Bring back Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy

[Old Testament Libera]

Democrats should not cede one district or state. We should build permanent, effective organizations in every district and state.

Howard Dean (former Party chair) was on the way to doing that. The work that he and the DNC did during 2005-2008 paved the way for the Obama sweep, which was far more decisive than Trump's squeaker of a "landslide". Then Rahm Emanuel fired Dean, and we went back to the anemic and narrow-minded focus on only blue and "swing" states. That is where we lost a lot of voters.

Bring back the 50-state Strategy.

The Harris campaign spent a billion dollars and built nothing in the way of a permanent cohesive organization. I fact, where the hell is Harris now?

Also don't vote for Rahm Emanuel when he inevitably reappears, like a bad penny.

[multigraincracker]

1. Check out Elissa Slotkin.

She won in a district than went for Trump. I’m a big supporter of her. Spoke with her and liked what she had to say about the direction of our party.

[OrlandoDem2]

2. Completely agree!

[samnsara]

3. but where is dean now? the ONLY way I feel we can beat trump is if hes

..cold in the ground... They cheat and lie to a degree dems will never stoop to.

[Gum Logger]

4. The 50 state strategy seemed to work.

For the 2024 election, the pollsters always said Dems needed to be up by 4% to swing the swing states, given past is prologue. The Dems never had that. Until they are up nationally, there is no point focusing on the swing states. By ignoring certain areas, Appalachia in particular, Dems are going in a death spiral.

[DFW]

5. I wish we could just bring back Howard Dean

But Howard will be 77 this year, and he's just not interested. We had the chance to keep him around in 2009 when he SHOULD have been HHS Secretary. I've known Howard for over 20 years, and when he's into something, he goes all out. while he was Party chairman, he lived life like a pin ball in a game parlor, zapping from one location to the next. When he stepped down as Party Chair in 2009 (he said that when he hold the White House, the president is the party chair), he had expected to be named as HHS Secretary. After all, if Howard had not been party chair, we might not have retaken Congress in 2006. But Rahm is a heartless egotist, and never forgave Howard for being right about the 50 state strategy in 2006. Rahm saw to it personally that Howard was excluded from the Obama administration, and Howard just let it be. He knew what a mistake Obama was making, but figured--almost definitely correctly--that it was Obama's decision to make if he was going to follow Rahm's lead. Rahm got his petty revenge, and the country lost out big. Howard could probably still do us a lot of good, but Judy wants to see more of him than she did during the 2002-2012 years. Howard was always a family man, and now that he has finally gotten the chance to be more of one, I don't think that at this point he wants the spotlight or the workload again.

[Old Testament Libera]

6. Agree, Howard doesn't need to do it himself

But the party chair and the DNC need to take a hard look at that strategy, which was really working.

Rahm Emanuel. Another entitled asshole.

[Canada Kid]

7. Fresh blood

The lack of forward thinking fresh people working behind the scenes at the Democratic Party is the downfall of it's success. Old farts with worn out ideas drive the party backward towards obscurity and irrelevance. The total lack of attention to rural America was done under Clinton's bid, and then again under Harris' bid. Focusing on the "educated" cities for votes while ignoring the backwater towns cost them dearly both times. Trump pulled off the support he needed by holding rallies in small southern and midwestern towns, the same angle used to win his first term. The old school mentality just doesn't cut it any more. The numbers didn't lie, half the country did not vote Democratic, the half overlooked by Democratic campaign organizers. If 20% of those voters voted for Harris, we would not be in this pickle right now.

[Gum Logger]

9. The inside the beltway bubble lacks marketing moxie.

Marketing outside the beltway bubble should be left to those outside the beltway bubble.

[nbsmom]

11. Careful with "backwater" towns

You realize that Dumpty 2.0 campaigned in many of the same "sundown" towns Reagan visited in 1980, right?

There's a difference between meeting people where they are and catering to racists.

That said, we really need to look at both who is voting and who is counting the votes.

[AmericaUnderSiege]

8. Agree with bringing back the Dean strategy.

I won't diss Harris though. She managed to be a focal point out of nowhere in a couple of months. I don't know if any type of strategy could have gotten across the mark in such a short period of time, but she stopped Russia Boy from getting a majority vote - and he goddamn well spent more than a billion dollars trying to get it, if you count the whole of the Russian intelligence state being bent on brainwashing every individual voter in swing states.

[nbsmom]

10. Unbelievable that we let it come to this

In 2008, people from all over the political spectrum were enthusiastic about electing a new voice. We will probably never know why Obama listened to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod instead of Howard Dean.

Like most people, I completely missed how Bernie had talked about primarying Obama in 2012. Making it worse, whoever talked him out of it in 2012 forgot that the same rules applied in 2016. Most of us — including some very knowledgeable people on this board back then — had no idea that we'd be setting ourselves up for many years in the wilderness if Bernie "ran" against Hillary. And I'm not going to lie — I bought what Bernie was selling back in 2016 and only realized just how stupid I had been a few weeks before I voted for Hillary. Far too few of us knew what a toxic sludgefest social media was turning into (and we only learned later about Cambridge Analytica or how Bernie had hired Paul Manafort cohort Tad Devine to run his campaign).

How many of us posting here remember how the Bernie bros were caustic, toxic, and misogynistic (and probably were part of the reason that DU went dark on Election Day 2016)? And that makes it all the more frustrating to see that his Rage Against the Oligarchs Tour is still splitting Team Blue instead of building it up. (He and AOC seem more than happy to collect the money through ActBlue, but his group does not appear to be sharing information with Dems.)

I wholeheartedly agree that the Harris/Walz campaign understood the assignment — at least initially. Walz was as close as you were going to get to Howard Dean since he's both a Paul Wellstone Democrat AND a guy who understands why you need to be able to have good, honest conversations with people down at the local hardware store. As time went on, you could tell that Walz was being coached to be what he wasn't, which hurt the campaign.

(Do I believe that Harris | Walz lost? Hell no. But that's a different post.)

[AmericaUnderSiege]

12. We all need to learn greater agility.

Primaries need to be brutal to test what materials we're working with. GE's need to be unified and have no air between the ranks.

All the ways we could complain about being betrayed by this candidate or that constituency have happened many times before, so we have no excuse not to be aware of them and heal the fissures beforehand.