As many of you know, I am now a delegate to the California Democratic Party from my Assembly District after being elected at a caucus on Sunday.
As in all elections, many of us, especially over on Calitics--California's Soapblox, which is now a daily read for me--started deconstructing and reviewing the elections. Why did things happen the way they did? How much of an impact did the bloggers have? What does it all mean? Will we be able to have any real impact?
I did some analysis of my own, and concluded one thing: I won because of Howard Dean. More below.
The first thing to note when trying to analyze what happened in our Assembly District Election Meetings (ADEM) is the outrageously massive turnout. In all fairness, we have to remember that these are elections for rather minor party positions with pretty low status. The meetings are not well-publicized at all, which means that even though any registered Democrat is eligible to vote, very few actually do, and they're almost universally the ones that are the most active in their local Democratic clubs and organizations.
That said, for my ADEM, we had a total of 214 ballots cast. That exceeds the number cast two years ago by over 100 ballots. AD-12 and AD-13 up in the Bay Area had over twice that number of ballots cast (kudos to SFJen in AD-13).
In AD-5, where our youngest CDP delegate rebelatheart was elected, they normally don't have enough candidates to fill the 12 spots, and whoever has the decency to show up and nominate themselves gets a delegate spot by acclamation. But this time, there were 14 women running for the 6 spots, so Paula actually had to run a campaign and earn it.
AD-16 in Alameda had 265 ballots cast.
And it wasn't just increased turnout in Democratic urban cores. AD-35 in Santa Barbara had 81 ballots cast--an all-time record. Conservative bastion Orange County also had strong turnout.
So, what happened? I'll tell you what happened:
The revolution wasn't televised.
First of all, let's start with the obvious stuff: if it hadn't been for Howard Dean, I wouldn't be nearly as involved in politics as I am today, and I almost certainly wouldn't have even run for the position if not for the gradual outgrowth of interest in politics, then blogging, then running for something, that got its start with the Dean campaign. But it goes far beyond that.
First and foremost, many of us have seen the type of change that has permeated the DNC ever since Howard Dean took office, and the election results on the federal level in 2006 have excited activists everywhere. Howard Dean told us that the people have the power--and in a lot of ways, the ADEM elections here in California proved that. A whole ton of us, and not just bloggers, decided that we were tired of being limited to calling our congresscritter's office and lodging a complaint. We decided that we wanted to make the decisions ourselves for a change.
But to do that--and to win a fortiori--you've got to have the right tools--and this is where the online activism tools really show how effective they can be.
For one thing, the state party did a phenomenal job in actually making running for the office accessible to the public! It took me five minutes to sign up as a candidate using the cadem.org website. You can bet that if people couldn't sign up online and had to figure out exactly how to download some form or other, fill it out and mail it in, we wouldn't have had nearly the number of people running for the spots.
In addition, there were new rules changes made it far easier for people to figure out how to vote. I haven't been involved long enough to know how the process used to work, but apparently, it used to be much harder to participate in the ADEM meetings, and the rules were revised and standardized to allow any registered Democrat to participate.
But what really stands out is the power of email. The way the election shaped up in many Assembly Districts, especially in Southern California, was as a battle between two competing slates--one comprised of a coalition of activist organizations, and one comprised of a coalition of Democratic Club organizations. Most of us bloggers in Southern California ran on the former slate.
Since the election was actually contested, the candidates on both slates used the full power of their organization's email lists to drive eligible voters to the caucus meetings. Imagine that--actual democracy with a small "d" in a party procedure! But it wasn't just that--the party sent out emails reminding Democrats to vote, as did DFA, MoveOn and plenty of other organizations. Simply put, getting people out to the caucuses to vote is easier, cheaper and more effective than it was just two years ago because of the amazingly rapid growth of email communication.
Blogging helped, no question--especially in my race. The fact is that for me, 13 votes were all that separated winning from losing--and I think that that's almost exactly the number of people that my posts on DailyKos and Calitics got to the polls to come out and vote. If it hadn't been for this community, I might not have won--and that's really saying something.
And no matter whether you share Robert Salladay's dismissive opinion of bloggers, or whether you think we might actually have something going for us, like Shane Goldmacher--it was the technological revolution and the notion of people power as introduced by Howard Dean and Joe Trippi that led us to believe that we could join the party (and join the Party!) and actually make a difference.
This diary was heavily inspired by a post on Calitics whose comments discuss all of these particular issues in a little more detail. But there was one thing that really stood out the most: we're tired of kingmakers and machine politics at all levels. In a particularly wonderful comment, blogswarm quotes James Carville on his dislike of Howard Dean's campaign for the DNC chair:
The "shit" Carville was referring to was the long-running feud between Rahm and Dean, which boiled down to Rahm's wanting Dean to give him more money-a lot more-and Dean's refusing to do it. Normally, the chairman of the DNC is installed by party leaders, but after the Democrats' 2004 debacle, there were no party leaders, and Dean won the chairmanship by winning over the anonymous state-party chairs and much neglected members of the DNC, the folks who actually vote on the matter. The state parties became his base of support, and Dean promised them two things: more money and more power.
It drove Rahm and Carville nuts. "The thing that stuns me," Carville says, "is that this is supposed to be a rigged deal-chairman of the party! The congressional leadership, the fund-raisers, people like that are supposed to decide. You [the state-party chairs and DNC members] are supposed to get a call and are told who to vote for! You're not supposed to really vote on this shit!" (emphasis mine)
If there's one principal reason that I ran--and if there's one principal reason that people came out and elected me--it's that we're tired of hacks in DC and Sacramento telling us who to vote for! We want them to be accountable to us and push for the positions that we support! Memo to James Carville: we're Democrats! We don't do the whole top-down thing like the woman you're married to!
There is one disappointment--it's not like the people I defeated are bad people. Far from it. I like most of them, and many of them have been involved in progressive activism for longer than I've been alive--and I feel a little bit guilty that these more than overqualified candidates were defeated by a political neophyte like me with an enthusiastic base. dougdilg, who won in the 41st district, describes the problem perfectly:
This is a really good thread (0.00 / 0)
because it highlights a very real problem that should be addressed. I'm sure when this process was opened up half the people who did it were really good people with good intentions and probably half were people who thought okay that will shut them up and they'll never get enough people to show up for it to matter. Well we surprised them and now a lot of those nay-sayers are gone, but so are a lot of good people. A sweep like what happened in a number of the districts makes no differentiation between what it sweeps out.
I faced this in my own district. When I walked in the hallway the first person to greet me was a delegate running for re-election. He introduced himself, handed me a leaflet, and started his spiel. Finally I mumbled something to the effect that I was running against him, but he was totally cool. More cool than me, that's for sure. And then later when he made his speech and spoke a little about what he has done I actually felt bad. Here's a guy who deserves to be a delegate and is nothing but well intentioned and I'm going to remove him because I want to make a statement to the Party and effect change. I don't want to be too self-effacing, I've got a legitimate case, but if you had to pick between him and me, anyone in his right mind would pick him, even me.
Instead of complaining about this, I think we should look at it seriously in terms of how do you fix it. Put aside for a moment the fact that some good people were swept out, what happened over the weekend was terrific for the Party - record turnouts, people activated and passionate, new blood, new ideas, new energy. So this opening up process, no matter why and how it happened, is a great thing for the Party. Let's just not learn from our mistakes, let's learn from our successes as well.
I feel a bit guilty myself about the people I helped to unseat--a few of them, anyway :-) But if you want to see change at an institutional level, I suppose it's not going to happen through keeping all the same people and expecting different results.
Lastly, I cannot emphasize strongly enough how rewarding it can be to get involved locally. We love to blog nationally about the effect the 50-state strategy is, but how many of us have really taken the time to invest our energy in reforming our local state parties and turn the 50-state strategy into even more of a success? I'll bet we can do more. I, for one--and not just because of my official duties--will be concentrating a little more on California issues now. Don't worry, you can still expect the same diaries on national issues and spiders--but you can also expect a diary from time to time about what's going on here in California. What's going on in my Assembly District. Heck, I may even try chewing out my neighborhood council :-)
Just kidding on that last part, of course--but I mean the rest in all seriousness. Find out how you can get involved in your state or local party. Start blogging locally. Tell us how things work in your area--because honestly, I'll bet that most of us don't even know.