Tuesday night was a night of great victory, yet for myself, and I imagine most of you as well, it was bittersweet, as some of our favorites went down to defeat. I believe it is important to learn from what we did right, as well as what we did wrong, and move forward smarter and stronger than ever, so that we can do even better in 2012.
Let’s start with a general lay of the land. We control the House, and we do so with a very nice margin. We won’t know the exact margin for some time, but we know it’s sufficient to pass a good solid Conservative agenda. We also know that, because the Senate is still controlled by the Democrats by a bit, and because Obama is still the President, that Conservative agenda probably won’t end up becoming law, at least not without some kind of compromise. The Government is still 2/3 Democratic, but we control the power of the pursestrings. No spending bill can originate except in the House. If we don’t fund Obamacare, it doesn’t get funded. If we don’t increase spending, it doesn’t get increased.
Therefore the first major order of business for our side, is coming up with a Budget. This budget will never become law, that isn’t the point, the point is that since we control the People’s House, it is our responsibility to lay out before both the Democrats in Washington, and more importantly the American People, exactly what kind of Government we believe in. It is possible that the budget we lay out in 2011 will become a major issue in the Presidential campaign of 2012. Therefore it is important that Speaker Boehner hold meetings with all potential Presidential candidates, getting their input and sharing his vision with each of them, in an open minded and nonbiased way, because whoever becomes our Party’s standard-bearer will need to run ‘with’ Speaker Boehner and the House’s budget priorities, not against them.
Another thing we must focus on is Election Strategy. We need more co-operation between the Party leaders and the Tea Party leaders, so that we can all agree on the strongest candidate in a given state or district, and avoid the bruising primary fights that cost us so dearly. For example, Christine O’Donnell was leading Chris Coons as late as June or July, before the Delaware GOP and the Castle campaign engaged in an incredibly vicious negative campaign, a campaign that didn’t fool most Republicans, but did fool enough Independents and liberal Republicans to cost us the seat in the fall. Had we been able to clear the field for Christine, or at least gotten Castle and the Delaware GOP to stick to a positive campaign on the issues, and then endorse her after she beat him, we would have won in Delaware. Clearly working together to keep Crist in the Governor’s mansion and Rubio as our Senate nominee would’ve made everything much smoother, although happily in Florida everything worked out nicely in the end anyway. Also in Nevada, if we could’ve all gotten behind Angle early she wouldn’t have been bankrupt after the Primary, when Reid spent who knows how many millions of dollars on negative ads, turning her double digit lead into a defecit. Of course Colorado was another bruising primary that cost us dearly in a super-close race, if Buck had avoided that fight and saved his money he surely would’ve won in November, and not only would we have Senator Buck today, but Governor Norton as well. That fight cost us very dearly indeed.
Another important element of strategy is the Ground game. We desperately need to get back to what we had in the Bush years, an unprecedently awesome ground game. I’m not quite sure whose idea it was to stop doing what we were doing so well, but we definitely need to get back to it, it’s an incredibly important part of any campaign, certainly you need look no further than Nevada to see that. Angle’s lead in the polls was erased by a superior ground game by Harry Reid and the Unions, that should never have happened. Especially in a year like this, when our enthusiasm advantage was so huge, to lose huge ground on Election Day is completely inexcusable, and it bodes very ill indeed for any year, including 2012, when our enthusiasm advantage might be less high than the awesome heights of this year.
In future posts I will go into more detail on specific issues and the strategies associated with them. For now, let me share an interesting piece of trivia with all of you. Most of you may have already heard it, but if you haven’t, it’s a good one, you’ll like it. As you know Obama became the first President in a very long time to lose the House but not the Senate. You may agree that he has a lot in common with the previous President to do so. That President? Herbert Hoover.
Moe Lane
PG DeFreese
Victoria Coates
Daniel Horowitz
Dan Spencer
On primaries
scorpio0679 (Diary) Thursday, November 4th at 10:09AM EST (link)I don’t think it will ever work out that people “agree” beforehand as to who should be the nominee for a given race. You will simply then be trading politicians’ choices for organizers’ choices.
The idea is to have a full, open primary process but to: (a) stick to the issues as much as possible; and (b) support quality candidates who are right on the issues BUT who are also highly respected pillars of their local communities.
Christine O’Donnell, bless her soul, is not the type of candidate we should be putting forward. Do I think it was right for us to back her over Coons? Absolutely. But why didn’t we have another choice? Like a local business leader or other leader who has proven him- or herself worthy of being elected to the U.S. Senate? Where was that candidate in Nevada?
SirGladiator, your Election Strategy is a series of "whats" without
ColdWarrior (Diary) Thursday, November 4th at 12:48PM EST (link)the “hows”
What: “We need more co-operation between the Party leaders and the Tea Party leaders, so that we can all agree on the strongest candidate in a given state or district, and avoid the bruising primary fights that cost us so dearly.”
How do we achieve that? Answer: get inside the Republican Party and change it from within. That means becoming a precinct committeeman. Are you one?
You give as examples Delaware, Florida, Nevada and Colorado as examples of how “we” could have done better for our favored conservative candidates. In each state you give as an example, the reason the Republican Party did not do a better job is because there were not enough conservatives in the precinct committeemen ranks to elect conservatives to the leadership positions of those parties. As a result, for example, in Delaware, the RINO Delaware Republican Party leaders where openly hostile to the primary winner, Christine O’Donnell.
What: “We desperately need to get back to what we had in the Bush years, an unprecedently [sic] awesome ground game.”
How do we achieve the ground game? I believe our conservative ground game can be greatly enhanced and strengthened by getting every conservative we can muster into the precinct committeemen positions in every precinct in America having vacancies and, if there are no vacancies, getting conservatives to help the existing precinct committeemen.
Example: My legislative district has about 60 precincts. About twenty of them have NO precinct committeemen. That meant when it came time to help our Republican candidates get out the vote in the general election, our local Republican Party committee could not provide even one person in one third of the precincts to help the candidates get out the vote.
My precinct, on the other hand, had an allotment of eight precinct committeemen and we had all positions filled this year. So we were in a good position to help our candidates. Some of the eight worked their tails off; some, I suspect, not so much.
Yesterday, I did an analysis of how we did in getting out the vote for our Arizona state senate candidate, rookie candidate Wendy Rogers. She lost the election. But she won in my precinct. And I think she did because we tried to get out the vote for her by going door-to-door to Republicans who did not vote in 2008 and urging them to vote this time. We made phone calls. We put up signs for Wendy.
Here’s a breakdown:
The good news: Wendy won the precinct by ten votes.
The bad news. Despite there being 852 registered Republicans and 581 registered independents/PNDs/”others” in the precinct, Wendy only garnered 505 votes. And turnout in the precinct was only 48.5 per cent. Statewide, it was about 44 per cent. In Maricopa County, it was about 39 per cent. So we did better than the averages, but 48.5 per cent is still pathetic.
In Arizona, there’s one PC slot available for every 125 registered Republicans in a precinct. So, we went into this with a full slate of PCs.
Our precinct has the following numbers of active registered voters by party:
Rep.: 852
Dem: 673
Lib.: 11
Grn: 3
Oth.: 581
Total: 2,120
Only 1,030 of the 2,120 cast ballots.
As soon as I can, I will obtain a walking sheet from VoterVault for the precinct showing which of the registered Republicans voted and which did not. For those who did not, I want to contact them and find out WHY they did not vote. Because we have to make sure they vote in 2012, no?
Using the walking sheets I received from the David Schweikert (our AZ CD-5 winner) campaign, I decided with the limited amount of time we all had, the best use of the PCs time was to at least contact the 122 Republicans who didn’t vote in the 2008 general election and remind them to vote this time. I divided up the precinct into eighths and asked the other seven to do the same for one-eighth. I followed through and contacted my one-eighth. Later, when the Schweikert campaign supplied us with a list of “early ballots” to chase, I used the same system and asked the other seven to, again, contact these folks. It only amounted to about ten calls or so each. I don’t know if the others followed through. Based on the vote total for Wendy, I suspect not. I can’t order a fellow PC to do anything, I can only ask that they help.
Despite all our efforts, out of the 1,433 Republican and “Other” voters (852 + 581), we only got 505 to cast ballots for Wendy.
We’ll do better in 2012. We’ll get better PCs into the PCs ranks and more of them. We had 31.9 per cent of our precinct committeemen slots filled in 2008 and 47 per cent are filled now. I am going to try to get us to 100 per cent strength in time for the August, 2012 primary elections.
I posted a Diary here today, again, in hopes of recruiting a few Redstaters into the precinct committeeman ranks.
Keep the strategies coming, SirGladiator.
And, if you’re not already a precinct committeemen, I hope you’ll become one. We need you (and every other conservative) inside the Party to help carry out your proposed strategies.
Thank you.
For Liberty,
ColdWarrior, PC (that’s “precinct committeeman,” not “political child!”)
Conservatives, UNITE! CHANGE the Republican Party and save the world by UNITING INSIDE the Party as precinct committeemen. NOW! (What did YOU DO to help get out the vote in the 2010 election in your precinct?)
In 2012, will YOU become a “voting member” of the Republican Party in your precinct?
Where it all started. Twitter @kaltkrieger
Unified Patriots.
Learn how to GOTV at The Concord Project and at Procinct and
Wow, that's awesome!
SirGladiator (Diary) Tuesday, November 9th at 1:20AM EST (link)Thanks for the incredibly detailed information there, you clearly are one of the most effective Conservative leaders in all of America, I’ve seen enough of your comments in the past, in addition to this one here, to know that for certain. I do plan to one day become a PC myself, I imagine it’ll take a long time before I’m anywhere near as effective as yourself, but I will do my best
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