eBurke's blog

One of the big problems any campaign faces is how to control data. It comes in many forms: emails, volunteer signips, voter information, events, rsvps, financials, etc. There are many companies out there with paid solutions to help campaigns manage their data. One of the best I've used is CompleteCampaigns, but having worked on many low budget campaigns that can't afford to buy such software there is now a good FREE alternative: Google's hosted services.

With a little computer know how you can setup your domain and recieve: web hosting, email hosting, online document sharing, and scheduling all for free through Google's free domain services. This can replace what many campaigns spend tens of thousands of dollars on.

Some of the services particularly on the web hosting / Content Management System side are rather limited but the GoogleDocs and GoogleMail interfaces are advanced enough that I would be inclined to say that almost no campaign should need to pay for these in the future. Consider a case study on GoogleDocs on campaigns.

Managing Volunteers through GoogleDocs

So the first major task of a volunteer management spreadsheet is getting the data into the system. Traditionally a campaign recieves information through online forms, offline phone calls, offline voluinteer cards, and walk-ins. For the online form, Google will generate a form that can be placed right on your campaign site that will take the form information inputed by a user and dump it straight into the spreadsheet, which saves the repeated data entry that campaigns ussually have from online forms that just send emails to the campaign staff.

Next, the offline information can be inputed into the spreadsheet by hand but the real benefit of GoogleDocs is that you are not passing around some excel document amongst staffers. Instead its online and two people can edit the document at the same time without needing some advance version control software to track / merge / delete changes. You can share the document amongst your political shop in the office who can also then share it with county chairs or other people located maybe hours from the campaign headquarters.

The spreadsheet is powerful enough for sorting and all the basic spreadsheet tasks one needs to track, contact, and activate volunteers. In short, you get an advanced data management system for free. Something that will bring a smile to every campaign managers face.

Signup here for Google Apps.

Excellent analysis. Promoted. -Patrick

With all the special election bad news this cycle there was one special election that illustrated possible ways for the Republicans to win even in very Democratic districts. Jim Ogonowski in Massacussetts's 5th Congressional District came within just a few points of knocking of Nikki Tsongas. It was a 60% Kerry district, but it was more the Clinton Democrats than the Obama Democrats.

This is the key difference we must seek out. The type of upper-middle class liberal that Obama attracts is probably in all but very rare cases out of reach of Republican candidates. However, the middle and lower class Democrats that Clinton represents is a real pickup opportunity for our party and the conservative movement.

One of the big problems the GOP faces today is relevance. We talk about smaller governnment, lower taxes and family values, but to most voters this is just meaningless sound bytes. We have overpromised and underdelivered, so to be blunt people don't trust us to govern anymore.

Take the economy as a good example. On the whole things throughout most of the GW Bush years were pretty good for the economy even great, but when you polled Americans they were apprehensive even in the best of times post the dot-com bubble. The reason was that the old structures of the 50's were now totally gone. People weren't anxious about their current economic situation they were nervous about their future economic situation. They weren't worried about the economy they were worried about economic security.

As someone who has worked on many campaigns, I've seen how over in just a few short years the ability for our message to penetrate the electorate has disappeared. Put simply, we need to restate our principles. We still have to be the party of lower taxes, limited government, and family values, but we need to find ways to be relevant to the voters.

Too many Republican campaigns, arguably this was the case in LA-6 and MS-1, use the talking points and the scare tactics that used to win us elecitons  but voters quite simply don't beleive them anymore. Rather than labeling someone a "liberal" we need to say they are for raising taxes, wasting money, huge corporate welfare, etc. We need to walk voters through the path because the old shortcuts don't work like they used to.

There has been some recent blog posts here that have talked about conservatism and the GOP being in dire straights. There is no doubt that the GOP is in bad shape. Public perception has plummeted along with self-identification. However, the mistake being made of conflating the GOP with conservatism is one that we should quickly clear up.

I, as a Republican operative, obviously have concerns for the Republican Party. However, I am a conservative first and the decline of the Republican Party is NOT a decline in conservatism. In the past forty years the word conservative has gone from being a dirty word to the plurality political identification of Americans.

There are a lot of blue collar, union Democrats who are conservatives. There are suburban Republicans that are liberals. Conservatism's goals and the GOP's goals are 90% of the time the same, but it is not the case that it is 100%. It is conservatism's best interest to have conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties. This is not in the best interest of the GOP. The GOP's best interest is accumulating all the voters as possible in their tent.

As we consider the "new" or "next" right it is important we realize that reviving the GOP is undoubtedly in the best interest of conservatism.