It’s not exactly a shock, but it’s still worthy of note. Democracy for America, the outgrowth of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign now run by his brother Jim, has endorsed Deval Patrick for Governor and has added him to its “DFA-list.” DFA uses its national mailing list to encourage donations to DFA-list candidates around the country.
I don’t have a good sense of how helpful a DFA endorsement has been in recent elections, particularly statewide elections, either in terms of fundraising or otherwise. Anyone?
Please share widely!
Heh, I was waiting for this to happen today and then I was going to post about it, but you beat me to it đŸ™‚ If I’d written a post I probably would’ve gone into how I think it helps and what effect it might have, so maybe I’ll comment on that later. I do want to add that while it may not be a “shock”, it isn’t something that could necessarily have been expected, either. It’s the result of a lot of debate at various local DFA groups, and good grassroots work showing Patrick has a lot of support. The significant thing here is that they endorsed before the primary, rather than wait to see if he’d get the nomination and then endorse.
This is great news, especially since it’s based on the fact that Deval has such strong grassroots & establishment support throughout the state. Could help his name ID (altho that seems to be less of a problem than a few months ago) and his volunteer #s/fundraising.
The recent polls that have been batted around here are still showing “Deval who?” numbers around 70-80%. Way too high. If this can help with those numbers, that would be a very good thing.
Last Suffolk U poll had 33% never heard of him. That’s still not good, but a far cry from 70-80%.
as I discussed here, those were the numbers in the last State House News poll. Obviously they’re different in different polls, but the fact that even one respected polling outfit can generate those kinds of “unknown” numbers for Patrick is a real concern.
David, the State House News poll doesn’t break out undecideds like Suffolk does. Suffolk pulls out the “never heard of” from the “undecided” numbers. I would argue that the Suffolk poll is a better measure of name recognition.
in Q4 of the SHNS poll, the “no opinion” numbers for Patrick were the really high ones (in the 70-80% range). The “don’t know” numbers were quite low (single digits). I’m not sure how much it matters that someone has heard of Patrick but has no opinion about him, vs. whether the person has never heard of Patrick in the first place. Maybe it matters a lot.
I’ll just echo what Cos said about how this has been the topic of much discussion at DFA meetings. I know we really kicked it around at the Acton Area DFA.
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Cos, I’d be very interested in seeing your analysis on this endorsement.
i.e. what DFA can actually do/has done for candidates. I think that would be helpful.
I think that the DFA endorsement may mean something in terms of net fundraising, but I can’t see how it can do anything to raise Deval’s profile among people who still don’t know who he is. He has to win the Convention and buy ads for that to happen.