Building a GOP Farm Team: Part II

Promoted by Patrick

This is a continuation of a previous post on why it's important for the next leaders of the GOP to focus their attention on identifying local and state leaders, as well as local and state issues, to win back the middle class:

"Major league/professional sports teams have 'farm team' systems where they can identify and train prospects. The best franchises in baseball have fully developed minor league system: Red Sox, Yankees, Angels, etc. The NBA only recently saw the usefulness of having a minor league system with the NBDL ... developing the Republican Minor League will be just as important, if not more important, than keeping the Republican Major League in line."

I was interested in a couple of the responses to this post, including a comment that argues that we should try our best to run in every race as well as a promotion of Slatecard, a Red counterpart to ActBlue.

I recently received an email from The Freedom Project, the PAC that provides "assistance to Republican candidates for federal office" run by John Boehner. (They pride themselves on being a "a web-based clearinghouse for Republican activism featuring online fundraising and grassroots tools, and regular updates on key races and critical issues.") The email, called "The Candidate Kit", was giving short blurbs on energy issues and legislation in Congress and giving advice to all candidates on messaging. Example from the email:

"Democrats continue to peddle their thoroughly debunked "use it or lose it" hoax. The Wall Street Journal calls it "obviously false." [READ MORE] Investor's Business Daily debunks a number of other "energy myths," nothing that "many in Congress seem either disconneted from reality or intentionally disingenuous about our energy crunch." ALL CANDIDATES: Challenge your opponent on supporting Democrats' "drill nothing" energy policy; point out that "use it or lose it" is already law and ask them to back their claims."

The obvious benefit from this is that all candidates, incumbents and challengers, can benefit from a clearinghouse that can assist them in messaging on national issues, especially an issue as hot as energy. My concern is that we start becoming lazy like the Democrats who share and plagarize messaging across the country in congressional and senate races.

Futhermore, using someone else's message without knowing whether or not it will work in a specific legislative or statewide race could be, at best, a waste of time or, at worst, a message that might take away votes. A possible solution is to use microtargeting services; but for a lot of local and state races, they either cost too much money or a regular voter ID program run by staff and volunteers early in a campaign can work just as well. Democrat Amy Gershkoff, director of analytics of MSHC Partners, questions whether or not local or state races need something like microtargeting to come up with a winning message formula in an article in Campaigns and Elections Magazine.

"It may sound obvious, but just because everyone else is buying microtargeting does not mean it's the best use of resources for your campaign ... You don't want to invest your entire budget figuring out how to contact voters most efficiently and then not have the money to actually contact them."

If we want to start building our farm team, we can't depend on either extreme: neither sharing the same message from one organization nor using something as undepedable and expensive as microtargeting. This is why any national organization must coordinate better with our state and local party organizations to identify the issues that matter the most, and tailor messaging on national issues to hit home with specific audiences.

BOTTOM LINE: The Democrats have their own 50 state strategy that identifies winning concepts and strategies in every race, federal to local. Republicans need to start doing the same, and can be better at this than the Democrats.