Downlo

For anyone else who was subject to bajillions of emails from the Obama campaign. It looks like guilt-tripping us worked:

• No. 1: “I will be outspent” brought in $2,540,866. 
• No. 2: “Some scary numbers” got $1,941,379 in donations.
• No. 3: “If you believe in what we’re doing…” pulled in $911,806.

Another revelation? People love cussing. “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” performed well.

darkjez:

roropcoldchain:

RECLAIMING Their VOICE: The Native American Vote in New Mexico & Beyond (42 min.) Narrated by PETER COYOTE, this film is OSCAR-nominated, EMMY-winning, filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman’s latest documentary. “RECLAIMING Their VOICE” follows Native Americans in New Mexico taking a stand against injustice in the political process. Personal stories demonstrate how minority communities are using their voting rights as they participate more fully in elections. These stories capture a microcosm of growing awareness and activism which is taking root across the United States. In addition to documenting the Native American suffrage movement historically, the film follows a groundbreaking project led by the Laguna, NM Native community. Their efforts lead to significant positive changes in New Mexico state election law. This story serves as a model for how other minority populations throughout the U.S. can work together to make sure they can cast their votes and that their votes will be counted. This film documents: * The Pueblo Revolt (1680) * Wounded Knee (1890) * The Sacred Alliance for Grassroots Equality’s fight to protect the sacred art of the Petroglyph National Monument * The Pueblo of Laguna’s 500 Voter Project * The passage of legislation to ensure greater election security for Native Americans * The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People

Reblogging to make sure I view this later

Lest you get the idea that overly suspicious Maine GOP chairman Charlie Webster has something against black people, think again. “I know black people,” Webster tells TPM. “I play basketball every Sunday with a black guy.” Besides, Webster wasn’t trying to single out black voters. There was also that one Chinese guy who apparently voted without being cleared first by the White Man:

“If you live in a town of a few hundred people and you go to the post office every day, if there’s someone who doesn’t look like you, you usually know that,” Webster said. “And that’s why when folks called me and said, ‘Where did this Chinese man come from? We don’t have any Chinese people here. Where did they come from?” Well, I don’t know! It’s a good point.”

The revelations about the Romney campaign that have been trickling out lately have been fascinating to me. We found out the other day that the Romney people honestly were expecting to win due to faulty internal polls and wishful thinking. Today, it came out that their election night was something of a mess, according to this volunteer:

…I headed back home to see if I could get my [poll watcher] certificate. I called their official help line. It went unanswered. I tried their legal line. Same thing. I emailed them. No response. I continued to do this for six straight hours and never got a response. I even tried to call three local victory centers. All went straight to voicemail.

What’s interesting is how Romney’s background as a CEO factors into all of this. The volunteer mentions that the Romney campaign had gutted local field operations in favor of a top-down campaign based primarily in Boston (insert outsourcing joke here). This Politico piece from June states that Romney structured his campaign like one of his companies. It gives the impression that the campaign was well-run and that Mitt was definitely at the center of all decisions. It wasn’t just Politico—the efficiency and efficacy of the Romney campaign was taken for granted in coverage of the GOP primaries (e.g. this, this, this).

It’s odd how that supposedly well-oiled machine became a “bumbling, bureaucratic campaign” that placed way too much confidence in an untested piece of software. Maybe Mitt’s desire to be directly in charge of everything was the problem here. Orca “was supposed to…allow the campaign to streamline, from its War Room at the Garden in Boston, the efforts to maximize turnout of Romney backers”, but it ended up crashing and leaving HQ in the dark.

The campaign’s hubris was also an issue here. Despite never having tested Orca, they were so confident about it that they apparently didn’t have a backup plan in place if it crashed. (Romney not being prepared for the worst? That sounds familiar.)

As this piece points out, Romney ran on the idea that he could offer his valuable leadership skills as a businessman and CEO. Yet his operation was no match for the Obama campaign:

When evaluated as a business case, the community organizer from Chicago did a demonstrably better job of leading and managing a complex campaign organization than the private-equity veteran running as a business leader who knew how to lead and manage.

So what happened? Why did the Romney campaign get worse as it transitioned from the primaries to the national campaign? Was it never that great to begin with? Or was Obama’s campaign simply so good that it couldn’t be matched?

An interesting article that examines national demographic and political trends by focusing on California. Some highlights:

1. Making it easier for people to register to vote seems to shrink the Republican pool of voters:

…[T]his year the Democratic legislature and Governor Brown enacted online voter registration…1.4 million Californians, disproportionately young and Latino, registered to vote, more than half of them online. By the time registration was completed…the Republicans’ share of the state’s voters, which had been declining steadily for years, fell beneath 30 percent for the first time since the state started measuring.

2. People in power (who are mostly whites) rig things so they stay in power. Taking redistricting out of the hands of the legislature helps ensure that the conservative white vote isn’t being given disproportionate weight:

The new districts in which congressional representatives and legislators competed this week weren’t designed to ensure their survival. And with the Latino and Asian share of the electorate continuing to rise, they all but guaranteed that the Democrats would enlarge their delegations at Republicans’ expense.

3. Xenophobia/racism during the mid-1990s (e.g. Prop. 187) won the Republicans some elections, but it laid the building blocks for future defeat by not only causing Latin@s to abandon the GOP, but politically mobilizing them:

One week before the 1994 election, the spontaneous anti-187 demonstrations of Latino youngsters came together in a massive planned march in downtown Los Angeles, which a number of not-quite-so-young Latino labor leaders coordinated. Two of those leaders, Miguel Contreras, then the political director…of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor…and Eliseo Medina, then a local official of the Service Employees International Union…saw the potential to build an alliance between the newly Latino-ized Southern California labor movement and the politically aroused Latino immigrant community….By 1998, they had flipped the long-Republican congressional and legislative districts…into the Democratic column. The efforts of both the AFL-CIO and SEIU have continued…turning a once-purple state steadily bluer.

4. The steady movement of the Asian vote toward the Democratic Party suggests that the GOP’s failure to capture the Latin@ vote runs much deeper than their shitty stance on undocumented immigrants:

Obama won 73 percent of the Asian vote nationally…It…demonstrates that the Republicans’ problem runs deeper than mere opposition to immigration, since the number of undocumented Asian immigrants is small. It suggests that for Asians, no less than for Latinos and blacks, the Republicans are viewed as a white man’s party. It also suggests that Republican opposition to education spending, increasing Pell grants and the like, may not be the best way to win a growing voting bloc that places such a high premium on education.

I agree with this. I don’t think Latin@s are automatically going to flock to the GOP if the party suddenly reverses its stance on undocumented immigration. They can’t win back voters they so recently demonized and bullied. I also don’t think the conservative stance on welfare programs, taxes, and education are all that appealing to Latin@s or Asians. Being anti-government no matter what seems to be (mostly) a white thing.