A little experiment

so, the saturday following the election, the davis county democrats got together for the monthly breakfast at grannie annie's. kim put on a little presentation on numbers across the county, single party voting, party turnout, and comparisons to past elections.

the numbers were at once encouraging and remarkably disheartening, along the lines laid out below regarding south weber. in davis county, only 7% of voters are registered democrats, yet we achieve, on average, 20-30% of the vote in any particular district (note that cory seegmiller, identified below as a democrat, in fact ran as a constitution party candidate; note further that cory still received 20% of the vote, indicating clearly that a sizable chunk of voters simply want to vote for whoever isn't the incumbent, regardless of party affiliation).

blah blah blah.

so, here's where it got interesting. kim finished his presentation and we started asking questions. up to this point, the executive director of the state party, a rather fat man named todd taylor (who resides in bountiful and probably showed up primarily for the food), started to speak up. aside from dispelling idle speculation that the long lines in early voting discouraged voters on election day (while simultaneously acknowledging that he didn't have a clue why there was no election day afternoon rush), the fat man todd started to pontificate.

now, i don't take too many points away from him for being condescending. my friends have long reminded me of my condescending ways. the problem with the words spewing forth from todd's mouth began when he started to talk about his "little experiment."

i honestly don't know what the man's background is, whether he's an attorney or a political science phd or what. but here's what he called his little experiment: he picked out a race where year after year the democrat received 35% of the vote and where a democrat in a senate race was running concurrent get out the vote efforts. the democratic candidate was further doing what democrats typically do in places where they rarely win: little to nothing. so, fat man decides to put together a series of four mailers, targeted at persuasion voters (republicans who don't vote in the primaries and unaffiliated voters). after confirming, two weeks out from the election, that the democrat was coming in right at 35%, the mailers start going out. on election day, after the four mailers had gone out from the state party, SURPRISE! the democrat improved his standing enough to grab 43% of the vote.

i just about jumped across the table and punched fat man in his fat little nose. the big boys in the state party sit up in their ivory tower year after year and watch the democratic candidate lose without so much as lifting a fat little finger for any of them. so two weeks out from an election, fat boy decides to play a little game and throw some mailers out at a race, and then he brags about how he swung the vote by 8%.

where the hell have he and the rest of the bozos in the state party been all these years????? and where the hell does he get off coming into a room of democrats whose candidates countywide failed to get more than 37% of the vote and telling us how easily he grabbed 43?

now, fatty's objective was to tell us that his mailers helped because his mailers, besides using well crafted psychological language, addressed issues like abortion, immigration and gun control head on, instead of dancing around or avoiding the issues outright. his experiment, apparently, was to run counter to the wisdom of the vast majority of democratic candidates who don't talk about gun control etc. (e.g., mark openshaw's approach). "when we talk about these issues head on," he says, "we actually do better than when we avoid them."

oh really? where, exactly, do you glean that from your experimental data? what variables did you control to come to that conclusion? i mean, don't get me wrong, i applaud you for your achievement. 43% in this election was pretty damn good for a democrat. but seriously, couldn't it simply have been that your mailers just looked more professional? that they weren't riddled with the obvious and painful spelling and grammatical errors we so commonly find in local candidate democratic literature? what about your nice little psychological language? the effect of the senate democrat's efforts? couldn't it simply be that when the weight of the state party gets behind our local candidates that our local candidates just do better?

should i complain that the state party reached out and helped a local candidate? of course not. our local candidates need help. if fat man can help them, by all means he should. but to call helping a local candidate "a little experiment" goes beyond condescending. it wraps up everything that's wrong with the utah state democratic party into one compact little anecdote. our leaders sit in their offices in salt lake and, when they get a little bored, they play games with local races.

oh, by the way, after the breakfast was over and we started to line up to pay our bills at the cash register, fat man waddles up to the front of the line, bypassing about ten of us who had been waiting before he got there, and hands the employee working the till a twenty, asking for a ten in return, then waddles off, leaving us still waiting in line.