Matt, i was looking for the same data... I'm not sure where this specific data came from, but i found that there were 17 freshman Dems in the House elected in '04 and 24 in '02. Well, that's not quite right as not all those were elected in that cycle (some were mid-year replacements). Anyway, the churn rate seems to be about 15-20 a year and as you noted, most of those are in safe dem seats (not surprising). Does anyone out there know how many 'new' dems are running for safe dem seats out there? If we pick up 20-25 new seats this election + 15-20 standard churn seats we will certainly be looking at a significantly larger freshman class than we have seen in decades.

Zack, this is a really interesting project and I'm looking foward to reading the tc sections. In the meantime I'd like to think a bit about your contention that:

For many federal and local races, these new tools will have little impact.

All the more reason to push House Dems to file an ethics complaint against Charles Taylor... See this diary by CREW which describes the complaint they have prepared, but are unable to file, against Rep. Taylor. In my view races in districts that should not be at risk like NC-11 are in play today because of ethics and corruption issues... It is very hard to say what is going to happen in Iraq in the next 6 months and how that is going to impact the election, but I can assure you that the ethics problems faced by many Republicans in Congress are not going anywhere.

I'm listening to this now. I'd forgotten how boring congressional 'debates' are...  someone is talking about 'the internet' not discriminating against consumers. I think they're on our side, but it is not THE INTERNET that is trying to discriminate, it is the telcos... and man oh man is this guy just rambling on. who are these guys???

Chris, great post... three quick links with data from the blogosphere:

Montana: 1393 in the last month.
Missouri: 627 in the last month.
New York: 451 in the last month.

I'm not sure exactly how much better the blogosphere has been on this (i tried to use the same search terms as you) and frankly it is very hard to also figure out reach in this process, but it is a really really interesting question.

Matt, I just spent a few minutes poking around the Hamilton Project website at Brookings and I would advise a more cautious initial approach to this as their core principles seem reasonable to me and many of the folks on the Advisory Board are academics or policy wonks whose work I respect.

The parts of their site that I find most objectionable are the ones that refer to this as some major new project that doesn't have to do with ideology and doctrine, but rather evidence and experience. I think this is both politically pretty dumb and also simply not true. The principles that they espouse are an ideology and a doctrine, but what distinguishes these folks from the people at Cato or Heritage is that they do not (hopefully) allow their ideology to blind them to evidence and or facts if their policy beliefs don't work.

Anyway, I'm going to take a more wait and see attitude to this effort and I also suggest we reach out to some folks over there to see if we can learn more about their direction/focus. Unlike David Sirota, I'm not going to just try and destroy this project before it really even begins... Maybe I'm being naive, or perhaps I'm keeping an open mind.... or perhaps those are the same thing in today's world.

Matt, So I've been digging a bit deeper into GOP.com's tagging strategery and it seems that they create tags for topics they expect to write about, but then don't link them from their blog front page until there is actually content tagged to that topic. As you can see from their blog in addition to tagging "Good News in Iraq" they also have tagged people like Laura Bush, Ken Mehlman and Jo Ann Davidson and topics like Democrats, Jobs and Economy, etc... This is all fine and well and serves as some kind of signal of what GOP.com thinks is important, but what is much more interesting is what they thought was important, but haven't ever written about (or tagged). Guess we know what GOP.com thinks of students, women and veterans.

On top of this Matt, I'm not sure if you checked out their list of tags, one of which is Good News from Iraq.... The idea that they would call a tag good news is the very signal that they are cherry picking. I mean, if they used their brains they'd call it "news from iraq" and then cherry pick the good news. In that circumstance at least a non-attuned reader could potentially say "wow, all this news out of Iraq is good." Where of course now all I can think of is, where the F is the "bad news out of iraq" tag. Patrick, when are we gonna see that?

Mathwiz, thanks for the thoughts and I would counter that while many of the experts haven't won many elections recently (Bob Shrum for example), there are people who have won elections, or come very close in races that no one thought would be close, and I think we have a lot to learn from them. One of the dangers in my mind about the rise of the blogosphere is the ease with which one can become a backseat campaigner. If we don't actually run any campaigns we can never actually lose, so we bear no responsibility for losses, but can continue to criticize those who do actually run things...

As for your question of information, I think you make a great point on the what we believe section. I can change this, and probably will, but the problem right now is that this section just has a starter set of principles and then a set of debates we are having on those principles, but it doesn't really represent what we believe per-se. The initial set of beta testers (including you hopefully) will be the ones who really define and refine that list... Then i'll be comfortable going more public with it.

wegerj, we've gone back and forth on this and we are considering giving you the ability to give your proxy (including all the people who have given you their proxy) to someone else... Thus enabling people to form coalitions, etc... There are some downsides to this, but it solves the problem you are addressing. Another option is to give people the ability to list their top 5-10 candidates and then use some algorithm (relatively complicated) that gives them the highest ranked person who is a rep. You as a candidate who is not yet a rep would be told how many more #1 (or 2) votes you would need to get to make it past the threshold, but that would be fairly complicated.

thoughts?

well... perhaps not valuable cash prizes, but the plan is to pay representatives out of membership fees and also representatives will control how the money raised by the organization is vectored... that's not bad, right?

rdf, we've been working on improving our ability to provide granular levels of access to our system. Right now for a variety of reasons we don't have the level of control that we want on this front, so rather than open things wide up, we decided to create a community which is somewhat 'safer', but clearly less useful for marketing. Ultimately we as a community will have to decide what portions of the site to make public and which ones to keep to members only.

Jeff, I'm looking forward to your additional thoughts and questions. Here is a first stab response to what I think you are asking:

1) Clearly registration verification is a critical problem, as firmly establishing one person one vote is the central underpinning of any successful representative community. In this beta phase we are allowing people to just sign-up without any 'real/verifiable' information. Our view is that it is currently more important to get enough people in the system, testing the tools, etc... than putting barriers to entry. Once we get deeper in the beta we are going to disable this registration page and people will have to go through our payment page to join. The membership fee serves several important purposes, not the least of which is helping (although it is imperfect) verify identity and ensuring that people don't join and then vote multiple times (we can do this by restricting each credit card to X transactions). I will get into other benefits of the paid membership model later if you are interested.

2) Delegable proxy: our view on this is that your representative has your proxy, but your representative does not have a vote equivalent to the number of proxies he/she has been given, rather each representative has an equal vote. The reasons for this are basically that we want to discourage proxy hoarding and encourage a broad range of people to serve as representatives (imagine how many proxies Kos or Eli Pariser could accumulate). The rule as we current have it is that the top 20 vote getters + anyone with over 10k proxies is a representative. I'm going to read through the article you linked and will surely learn something new...

3) Open Source voting code -- agreed completely and I will have our programmer discuss what we are doing on this front in a later post.

Thanks for the great thoughts and keep 'em coming. This is an idea that has been gestating for a while and one that is by its very nature a communal project.

I'm with you that the state of our union is not good. as a matter of fact i think we are in the shitter... but, river of apathy? I'm not sure where you are going with this? I strongly suspect that you don't think of yourself as apathetic, but see others who are not with you in your particular brand of non-apathy as apathetic. This is the same problem we talked about with Tom Franks book and Kansas. By atributing the actions (or in this case non-actions) by others to apathy in this case there is an implicit blame placed on them that somehow "IF ONLY THEY SAW THINGS MY WAY" we would all be better off. So no, in my view it is not that others are apathetic, it is that others are apathetic to the fashion in which you (and by extension me) are telling the story of what is happening to our country.

To take a semi-non-political story here for a second, lets look at avian flu and your well known fear on this subject... You are right. others do not share your fear. but why? is it because they are apathetic? or do you read their lack of fear as apathy, when in fact it is a perfectly reasonable response on behalf of a set of rational individuals who are working from a fairly well ordered world view with a reasonable set of facts.

That is to say, it makes sense that they aren't worried about the bird flu... So, IF you believe that they should be worried about the bird flu, the answer, i think, is not to ascribe 'apathy' to their response, but rather to think about what are the underlying pieces of knowledge which these so-called apathetic folks have that is making them rationally behave in the way they are behaving.

By working to alter these underlying facts we can work to change the dynamic which leads to what you perceive as apathy and i perceive as simply rational beliefs that are counter to mine based on a different underlying preference function and different set of base facts. While it is hard for me to change people's preference functions (and man would life be boring if we all had the same preference functions), we can work to change the underlying set of facts under which we all operate.

Now this isn't to say that I am in the "if everyone just knew what i knew" camp. I prefer to think of it somewhere along the line of: we have no hope of winning if our central argument is that there is something wrong (apathy or other) with those who disagree with us, or don't support us fully.

More on this later and as for your line on moral prosperity, i just don't really get it...

Matt, per usual there is a lot of interesting stuff in here, but i want to pull out this piece on designing our approach to the world. While I agree with you that we are often muddled, disconnected and uncoordinated in our response to the changing landscape of our world in terms of the day to day, or even month to month dynamic, i think in general we are somewhat in agreement in long term goals. The challenge then, as a party totally out of power, we are essentially helpless in driving the direction of current policy and any policy suggestions about the here and now are likely to be outdated and look ridiculous when the world evolves in response to the likely inane actions of the Bush administration. So in a sense what I'm saying (and trust me, i'm still thinking through this) is that we need to resist the urge in general to provide actual policy responses to the current situations as they are, and rather focus on clearly describing what the macro policy differences are between us and them.

In a sense this is what we did in the Social Security 'debate'. Rather than have competing proposals to solve a problem that we don't really think exists, we ran a campaign on the simple vision of what we think Social Security should be: Secure. Obviously the analogy from one campaign to the next is imperfect, as each one has its own vagaries, but nonetheless, i think it is worth exploring.

As for your other points, about mortar and all... I think you are right. The one thing I don't remember seeing in your post is an emphasis on the creation of a functioning enforcement mechanism. This is something that Grover and the Club for Growth have done so effectively for the right. It is not merely that they help develop ad hoc coalitions on different issues, it is that if they really need a few votes on stuff they can actually effectively threaten caucus members to get them to go along even if they aren't really happy about it. onward....