Dean's List
The Democratic chair plans to fight in every one of the 50 states. Is this shrewd strategy or a recipe for disaster?
The promise and peril of Dean's plan come into sharp relief in the Magnolia State, where neither this year's U.S. Senate race nor the four House races are considered competitive. And while Democrats enjoyed more-or-less single-party status here for the hundred years following the Civil War, Republicans now hold the state's two Senate seats, the governor's mansion, and most other statewide offices. The last Democratic presidential nominee to win the state was Jimmy Carter, in 1976. But Dean argues that such failures are the result of the national party's having packed up and left red states. "Nobody stands up and says, 'Here's why I'm a Democrat,'" he says. "That's why right-wingers have managed to brand us in unattractive ways. To be branded right, you need real people on the ground."
The gambit has remade the Mississippi party with four full-time, DNC-paid staffers and a fundraiser. In four months, finance director Wendi Hooks has tripled the number of $1,000-plus donors to 24 and expects to more than double the party's budget this year, to $400,000. Two field representatives have recruited captains in more than 500 precincts so far, along with volunteers for phone banks and canvassing. "I've been trying to contact the party since I moved back here in 1992," says Harold Terry, 43, a Jackson native who volunteered last week at a phone bank. "Someone finally got back to me three weeks ago."
The new DNC hires tell similar stories. Rita Royals is a 57-year-old former rape crisis counselor who paid to print her own Kerry signs in 2004. That same year, DeMiktric Biggs, a student at Jackson State University, sent a county-by-county voter analysis to almost everyone on the state Democratic committee--and never got a reply. Now, the party is using his work to plan its ground game.
As the 2006 election nears, the precinct captains whom Royals and Biggs are training will be put to work leveraging the DNC's updated voter file--improved since technical glitches stymied many state parties' get-out-the-vote efforts in 2004. Of course, with President Bush winning Mississippi with nearly 60 percent of the vote, the Democratic Party isn't expecting dramatic results anytime soon. "The Republicans had 30 years to put themselves in the position they're in," says Dean. "To think we're going to turn the party around in four is wrong."
That timetable makes operatives at the other Democratic committees even more uneasy. But the 50-State Strategy, for the time being, is focused more on keeping or regaining control of state legislatures, which have taken on more national political value because they draw the lines for U.S. House seats. In Mississippi, Democrats control the Legislature but have lost dozens of seats recently. In Arizona, Republicans are three seats away from veto proof majorities in the state House and Senate. The state Democratic Party there has used its DNC field organizers to do aggressive outreach to American Indians and Hispanics, particularly during the huge immigrant rights protests earlier this year. "The DNC has enabled us to become part of the fabric of these communities," says Arizona party chair David Waid. "There used to be this sense of coming around only when we wanted your vote."
advertisement
