State and County Parties Need a Network Not a Website

Republicans have come down with Howard Dean Envy. A great summary of Dean revisionism from the left can be found at Ari Berman's piece in The Nation singing the praises of the outgoing DNC Chairman, who laid the groundwork for the Obama campaign with his 50 State Strategy. Cahnman blogging in this space picks up the theme. And numerous candidates for RNC Chairman have offered up their own version of the 50 State Strategy.

I am going to dissent on this one. I've consciously avoided any references to a 50 State Strategy because I think a cookie-cutter state-by-state approach is secondary to building up good candidates and using technology and open grassroots platforms to mass-empower all Republican activists everywhere with one fell swoop (as opposed to 50). New technologies are a tool for nationalizing elections and at the same time empowering individuals to act on the hyper-local level. Less important are the traditional middle-men -- and this applies to state and local parties, and to some extent, the RNC.

Dean the candidate was transformative. He showed that one could not only augment but supplant a traditional political organization using online tools. This lesson has since been learned by the likes of Ron Paul... and by the President-elect of the United States.

Dean the chairman has been less so. To be sure, the 50 State Strategy was a marked departure from the committee's traditional DC-centric focus, as evidenced by Rahm Emanuel's fierce resistance to Dean doing long-term organizing in places like Alaska and Mississippi as opposed to winning targeted 2006 races.

But was Emanuel wrong and Dean right about 2006? Hardly. Emanuel is the one who used hardball recruiting tactics to get guys like Heath Shuler to run in deep red districts. That was Rahm's version of the 50 State Strategy -- disregard traditional red-blue voting patterns, and find good candidates to run in specific seats, not just organizers. This turns out to be a more efficient lever to accomplish the same 50 state objective. Change in the highly personalized American system hinges on candidates more than ideology or organization. These latter factors are important, and highly so, but they are useless without the right candidate. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan largely had the same ideology, but having the right candidate made all the difference.

The other fiction is that Dean somehow birthed the Obama campaign's grassroots-centric focus. It's true that Obama devoted a comparably high percentage of resources to non-battleground states, but only because he had so much more money. Moreover, he did it in a smarter way than Dean did, which I'll get to in a moment.

In reality, Obama devoted the vast majority of his advertising and grassroots organization to the 15 or so battleground states. To the extent he veered off the reservation on this one, it was always to throw McCain off and force him to compete in Republican base states. When things weren't looking so good after the RNC, Obama moved staff from places like Georgia to North Carolina which were winnable. If you went to an Obama website page in a non-battleground area, you saw a signup address, maybe one office location and an invitation to drive to a nearby battleground state. Obama may have been a community organizer, but he wasn't stupid.

What Obama did build in the non-battleground states was unique: a turnkey organization powered almost exclusively by volunteers and empowered to connect through the zero-marginal-cost MyBO platform. This is a different proposition than hiring organizers state-by-state regardless of conditions on the ground.

Though more than 35,000 local groups were created on MyBO, the key here is that they the system wasn't dependent on state boundaries. One could create groups for a local neighborhood, a city, a county, a region, a state or even a nationwide affinity group. Those states that had large numbers of paid organizers then plugged in to this ready-made network of volunteers as needed. I imagine the situation was somewhat different in states that were not closely contested.

My advice to the next RNC Chairman would be simply to let a thousand flowers bloom. Plant the seeds of a nationwide grassroots network with a Ning or enhanced MyGOP platform that allows county organizations to build their basic presence that includes 1) room for basic content and contact information, 2) an open listserve where anyone on the "list" at the local level can interact with one another as well as receive announcements from the top, and 3) donations powered by PayPal or Google Checkout.

Local parties, and to some extent state parties, DO NOT need elaborate websites (or to become miniature versions of the national committees a la Dean) because their relevance as a communications medium is perceived as, at best, tertiary -- the RNC, the state, and then the county. But at the local level, enabling constant, self-perpetuating person-to-person interaction is critical to solving the free rider problem in campaigns. At this level, the network becomes far more important than having an online billboard.

This recognizes what the parties at different levels do well. Ask a local party what the national message is and you'll probably get a blank stare. Ask the RNC what's going on in your town that Saturday and you'll get the same blank stare. Local parties are no good at espousing the national message; it's useless to post RNC talking points on a state party website, because an efficient Internet user is wired to go to national sources for that information. But GOP.com should also be a hub for all local activism -- and the energy here must come from the state parties, but more to the point, from activists on the ground. In many cases, a county party will be dormant, so it will fall upon 3 or 5, and then 10 and 20, and 200 and 300 grassroots activists connected to one another online to route around country-club style official organizations at the county level.

Perhaps this doesn't happen at the RNC. Perhaps this happens outside. MoveOn never did get any of its policy goals accomplished, but it did build up a heck of a network in red states that served as the real examplar for the Obama campaign. And they did it without any state offices.