The fifty-state strategy

If you’ve followed Democratic Party politics at a national level in the past year or so, you’ve probably heard the term Fifty State Strategy tossed about. The basic concept behind it is that in recent election cycles, especially Presidential ones, the Democrats have focused almost exclusively on a handful of swing states and Congressional districts, with less than satisfactory results. That strategy was criticized for marginalizing the Party in large swaths of the country, making not only the Presidency a tougher goal to reach, since there’s now much less margin for error, but also both houses of Congress. One of the promises Howard Dean made in his successful bid to become Chair of the DNC was to reach out to state and local Democratic organizations in all 50 states to rebuild their infrastructure and work back towards competitiveness everywhere.

The scoreboard that netroots activists have used to follow the progress of this fledgling effort has been filings in Congressional races. It’s an article of faith that in a year where poll after poll gives Democrats a double-digits lead in generic Congressional preference, having fewer candidates running can only limit the number of seats in play. On this front, the news has been very good.

The go-to site for tracking candidate filings, rumors, write-in possibilities and more has been Barry Welsh’s Fifty State Tracker. Welsh himself is a Congressional candidate in Indiana’s Sixth District. Last week, a milestone was passed. Noted by MyDD diarist Benawu on Wednesday, the 419th declared candidate was counted (a 420th has since been spotted). That ties the record for the most candidates run by one party since the Republicans ran 419 in (cue foreshadowing music) 1994. As you can see here, it’s quite a bit more than the Dems have run in any year recently. Even better, there are only three districts that have no Democrat running and where the filing deadline has passed. In theory, 432 out of 435 seats could wind up being challenged.

Now, the fact that so many races will be challenged is not the same as saying they will be competitive. Many of these 419 have little hope of winning, even if they could raise enough funds to get their names out. I believe more districts than usual will be available to Democrats this year, but no matter how optimistic you want to get, the ceiling only goes so high. (This statistical model by Alan Abramowitz suggests that ceiling is 229 total seats, or a net gain of 27 for the Dems, given factors in play this year.) So why bother?

Quite a few reasons, actually. Click the More link to see them.

Reasons given by “Run Everywhere” advocates, of which I consider myself one, include forcing the other party to use more resources than they want on defense, engaging base and reachable voters in places where they’d been ignored previously, being in a position to take advantage of unforeseen good fortune, and just simply projecting the image that the party believes its values apply to everyone, not just the lucky folks in certain designated areas. But there’s more than that.

The fact of the matter is that most candidates don’t win their first time out. Rookies make mistakes. Good candidates learn from their mistakes, and turn themselves into better candidates in the future. As this comment thread notes, Newt Gingrich won his House seat on his fourth attempt. His first three runs served to season him as a contender, and when the incumbent retired, he was the top challenger. A longer list of losers-turned-winners is here.

Note that along with name recognition and experience as a candidate, Gingrich managed to creep a little closer in each election. This should be axiomatic, but you can’t measure support for a party in a district unless there are candidates running there. Districts change over time, sometimes fairly rapidly. State House districts, which in Texas are less than 1/4th the size of Congressionals, can really turn on a dime. Would anyone have noticed that Talmadge Heflin was vulnerable in 2004 if the unknown and unfunded Andrew Tran had not drawn 45% of the vote in 2002? How can you tell if an incumbent is losing touch with a district if there’s no way for the voters to express that?

What a lot of this gets at is that running a candidate everywhere makes for sound longterm strategy. It’s an investment in keeping your supporters engaged while working to find new ones, and it recognizes that neighborhoods, districts, counties, even states change over time. Greg Wythe touched on another aspect of this back in December when looking at a list of then-unchallenged State House districts and pointing to HD130 as a key opportunity.

District 130? That’s the single most GOP-friendly territory on the list. What gives?

What gives is that it’s also the fastest growing territory on the list. The district had nearly 95,000 registered voters in 2004 and new home construction continues unabated, with little end in sight. By the time 2011 comes, along with redistricting, it will almost certainly be split in two, creating a new Republican district in northwest Harris County. Why not spend a few election cycles organizing, registering, and advocating … and then see whether or not there’s terrain in any new seat to run an even stronger race in 2012?

Sadly, no one took up the challenge. It’s not easy to ask someone to serve as a building block, especially when the reward is that a few years down the line someone else can take advantage of your work. That’s why a project like this needs institutional support, and why it’s encouraging to see as much of it happen as there has been without much of that support being fully in place yet. I don’t know what the payoff will be this year, but I do know that I’m eagerly awaiting the data.