Post Primary Depression and what we (DFLers) did last weekend…

The primary is over, my candidate won, and I’m as (sometimes) welcome again as ever at most DFL venues, ‘cept for one holdout FB page. Meanwhile, looks like the state DFL party blew their wad on their losing candidates… Word has it that they won’t be staffing our local campaign office, and their share of the rent is overdue. Meanwhile, competitive state house districts in the ‘burbs are being carpet bombed with DFL funded mailers…

So apparently the DFL ain’t broke, they’ve just forgotten rural Minnesota like usual. The pattern has become predicable- We hear a lot of talk about how they’re going to compete everywhere, our rural candidates work their tushes off, we parade and doorknock and phone for them, and blow our local DFL budget on a campaign office. Then the DFL dumps it’s dollars pretty much within the metro and DFLers pretty much lose again outstate.

Having observed this DFL failure for the half dozenth time in rural MN I’ve learned to take a cue from the state party leadership… If they’ve abandoned our rural campaigns, I’m not about to doorknock ’til I drop. So last weekend with no campaign events on the calendar I headed to Galena, Illinois to commune with some of my motorcycling buddies from Wisconsin, Illinois, and even Florida. Had a great weekend, and was delighted to see a dem campaign office open in Monroe, Wisconsin. Half of Iowa’s CDs, the WI gov seat, and MN1 I traveled though are all in play and the dems are active in all, though the MN1 candidate could use more signage.

Meanwhile on the other side of Illinois the DNC was meeting… WTH, can’t they get their business done in years we’re not busy with elections? Their major much ballyhooed accomplishment was trimming the power of the superdelegates. That means the Bernie Bros will have one less conspiracy (theory) to whine about and the party hacks will have to rely on traditional hacks like caucus manipulation to get their losing candidates nominated. I’ll put out a “how to hack a caucus” tutorial before the Iowa caucuses for the newbies…