfight is going to have a contest to find the Top Ten Worst Campaign Democratic Congressional Websites! Why? Because this election is so overwhelmingly important we can't afford to have potentially good people represented by really, really bad websites. YOU the readers will make the nominations to my address here and then we'll have a vote for the worst of the worst. Again Why?more on the flip

There's more...