I’d say my candidate is on a roll!
According to “Political Intelligence” (no challenge here that that might be an oxymoron), Patrick has yet another key endorsement to follow up on the Harshbarger announcement earlier in the week.
I think one of the significant things about both endorsements is that it punctures the assumption that one of the other candidates might have been presumed to have a lock on the law-enforcement crowd. That clearly isn’t the case, and is another indication of Patrick’s ability to reach out to diverse audiences and include them in his campaign.
Please share widely!
I’ve been saying for a while that a weakness at the moment is Deval’s gotv operation, and to get Andrea helping him out in Suffolk County is very good news…
This strikes me as a curious thing to say. His campaign has been compiling lists of supporters with contact info for over a year, and has a large, committed volunteer base. This looks to me like the foundation of a very good GOTV effort. Why do you think it’s a DP weakness?
it’s just downright bizarre as there’s not been any “vote” to get out yet. It was Patrick’s ground game that secured him the lion’s share of delegates at the caucuses. His volunteer base is organized, motivated, and sizable, as well. While no campaign can control for voters who ultimately refuse to actually go to the polls on election day, the Patrick campaign certainly has the apparatus in place to reasonably ensure that they will be able to track and deliver voters to the polls.
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In short, there can be no GOTV without a ground operation, and no one–who is sentient, anyway–is suggesting that the Patrick campaign doesn’t have a formidable ground operation.
Iowa 2004. A huge force of volunteers from around the country converge on Iowa on behalf of Howard Dean. The largest (if not most organized) force of volutneers ushers their candidate to a third-place finish.
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It’s well and good to have house meetings of activists in a town, but the vast, vast majority of primary voters remain outside any of the three campaigns. We’re all used to activist circles here at BMG and off-line, but we are nto typical voters. The large numbers of people who will decide this primary do not surf here, do leave and breathe politics the way we do. So winning the majority of activists is the first step, not the whole enchilada. As we’ve seen with several campaigns (Hackett, Dean, Busby) large door-to-door contacts do not translate into vote turnout. Patrick has a great operation of people going door to door and getting little cards filled out, but that does not translate into votes.
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In terms of collecting large groups of people, getting them to the polls and back, the best operations since World War II for that have been urban communities, and labor unions. Deval has a minority of the union support, and not much in the cities. Hence, GOTV is a problem. I just don’t understand how people can bemoan the steamrolling of “machine” politics over “people-powered campaigns” and refuse to learn any lessons from those losses. And the losses happen beacuse of GOTV.
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And lightiris, let’s bury the caucus fairy tale. I know it was exhiliarting for the people with Deval at the time, but face facts — Reilly didn’t organize a whit for the caucuses, and Gabrieli wasn’t even running then. Heck, Je Kennedy got more delegates than Chris Gabrieli that day. Deval won by default.
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We had a post here about “Deval drinking the Kool-Aid” regarding campaign overconfidence. I can see now why it was such a must-read.
anymore. Membership just doesn’t follow lockstep and vote for the whoever the union endorses. That we did learn from the Dean campaign, as well. And oh yeah, d’oh! The Kerry campaign learned that lesson harder than anyone. Were you absent that day?
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Second, your gratuitous snarkiness aside, nothing I said in my comment is negated by your lengthy sermon. Patrick does have a ground operation that is quite organized. You, of course, are free to deny that. Your denial, of course, doesn’t make it so.
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The comments that you did make that are relevant here do not speak to whether or not Patrick has a “GOTV” problem. We won’t be able to diagnose whether or not Patrick has a GOTV problem until after primary day, when there can be an accurate assessment of his efforts.
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And, lastly, the entirely predictable closing with the trite and cliched “kool-aid” comment is just childish and says more about you than it does about me. Cheers.
Massachusetts, in fact. Best effort (maybe until this year) to ID supporters and turn them out on primary day. Funny, it was on behalf of the more liberal, reformer candidate, the one with an army of passionate supporters. Fella’ named Dukakis. (It used 3×5 cards, if memory serves.) Unlike Dean’s Iowa volunteers in ’04, and like Patrick’s this year, they were almost entirely homegrown.
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Two things Mike didn’t have in ’82 that Deval has this time: (1) charismatic personal qualities. (Sorry, Mike. Love ya anyway.) (2) the internet as a tool to organize and communicate.
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Oh, and one thing Mike had in ’82 that Deval doesn’t have this time: only one incumbent, and an incumbent to boot.
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Advantage Patrick.
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I wrote the Kool Aid post sabutai refers to, and I am still concerned about whether Patrick will have the airwave/wholesale game to overcome Steinbrenner’s $15.36 gazillions. But I’m not worried about Patrick’s field/retail/GOTV game. Not at all.
is what it should say in my post above.
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(Dukakis had one primary opponent in ’82, the incumbent governor Ed King.)
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Gotta proofread!
about whether or not Patrick’s bench is going to save the game. Gabrieli’s and Reilly’s supporters are worried about whether or not their candidate’s organizations can pull it off, too. Those who reject such worries are either naive, inexperienced, foolish, or all three. Campaigns, by their nature, are fraught with anxiety, second-guessing, and self-doubt.
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None of which, however, really has anything to do with Kool-Aid. The Kool-Aid metaphor has become nothing but a one-size-fits-all insult. It’s meaningless. Don’t agree with me about (fill in the blank)? You’ve drunk the Kool Aid. Don’t accept my view of (fill in a campaign of bygone years here)? Must be the Kool Aid. And let’s not forget all the cutesy spins on the KA metaphor, too, that are supposed to make the recipient wither under the crushing weight of the attacker’s clever wordplay.
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Nobody knows what’s going to happen, nobody knows who’s weak, who’s strong, who’s bench depth is shallow until the day of the vote when all the players from each team are pressed into action and voters pass their referendum vote. All we can do is gauge how each campaign is doing in comparison to previous campaigns, both winners and losers, and place our bets on which past experience will prove most relevant. We will disagree on the relevance of some past campaigns as well as the validity of some of those comparisons. One thing is for certain, however: nobody on this site has a crystal ball that’s accurate to within ten degrees. Consequently, there won’t be any definitive answers until the election post-mortum.
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According to Nancy Stolberg (Patrick field coordinator), that was how her campaign won the Iowa caucuses in 2004. They knew going into the day they probably had enough voters to win, because they had enough pledge cards to win. Now they’re trying it again at home.
worse than Harshbager’s.
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The jokes on Deval