I’m going to state the obvious here. If we don’t take control of the Senate from Mitch McConnell and the Republicans it won’t matter if any of our two dozen or so presidential candidates defeat Donald Trump next year-nothing will get done and the country will continue to suffer. Playing it safe and assuming that we don’t win the Vice Presidency and Doug Jones loses in ruby red Alabama (and let’s work to make sure that we do everything we can to keep him there and give Mike Pence the boot!) we need to aim for a gain of about five seats to be the safe side and considering the past abuse of senate rules more of course is better. Unfortunately, at this moment we don’t have a lot of top tier candidates turning up for the winnable races.
Right now, we have a top tier candidate in Arizona, a swarm of Democrats running in Colorado, and some promising folks in more long shot races like Texas and South Carolina (both of which we should put everything we can into winning). At the same time, we’re yet to find a top tier challenger to Susan Collins, despite the cash stockpile waiting for the eventual Democratic nominee and our top tier candidate for Georgia, Stacey Abrams, passed on the race. If we don’t do better in senate recruitment, winning the presidency from Trump won’t do much to change the long term trajectory of the country and you can kiss saving the planet from climate change and other things that we absolutely have to do goodbye.
The good news is that there’s something we can do about this. If there’s anything the netroots has been good at in the past, it’s been launching draft campaigns. So if you’re in a state with a Republican senator up for reelection and some good Democrats that might be persuaded to take them on, here’s what you can do to launch a draft effort with the potential for success.
First, a little background. Way back in 2010 we launched a draft effort to primary a very problematic Democratic senator in my home state of Arkansas and persuaded the man who was then our Lt. Gov to challenge her. In the course of that those of us who worked on that draft effort in the state were mostly throwing mud at the wall but we did get a lot of good advice from people who had worked on the effort to draft Jim Webb in Virginia four years earlier. So, for the benefit of everyone, here are some lessons from that history.
1. First things first, you need a candidate who stands a chance of winning and could be persuaded to get in the race. Now look, we’re talking about the U.S. Senate here, that requires a certain caliber of candidate. For us in Arkansas that was a Democrat that had already been elected statewide by a substantial margin. In Virginia, it was a candidate with a compelling biography, positions, and background that suited the time and place. Being on the ground in your state you’re in a good position to gauge the strengths of your potential candidates and how likely it is that they might be interested. Be objective in looking for who would be the best candidate and the best U.S. Senator given your options, but keep in mind that if you don’t try to persuade someone to run and help build support for their candidacy we’ll never know if it could have made a difference or not.
2. It’s all about persuasion. Not just persuading people to support the candidate you want to draft, but in persuading the candidate themselves that they should do this. There’s a lot that goes into running for office-family and financial considerations, going through the ordeal of being dragged through the mud and scrutinized, etc. A candidate has to be convinced it’s worth doing. The good news is that the best way to do that in a lot of cases is to show them there are a ton of people out there who want them to run and will support them. In Arkansas, we did this by building a Facebook group dedicated to our candidate and by blogging nonstop about the effort, emphasizing not just the reasons we wanted to defeat our targeted senator but also our preferred candidate’s best selling points. A good activist in Virginia who had worked on the effort to draft Webb recommended we do pledges of financial support. Not actually collect money, but pledge contributions to the potential candidate if they would run. ActBlue of course enables the creation of fundraising pages like that waiting for Collins eventual opponent and that’s a potential tool to utilize as well. For us I think, the thing that worked the best was that we organized an effort to call our draft candidate’s campaign office nonstop on a single day asking them to run. More people got involved in that than we expected and it coincided with a big snow storm. When I finally called down there about 1 in the afternoon I could tell the single staffer manning the office was overjoyed by what was happening and when I said “I just want to say thank you to Bill Halter for all the work he’s done and I’m sure you’ve gotten at least a hundred calls on this today...” he cut me off and said, “Nope. We’ve had more.” The lesson learned-if you want someone to run, make sure people ring their phone off the hook asking them to. It’s a hard thing to say no to.
3. Social media is your friend (but don’t make it your only tool). Yes, there are a ton of problems with every form of social media out there. Doesn’t matter for our purposes. Use them. We used Facebook effectively. Twitter was still pretty new in 2010 and we had some outside help with that. Blogs are not what they were in 2010 (at least not to my mind) but they’re still useful. Then there’s the countless other forms of social media that I have no experiencing using that could be utilized. It’s an important tool and you have to use it. But don’t make it the only thing you use. Like I said under point 2, get people to pick up the phone and call. Hell, get some folks together and stand out on the street with homemade signs and make sure you call the state and local media so you get some coverage. You want someone to run and defeat a god awful but prominent Republican, you’re going to have to put some work into it, and you might be surprised at how much fun you have while doing it.
4. National activists can help but you need local support. Back in 2010 we got a ton of help from people all around the country that we were very thankful for and our movement wouldn’t have gotten as far as it did without them. That said, you’ve got to show your candidate that there are people who will actually have a vote in the race that are there to support them. For that matter, you’ve got to show the national folks that people on the ground will respond and it won’t be a wasted effort. Yes, reach out nationally, but start locally and show folks in other states that you’ve put together a good local effort. Some of that will be done simultaneously, you’ve got to be able to walk and chew gum after all, but the importance of showing local support cannot be overstated. The local support shows everyone that your candidate can win.
5. Failing is not the worst thing that can happen. Our candidate got into the 2010 senate race and lost a heartbreaking nail biter of a primary. It hurt. It hurt bad. But if you’re looking for guarantees you’ve got no business in politics. Nothing is guaranteed but we still do what we do because it’s important to try. You can do everything right and still come up short. That’s just how life is and there’s nothing to do about it except keep going. That said, good things can come out of efforts that seem like failures. Because of the pressure that was applied during the senate race in Arkansas, extra motivation was put on Senate Democrats to pass the Affordable Care Act. I don’t know that it was decisive, but it helped. The whole reason I got involved in that campaign in the first place was because a free clinic drawing attention to the health care crisis had drawn countless people in my state. If that alone had come out of it, it was worth it. What’s more, the added pressure lead to a stronger Dodd-Frank bill as the incumbent pushed for stronger regulation of derivatives. After the primary concluded, she tried to weaken the bill she had been championing for months, but by that point it was too little too late. The point is, a lot of good can come out of even seemingly failed efforts. You’ll never know what will happen unless you try. And for that matter, don’t get discouraged if you don’t get instant results. Our draft effort started in 2009 and we had no idea what our candidate was going to do until he announced on the first day of filing.
We’ve got to take the U.S. Senate back from Mitch McConnell for the sake of our country. There’s so much at stake, from the judiciary, to guns, protecting the Affordable Care Act (to say nothing of going beyond it), to protecting choice and civil rights, to an agenda that includes what really is our last chance to start turning climate change around. We have to do this, and if you’re in a state with a Republican senator that can be taken down, you very well could have a part to play. I hope this post helps in some way with that, because we’ve got too much at stake to just hand McConnell the Senate through recruitment failures.