Reply #63: Giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assuming that you're [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

actually asking a serious question instead of assembling your usual tag team to taunt us "fringe folk," here's what I would do if I were advising the party on 2006.

1) Let no Republican go unchallenged. Send out a sacrificial lamb if necessary. Even if the lamb doesn't win, at least part of the population will have heard an alternative to the Republican line.

2) If possible, recruit local candidates who are known and well-liked for community activism.

3) Assess the specific needs (not demagogic wedge issues) of the local constituency--jobs? better schools? a cleaner environment? better disaster relief?--and run heavily on three to four issues with specific suggestions for each one. Of course, the candidate should study up on a wide range of issues and shouldn't be let out in public until he or she has something to say about most of what locals are likely to bring up.

4) Don't let the Republicans set the agenda. If the R's bring up "God, guns, and gays," the Dem candidate should sigh in exasperation and say, "They keep bringing that up because they have nothing to offer you. They're waving flags and Bibles in your faces so they can pick your pocket."

5) Expose the candidate to as many local voters as possible by holding low-cost fundraisers, following the example of Peter DeFazio's $35 beer and pizza parties. Hold $5 coffee parties in poorer neighborhoods where the candidate can meet with underserved voters. In the end, it's not necessarily the candidate with the most money who wins, but the candidate who gets the most votes, and if $5 coffee parties and $35 pizza parties will bring the candidate face-to-face with the voters, who can become committed word-of-mouth recruiters, you'll still need some media ads, but not as many.

6) All candidates should emphasize that voters who are dissatisfied with the way the country is going should vote for them. There should be one nationwide plank (doesn't matter what it is, except that it shouldn't be one of the typical wedge issues) that ALL Dem candidates around the country should run on. Tell voters that if they vote Dem and enough of the rest of the country votes Dem, this idea will be introduced as a bill in both houses. (If Bush vetoes it, fine, that's something to run against in 2008.)