As I’m sure you all know by now, the voter turnout for early voting here in Texas has been nothing short of
phenomenal. Already, we have had more people come out for early voting than turned out in ALL of the previous party primary. The party chair has called it “the largest Democratic primary in the history of Texas.”
And, of course, you’ve heard about the enormous rallies that have been held. The line for a typical Obama event starts 12 hours before the door opens and snakes around the building a couple of times before meandering off down the street a mile or two. Clinton events, although smaller in scale, have also been well attended.
Finally, there’s the
overwhelming turnout of people wanting to volunteer. Campaign offices are hopping. Calls are getting made, signs are getting built, and emails are flying all over the place. People just turn up with food, supplies, and anything that’s needed for the office.
Now, of course, this race is important. And of course, people are very excited about these candidates. But the deeper reason here, the root of this tidal wave of enthusiasm, is simply this:
For the last 20 years, Texas Democrats have been starved for attention.
Let me give you a little taste of what it’s like to be a Democrat in a red state. Flash back four years, when I started my political life as an activist Deaniac and stayed around to work for Kerry. I was on the “board” of Dallas for Kerry, such as it was. We had a website (we did it ourselves) and a 2000-person email list. We organized ourselves. We did voter registration drives and we did block walks. We printed our own literature. We got a local sign shop to print our signs. We got in contact with the campaign and we organized the largest call center in the country making calls to swing states. Some of us drove to Arkansas to work GOTV in the weeks before the election, because the campaign opened up an office there.
But in all that time, we never saw an ad. We never got an “official” piece of campaign literature. There were no big rallies. I’m talking not even once. It’s like seeing your neighbor throw the best party in the world and not getting invited. But, you’re told, you can pass those nice cookies you made over the fence. We’ll take those. That’s not so far off, actually, because sometimes candidates do come here. Typically it goes down like this: they fly in to Dallas, Houston, and Austin for those thousand-dollar-a-plate foo-foo luncheons held by some magnate in their mansion, pocket the cash, and then jet off again. It does get a bit dispiriting after awhile to have your state treated solely as an ATM.
And this has been going on for twenty years, mind you, twenty years. Imagine how wearing that gets. It has taken a lot of heart, soul, and guts to be a Democrat in Texas. It’s felt, to be quite honest, rather like being the uncool kid who has to sit at the lunch table by himself in the high school cafeteria, day after day. In the wilderness. With some idiot (who says he’s related to you) up there in Washington embarrassing you. You just want to slide down under the table and hide, but you don’t. You get up and do what you’re supposed to, every day, every election, maybe a bit grimly after awhile, but you do your best.
So this primary season has been a wonderful, no, an amazing thing for us down here. It’s like the heavens have opened up and the sun’s shining on us. It’s like coming out of the woods when you think you’ve been lost but there’s your house right over there. All those folks voting in the Democratic primary, all those people getting involved, it’s like manna falling from heaven. Sure, some of those folks are going to get bored, and disappear, but some are going to stick around and stay involved. Maybe work on or donate to a local campaign, too. Besides, we’re adding all of them to the mailing list, so at least we can invite them to party functions and hit them up for a donation every now and again. ;) And all that energy takes us one step further down the road to taking Texas blue.
Now, I understand that we have, in a sense, hit the attention “jackpot” as it were. And I’m quite sure that those in later primaries are feeling exactly as we were feeling before all this excitement started. Indeed, my heart goes out to you.
And this, my friends, is why we absolutely MUST establish a system of rotating primaries. So that every state can have its day in the sun. Every state gets a chance to be the center of attention. Every state gets to feel like “we matter.” This is how we can consolidate the gains we have made with the 50 state strategy and strengthen each Democratic party. This is how we build it, long-term.
So, how do we really do this? Anybody got Howard’s phone number? ;)
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