SubscribeA rumor at this point (or rather, someone unwilling to go on record) but what I'm hearing is that the DNC organizers who implement the 50 state strategy are about to be let go. Apparently they will be laid off at the end of the month, and the new DNC chair will decide whether he or she wants to continue the 50 state policy.
I asked about Democratic use of Catalist, and how it compared with the RNC-owned VoterVault. Both of these are highly advanced datamining tools that campaigns use to target their voter universes for ground game. (When I say universes, I mean any groupings of voters selected for organizing purposes -- undecideds, sporadic voting Ds/Rs, newly registered voters, etc.) Dean told me that Republicans have used theirs longer (7 cycles) compared to this being only the 2d cycle for Democrats, but confidently stated that "ours is better."the 'permanent campaign' for both parties is only beginning...
Dean cited the Catalist's capacity for prediction with 85% accuracy using credit card data whether a voter falls into a particular targeted universe. The amount of streamlining this enables a campaign's ground operation to achieve is hard to overstate. He argued that having only 30 variables versus VoterVault's 250 variables allowed for easier use.
In addition, Dean cited the importance of the primaries, where as a condition of being granted access to the voter file, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were required to return the files with updated data. With a contested primary or caucus in virtually every state, and hundreds of thousands of volunteer organizing hours powering that list-refinement, the voter files Dems are operating with just this cycle are both more up to date than the Republican files as well as being worked much, much harder right now during the general election.
GOP 2.0 simply ignore's this uncomfortable discussion. Instead they simply want to rebuild the Republican machine around the internet.RedState.com's history in this regard isn't promising. They started by taking the open-source software DailyKos was using, and launching "A right-wing DKos". When Kos started hiring developers to enhance the software, RedState complained that all the liberal programmers wouldn't donate time to help Republicans.
In the battleground state of Ohio, "instead of volunteers assembling at 200 parking lots at union halls, we have 1,400 neighborhood teams in the state that we have spent six months recruiting and training and managing, said Jon Carson, the overseer of Obama's national network of volunteers. "We've taken the best of those volunteers, and they're giving us 40, 50, 60 hours a week. They're empowered, and we made them accountable. I can tell from here in Chicago; did you make the phone calls, the door knocks?"That's real work. How many Republican college smarties are willing to put in that kind of hard labour? Walking for freakin' miles, knocking on every damn door? Unless they're being well paid, I can't imagine many of them care so much about other people as to do that.
The discomfort among McCain's advisers was plain to see. Tensions had been building: in early October, as reporters trooped through the lobby of one hotel, they witnessed Salter and Nicolle Wallace arguing heatedly. Days later, Salter was unhappy with a statement by Wallace that seemed to defend the angry crowds stirred up by Governor Palin. Salter and Wallace clearly had a strained relationship. As reporters, who had been kept away from McCain, boarded the plane that day through the front door, they paraded past the candidate who was sitting on the couch that had been installed—but never used—for "Straight Talk" chats with the press. The candidate who had once traded japes with his press-corps pals did not even look up; he just looked glumly at the floor. He was flanked by Salter and Wallace, who stared grimly ahead.The old Republican Party is a dog-eat-dog world. It is doomed to fail, devoured from within.
Nixon had promised to avoid personal attacks (and thus earned the nickname "Tricky Dick"); he was adept at mixing high rhetoric with low blows. These tactics became a strategy in his appeal to the Silent Majority fearful of black crime and rioting students in 1968.That shit worked back in the day, Pops, sure.
McCain nodded. "Yeah," he said. Schmidt quickly got to work on an ad. On July 30, the "celebrity" ad went up and was quickly flashed around the country on news shows and YouTube. "He's the biggest celebrity in the world," a breathy announcer declares, while images of Obama's Berlin speech are juxtaposed with shots of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.Thing of it is, Obama is a celebrity on the world stage. As far as we can tell from outside your country, it looks like he's really willing to learn about things, think about things, make decisions based on fact and sound thinking.
Obama has the most votes on record
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posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:28 AM on November 10, 2008 [32 favorites has favorites]