Success - Now we Need to Adjust
While failure requires change, great success also requires change.
When a party fails in an election, it’s clearly time for introspection and then determining a new path. However, when the opposite occurs, and you reach great success, it’s equally important to review what you did, where you’re at, and determine a new path. Otherwise, you risk wasted effort, and missing new opportunities.
So let’s look at what happened, and based on that, what we should do now. Because rinse, lather, repeat for ‘24 would be a total waste of amazing talent here in Colorado.
Great Success
In Colorado we had a great election (if you’re a Democrat). Before election day there was concern about would we hold the state Senate. And of course, CO-03 would be won by Boebert.
And after the results came in? We won every competitive Senate seat. Even SD-20 where Tim Walsh spent over a million dollars of his own money. And CO-03 was lost by 0.2%. The Democratic wave in Colorado stopped in CO-03 where we fell an inch short.
So what does this mean? First off, a big acknowledgement that everyone involved in the Democratic campaigns rocked. The candidates, the consultants, the volunteers, the PACs, everyone. They got it right on messaging, media, focus, effort.
Second, Colorado is now officially a blue state. The state that was the 2nd closest win for Obama in ‘08 is now clearly solidly blue. This is best shown by the statewide offices where all 4 candidates had a solid win. Yes Ganahl was a total disaster. But the other three state candidates were decent1. And they lost big.
Does this mean we can coast? No. As Boebert said2, the Democratic candidates were helped in large part by Ganahl’s dumpster fire. And also helped by the nationwide move in favor of women retaining the right to make their own decisions and the citizen’s desire to remain a Democracy.
Biden’s and others focus on abortion and repudiating the MAGA/Big Lie candidates was a winning message. One that got us a win. But that win was a close thing in places. Not just in some of the state Senate races, but also in CO-03 & CO-08.
So we do need to keep working. The Republicans can move beyond the worst of MAGA/Big Lie and nominate better candidates. We Democrats can get overconfident and pass legislation that moderates don’t like. Or ignore big problems they want resolved.
We’re not Hawaii where everyone can sleep through the election, legislate as they wish, and still have an overwhelming Democratic majority. Work remains.
What Next
But what remains is smaller, easier, less expensive. Outside of CO-03 & CO-08, there’s no need to fight for that last 2% of the vote in any election. Even if we lose 1 or 2 seats in the legislature, we still have a strong majority.
And at the same time, we have all these talented political operatives. And we have all these donors willing to fund competitive races. We’ve had great success and that success means we should look at what to do next. And what we do next should be a big change.
If we’re up 12 - 0 at half time in a soccer game, there’s no value in ending the game 24-0. It would be a waste to point the large talent and money we have here just adding a few more to the legislature. And so, I propose we redirect a substantial part of the political machine/money we have here at two efforts.
Post Partum
In High Tech, after any product ships, marketing campaign completes, etc. there is a post mortem. At Windward I changed the name to post partum because it was after completion, but usually the product/campaign/etc. had been successful, not a failure (death).
So looking at the election results, what can we learn? Beats the fuck out of me. I’m semi-skilled on data science and merely an observer of political campaigns. But we do have people, I hope, that can look at what happened and from that determine what campaigning is effective and what isn’t worth the time/cost.
Granted it’s a small data set and there’s a big danger of overfitting. But done carefully I am confident they can find useful lessons on what to do in future campaigns. I do think the outliers may provide us the most valuable insights which would include Adam Frisch, Bob Marshall (won a House seat in Douglas County), Richard Ward (Libertarian pulling 3x the normal Libertarian vote in CO-08), & Lisa Cutter (won SD-20 with Tim Walsh spending over 1 million as her opponent).
There’s also hopefully much to learn from all those competitive state House & Senate races, looking at the expected margin vs. the actual margin and then also looking at each race and what they did - spend on TV, mailers, digital as well as door to door and other direct touch.
Arizona & Nevada
We go to Arizona and/or Nevada and help them on their efforts to turn their states blue. They’re where Colorado was 14 years ago. We should not walk in and tell them we’re here to show them the way. But we could go in and offer to help, listen, and occasionally suggest.
And we can provide them funding. As a donor I’d rather help Arizona & Nevada turn blue as opposed to increasing our portion of the legislature from 65% to 70%. To be honest, I prefer that the legislature be 55% - 60% Democratic because I’ve seen one party rule and it’s unresponsive & corrupt.
So… offer our talent and money to those states. Make it a thing where as a good neighbor we’re there to help as best we can.
Improving the Playing Field
The other thing we can do is evangelize our redistricting process and vote by mail system. Both of these are easily the gold standard for the country. We can put together a group that works to get both of these in place in additional states.
Where to start is obviously the battleground states. From Nevada to North Carolina, from Wisconsin to Arizona. These are places where it’s going to go back and forth for a bit, but we can make the playing field a lot more fair.
But not just there. Also go into Republican states where this would give Democrats a better shot at winning them back. Think about the impact if this is in place in Florida, Ohio, & Texas. Even as a minority, at least Democrats would be fairly represented.
And I would suggest, add in Alaska’s jungle primary & IRV system to bring a third system to these states. That would make for an even more equal competitive landscape. And all three of these would also reduce the likelihood of getting extremists elected. It also sounds more bi-partisan when one of the 3 systems comes from a Republican state.
2024
I will of course donate the max amount to Frisch & Caraveo. But aside from that, I don’t see any political effort in Colorado that comes close to the importance we’ll have in other states.
But I will happily donate & support efforts by the teams that accomplished our success in Colorado pointed to battleground states, either directly for the campaigns or to bring in the three powerful systemic changes as initiatives.
We need to share
O’Dea was mediocre but not bad. Definitely not Ganahl awful.
Something I never would have predicted - Boebert said something I agreed with.