I don’t think so. But some of ’em sure as heck are tryin’…
Now this ain’t just about the 17 points behind Murphy campaign here in Minnesota that thinks they’ll win with en masse social media and doorknocking when they can’t afford enough paid media to get name ID. This is about the campaign after campaign that loses because they let emotion drive their campaigns rather than data. And I know of what I speak, because I’ve made the same mistakes.
I campaigned big time for Dean in Iowa in the year before the ’04 Iowa caucuses, still got my “Iowa Perfect Storm” orange stocking cap to prove it. We had such a massive “ground game” that in the weekend before the primary you couldn’t find a passenger van for rent in or within a hundred miles of Iowa- We had them all. And we were so damn busy doorknocking and e-mailing our exploits that we didn’t even notice that we were dropping in the polls. By caucus eve we had at least a hundred doorknockers and a real campaign office in Mason City, we laughed at Edward’s two guys with a desk in the back of a local lawyers office, and the Kerry campaign was MIA. We lit up the internet, doorknocked ’til we dropped, and on caucus night we finished 20 points down from Kerry with no ground game and Edwards with little ground game. Damn, if I would have just followed the polls…
So comes the next quadrennial political silly season to Iowa and a newbie senator from Illinois is all the buzz, even though he’s 13% behind leader Edwards in the polls. But Baraak had another stat in his favor, drawing thousands in below freezing weather to his outdoor campaign kickoff in downstate Springfield! Being semi-retired and laid off for the winter, I made my usual trips to Iowa to sample the candidates and noticed Obama’s supersized crowds. I did some counts and checked the local census stats and WTF… Obama was routinely drawing 5% of rural counties population for weekday events! By spring Obama was within single digits of Edwards, within the MOE of Hillary, and gaining… I was ready to go “all in” with Obama and applied for an internship, and was offered one as a labor liaison in Iowa. OK, but figuring I was going to be making a tour of union halls 200-300 miles from home I insisted my travel expenses be covered and was assured they would be. Couple weeks later and I’m supposed to be headed to campaign HQ in Chicago for training and no expense money was forthcoming… I said a polite “no thanks”. I was learning from my mistakes… No point in blowing my retirees limited income and missing union scale temp work in the fall for a 3rd place candidate. Good move- By xmas layoff from UPS I’d put over $10,000 pay in the bank and replenished my unemployment account that paid me benefits clear into 2011! By preserving my resources early in the campaign I was able to spend every remaining weekend in Iowa campaigning for Obama.
Come 2010 and the MN Democratic Farmer Labor party (DFL) had done their usual disaster of a gubernatorial endorsement, the party activists having blessed yet another underfunded state legislator. Challenging the party’s endorsement and threats in the primary were former U.S, Senator Mark Dayton and legislator Matt Entenza, who I sided with. I ignored the party’s laughable threats and campaigned hard for Entenza, but by late July the polls showed him far outside the MOE… I cut my losses and pulled out of Entenza’s campaign and Dayton won the primary. Again following the polls which showed a tight race I campaigned hard for Dayton in the general and we pulled out a victory, close enough to mandate a recount.
Come 2016 and we’re awash in so much polling data and analysis that you’d have to make a serious effort to ignore it. But some campaigns did… While Hillary’s campaign reputedly spent millions on data and analysis, by labor day you could read fivethirtyeight.com for free and see a path to victory for Trump through the rust belt. By october that path was so clear and the Clinton campaigns strategy so fogged that I began a “plan B” for surviving a Trump presidency. On election eve 538 gave Trump a 30 odd percent chance of winning, and at the first hopefully victory party of election evening I noted stronger than expected results for Trump in rural Florida counties. On the hours drive to the next party the bad news oozed from the radio, and the next event was more a funeral than a victory celebration.
So here we are in 2018 and a primary victory by a “democratic socialist” in a yellow dog democratic district has the local “progressives” suddenly thinking they can win red districts with state legislated socialized medicine despite being pre-empted by a Trump GOP federal government. Despite the environment placing a weak 4th or 5th as the “most important issue” in polling, we have a candidate make global warming and banning copper mining pretty much her whole platform. And despite her coming in 3rd in a 3 way race for the endorsement, the winning candidate pretty much adopts her losing platform. Again, instead of following the data, democrats are repeating the same mistakes that made us a minority party.
Meanwhile the republicans studied the data of their 2008 losses, read the “rulebook” AKA constitution, and came up with a plan to use small rural districts and states with inordinate electoral power to make their minority of the voters the majority party. So democrats, will we use the same data and analytical tools to become the majority party, or will we follow our emotions into more failed campaigns and let the republicans be the permanent majority party by our default?
Sassy Democrat 