527s and GOTV in response to "Post-Concession Reflections" by Robert L. Borosage

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/postconcession_reflections.php While I agree with and appreciate much of Mr. Borosage's commentary I must adamantly disagree with his assertion regarding the "sophistication" of the 527s and the wisdom of their efforts. As a long-time volunteer organizer for the Kerry campaign in Chicago I helped coordinate hundreds of supporters in canvassing trips to Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio. Although the media buys, the voter registration drives and the get-out-the-vote follow up on these new voters by these independent groups was definitely helpful, their overall GOTV strategy was not. The Democratic Party may not do the best job executing many tasks, but getting out the vote is one they do very well. Since the Party and the 527s are legally barred from coordinating their activities they inevitably end up duplicating each others’ work. Now the more advertising the better and the same goes for registering new voters. However, GOTV should be left to the Democratic Party to lead. The 527s would best serve everyone if they utilized a limited number of volunteers or paid staff to get the specific voters that they had previously registered to the polls and advise the rest of their membership to independently contact the Party (of their choice) to get involved during the last week or two of the campaign. Why? It’s simple. If we have 150,000 voter reminder calls to make to Kerry supporters in Lucas County, Ohio doesn’t it make more sense to have one group making sure that all these contacts are made? Instead, what we had just recently was a situation where maybe only 120,000 of these voters were contacted, but those voters were called by each of these numerous groups amounting to 3-10 calls a piece. If the volunteers working for these 527s had been on the phones for the Democratic Party, every one of those 150,000 voters would surely have been called and perhaps not felt so stalked. Another perfect example is in Ohio last Sunday 10/31, while I was driving between two phonebanks, and ran into a 527 canvasser still doing persuasion door to door. Now that is crazy! That same volunteer could have made hundreds of phone calls and reached literally dozens and dozens of people in the same amount of time it took to go door to door. Throughout the last year, volunteers were pulled from our coordinated activities by these 527 organizers. There wasn’t a consistent message offered to voters as every canvassing group had their own agendas and talking points. The total votes needed to win, and whether we had them or not, was not tallied in one place. The list goes on. One thing is clear. Despite the fanatical energy of so many to get rid of George W. Bush, this hodge-podge coalition of independent groups was not able to put the cumulative number of votes together to win. We all need to register new voters and keep in constant contact with them, we all need to do our best to affect the content of our nation’s numerous media outlets and we all must do so using the message(s) that we are most comfortable with. GOTV should be coordinated by one group and the best group to do so is still the Democratic Party.