GOP Leadership Adjustments Begin
By Greg L | 10 November 2006 | Virginia Politics | 12 Comments
Bearing Drift reports that Kate Griffin is stepping down as Chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia. The stated reason for her resignation is in order to form an exploratory committee for a run at Lt. Governor. I am not entirely convinced, especially given the timing. We’ve seen Ken Mehlman (national GOP chairman) step down yesterday, with a similarly thin explanation. After a sub-par performance it’s entirely normal for there to be leadership shakeups, and almost always these produce a stronger and reinvigorated party.
So what does this mean for Prince William County Republicans? It means that pretty soon there’s going to be new leadership eager to reach out to grassroots activists and listen to their ideas about how things can be done better and add those ideas to their own experiences. This will be an opportunity to re-engage with the state-level organization.
Based on what I’ve seen this election cycle, here are some changes I’d like to see made which would help me be more effective:
The grassroots leaders need intel. When we have something that is really connecting with voters, such as the Marriage Amendment did, that information needs to get down to the foot soldiers so they can capitalize on it. We missed an opportunity to more strongly link our candidates with this popular initiative, which may have made the difference in one particularly close race.
RPV needs to get in the game. They played very little part on the team, and when they showed up they didn’t do that much. If these are the big guns which are supposed to make the difference, they actually have to try to make a difference. Money from RPV wouldn’t hurt either — they could learn how to raise some.
The RPV voter database application sorely needs a tech refresh, a better user interface, GIS capabilities and usability with browsers other than Microsoft Explorer. If I can’t update records, I’m not going to update records. There’s so much to fix with this system it’s hard to provide a comprehensive list of capability gaps without writing a novel. It’s quite possible that this refesh could be accomplished using volunteers, given Virginia’s technology industry.
RPV should make a concerted effort to provide training at the local committee level in things other than how to navigate the user interface for the RPV database. Local committee members should be getting grassroots operations training, especially in areas where committees are rebuilding or underperforming. If this has to be a train-the-trainer effort, fine. But we have too many activists who need a stronger skill set.
Finally, coordination between the campaigns and local committees is pretty iffy, and it’s not uncommon to have precinct captains unaware of what different groups of volunteers are doing in their own precincts. RPV could help a lot to establish better communication mechanisms and establish collaboration capabilities that would help precinct, district and campaign activists communicate more effectively and plan and manage resources better. Few things are more frustrating than bumping into volunteers from another effort who are working the same area you’ve planned for your volunteers.
Let’s hope we use this opportunity to improve our party to the fullest.
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12 Comments
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One thing that hasn’t help elect Republicans is importing people from out of state to run candidates campaigns. People from out of state do not know the political climate in the area.
Also, having the ultra conservatives fighting everyone who doesn’t agree with them is hurting the party and causing it to fall apart in some places.
I could go on and on, but I’m tired.
Had to Say……..TOUCHE!
The Davis Campaign had an outstanding team in PWC. They worked hard, 7 days a week, asked plenty of questions to familiarize themselves with the local political climate and some folks who live in PW. They were well prepared with signs, materials, worked the phones, coordinated with their headquarters and knew Voter Vault.
RPV provided PW with one person to represent the Allen campaign up until the kick off of the 72 Hour Plan, then we went to 2 and on election day 4 people. This group was clueless about the local political climate but we had many local activist you stepped up and did many hours of phone banking, worked the PWC Fair, Occoquan Arts and Crafts Festival, and more helping out. However, being one of them I didn’t appreciate being constantly shorted on supplies like yard signs, not did to folks who were asking for them.
Bottom line here folks is we needed more volunteers. I saw a lot of the same people through out the campaign. I’d like to know the percentage of committee members that volunteered. I want to know where Marty Nohe, Wally Covington and Maureen Caddigan were? 2 of the 3 offered their support but in name only. Though most of our candidates did win it was certainly inspite of the limited involvement.
Watch what happens when they run next year, they’ll expect everyone to campaign hard for them and offer lots of money.
BVBL:
I don’t want to give the website a real beat-down as the idea is an excellent one and developing this kind of data is very difficult but the problem with the voter database is two-fold:
1. The data is kinda lousy. There aren’t enough people in it and those that are in there aren’t well catagorized. For instance, my campaign (spring 2006) was accused of mailing to democrats. Ironically (sp), the mailing list we used came primarily from the RPV database and those selected were considered republicans - no “republican leaning” people were selected. We didn’t have enough money to mail to all registered voters, we were trying to turn out the base!!
2. The technology needs work. It’s a step in the right direction but you shouldn’t have to hire an IT guy (as much as I think it’s a good idea…;)
The only way I got useful data was to import the whole mess into a database and “cross” the data from RPV with a select subset of voters from the SBE. From there we used a bunch of queries to modify and sort the data for different purposes such as walking and calling. We also geocoded the data so we could map the voters and chart the areas where there are larger concentrations of voters. That was a neat deal and when you see a bunch of dots in one area, that’s where you go.
I should probably start an election IT consulting practice but it would be better for everyone if I didn’t need to.
Skeptic - I had Marty and his wife working the polls in my area, so while they may not have been in your corner of PWC all the time, they did show up and worked really hard in other areas such as mine. I wouldn’t fault them at all, especially since (in retrospect) they lent support where it was needed most. They don’t deserve any rocks getting thrown at them, although I understand why you might feel they weren’t as engaged as they should be. They were, just in a lot of different areas besides your own.
Andy — I can just imagine what we could do with a bunch of volunteer technology gurus if given the chance to take a crack at the voter database application. If we could cut down on the latency, make it easier for everyone to use and made it more available to the folks on the ground we could vastly improve the quality of the data and our ability to make use of it.
A political IT consulting practice is a fascinating idea, though. It would even be better if RPV brought in additional talent and just made that available to our candidates.
To address the gist of your original post Greg…RPV (and the respective committees) needs to address the issue of winning elections rather than shaping ideology, and you are absolutely correct. It’s not the purpose of the Republican Party leadership to promote the politics of exclusion. That’s not how we became the majority party.
And I would note, general to the subject, that one of the things that has made the RPV successful over the years is embracing new technology. I remember as a young ‘un how the use of direct mail by GOP candidates, which not only raised money but effectively served as an early form of data mining, allowed the GOP to create a grass roots fundraising edge that held for many years.
I don’t know what has driven this unwillingness to adopt new technologies, and I shake my head at stories that the same new tactics-organized blogging (which does seem like a contradiction in terms)-that has been embraced by the democrats is still held at arms length by the RPV leadership. But if the GOP is unwilling to go into the statehouse elections next year baring every possible weapon, then the statehouse majorities are at risk.
1. Voters should be required to register their party affiliation in VA.
2. We build a WAN with computer terminals set up at Phone Banks (Headquarters) so as someone is making phone calls they enter the results immediately into the system and information is kept current.
3. Reports can be printed daily such as: wants to volunteer on election day, needs a yard sign delivered, etc.
4. A complete list of all events on our web-site for on-line volunteer sign up and registration. With back end reporting for leadership organizers.
5. Full-time staff person is assigned to train users, print reports and disseminate results every 24 hours.
6. This can be done with an out of the box solution like GoldMine or Act! and offer more functionality than in Voter Vault.
7. Maintain higher integrity of data. Every other name and/or number is wrong!
8. Build an Intranet for working activitist to communicate, access vital information such as cell phone numbers, events, place requests for materials, etc.
We’ve got the talent, we can raise the money, lets do what we have to do or convince RPV that it needs to be done and join them in doing it.
By the way Greg, thank goodness for blogging because this seems to be our best method of communication these days. Good to know Marty and Kris were out there on election day! Any word from Wally or Maureen?
Grant was at PW Headquarters on election day from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. expecting to have voter counts phoned in every 2 hours from all precincts and it didn’t go as well as it could have. We had a list of volunteers but not always a cell phone cell number to reach folks. We knew where you were working but there was no inbound communication and no cell number available to reach you.
Seems like there must have been a completely separate and independent activist and volunteer effort underway in Brentsville. Please enlighten me?
There were many issues that arised through out the day. Public Works removing our signs, broken machines in 5 precints, we were there to assist EVERYONE and did for those who worked with us. I feel like a mushroom, wanna fill me in on what was going on?
Skeptic:
I think an open-source solution would work better. For the amount of $$ we’d have to pay for Act or GM, we could easily roll our own. Heck, we could use SugarCRM for free. With a web-based solution, the internet is our WAN.
As I see it, the challenge isn’t the technology, it is keeping the data in better shape. Honestly, I can’t tell you the best way to do it other than train the heck out of a volunteer corp and have only them update it. If you allow too many people to update the data, the quality will be worse than if we did nothing.
Greg, did the RPV really have any hint as to how public opinion on the Amendment was trending? I didn’t follow the issue too closely and I was truly surprised it passed by such a large margin.