On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
> [Nathan, better have a chat with Edsall, Ackerman, and unnamed Republican
> operatives. And this confirms my remark the other day about the impact on
> the AFL-CIO's GOTV operations.]
-I thought one of the big lessons of the last campaigns -- and of that -article you posted earlier on GOP geeks kicking ass -- was that the Repugs -derived a big advantage from centralizing all GOTV operations in the party -apparatus, and that the Dems' lets a thousand GOTV operations bloom idea -pure and simply got beat.
The decentralization on the Dem side caused some problems, but the real issue was that the Dems were too dependent on pure canvassing and not enough on building local precinct captains. We will see how the split effects Americans Coming Together, but they are working to use the names of everyone canvassed last year to build more of a precinct system where on-the-ground people would be doing more of the coordination in any local area.
As I said, there may be some bureucratic issues, but if people want to work together, this can all be made to work. I'm already seeing a bunch of notices of alternative structures being pursued for collaboration outside the AFL-CIO channels.