Resolutions from our party members should be heard and voted on, not culled in ignorance

It does work. But "volunteer activists" are incredibly expensive. You can't recruit people to volunteer for free (it is a long and difficult effort to get enough). You can't give them stuff to hand out for free. You can't manage them, track their efforts and everything else for free.

So the idea pushed forward by some (not saying you are saying this) that we can take the money out of campaigns by doing field are incredibly naive. It might be cheaper per vote (MAYBE), but its not free.

Cheaper is not cheap. Lets break this down.

Your breaking it down the wrong way. You seem to be focused only on winning elections.

Say you want to have a field campaign for 6 months, run by the state party with local input. You want 1 field organizer per State Senate district (much much less than what Obama had in 08). And, because field campaigns don't just happen magically, you want them for an entire 6 months before the election.

We wanted a county party organization run by volunteers who do a variety of things year round. We have 198 precincts. We divided ourselves up into 9 House Districts and (after 2008) 44 or so "turfs" of 5-6 precincts per turf all within the same House District. Split precincts would be contained in the House District that had the majority of Democrats.

These field organizers would be responsible for recruiting, managing and training volunteers, along with data entry.

I already do that as precinct chair. All the turf crew leaders need to do is facilitate how the chairs do their job, and be the link between the precincts and the House District, County, Congressional District and State party above them

Lets say you get 100% young, fresh out of school, can pay almost below minimum wage salaries people to fill these roles.

You don't need to pay people to do this at this level. You need experienced party volunteers who are active chairs, vice chairs, delegates or members of auxiliaries to do this. Folks who have some real-world experience and who know the folks in their county. Trying to bring in kids out of college to do this work is a waste of time - and it's a race to the bottom!

That is 50 people times 2000 a month for 6 months or $600,000.

Now, you also need office space and phone lines for volunteers to call from in all those areas. You need literature to hand out. And you need staff to supervise those 50 staffers.

People can work out of their homes to do this. Or use their cell phones and laptops and share internet access. In 2008 the Wake Dems had an effective GOTV organization staffed entirely by volunteers. And after the NCDP delayed us from printing slate cards and voter guides from late June through Labor Day, we had county-wide lit to hand out. And the person who staffed the GOTV office and supervised the entire county operation was me - as a volunteer. So please don't tell me that you have to do it the way you describe. That's just an excuse to have to raise more money and hire "paid professional political operatives" to do the work.

All of a sudden, you are talking a million dollars for 6 months worth of work.

No you are not talking about that much money if you set it up as a part of a sustained party-building effort. The problem is - most folks don't see being able to unify both party building and GOTV. You all seem to think about this as being all about elections. What good does it do to win elections if the people who win don't know what they are supposed to do once they win? If they don't know that they are supposed to be turning the Democratic Party platform into public policy. And they wonder why people get so upset with them when the go against the platform.

To put that into perspective, the GOP had a coordinated campaign of about 1.4 million all raised by Richard Burr. We had a coordinated campaign of less than $200k I believe.

You had a campaign of less than $200K, but it was not well coordinated. All the players had their own agenda.

So in effect you are asking that we quintuple the amount of money the state party spends on voter outreach. I love the idea. I absolutely do. I have advocated for field programs like this in the past. But lets be realistic about what all this takes, and plan to put it in place. We can't just say "volunteers knock on doors" and think it happens overnight.

I have personally recruited people who have made thousands of phone calls and knocked on thousands of doors. If your list is good, and you are trying hard you might get 1 or 2 volunteer shifts an hour. It requires literally thousands of shifts to win an election.

You don't need these done as field programs for campaigns. You need a 100 county strategy for building the Party. Then all you need to do is get 1 person in your precinct to go out and talk with 20 voters door to door a couple of times during the election season and you can get out the vote and win elections.

The big problem is that by doing things my way - you empower too many people who then want to know why our legislators aren't doing the things they promised us they would do during the campaigns. Those people start to act "uppity" towards their elected public servants, which the servants don't like. They'd rather be out raising money from a smaller number of large donors they have to work to keep happy rather than having to please thousands of smaller donors. God forbid that those thousands of smaller donors ever got together and decided to "collectively bargin" with their elected public servants. That's the whole point of a political party - or it should be.

We have to stop thinking in terms of winning elections. Elections are only a small part of a much bigger picture.

rant, rant, rant....money is bad and yet one WCDP "volunteer" wanted $5000 plus beer & snack to run the sign shop.

When faced with "volunteers" like that, it does make election time challenging.

A good overview of the cancer in action