Patrick Ruffini's blog

Jose Antonio Vargas breaks down some monumental numbers.

13 million e-mail addresses. 

$500 million raised online.

6.5 million donations from 3 million donors with an average donation of $80.

3.2 million Facebook friends (to John McCain's 600,000).

2 million My.BarackObama.com profiles created.

One million participants in Obama's cell phone text messaging program -- this is less than the 6-8 million rumored but still massive.

400,000 volunteer blog posts written. 200,000 volunteer events created. 35,000 local and affinity groups created by supporters.

Three million volunteer phone calls made in the last four days of the election through the website without supporters having to step into a campaign headquarters.

The campaign had a full time chief technology officer in addition to a new media director. They had a full time analytics team whose job was to do nothing else but monitor site data.

A question I often get with Rebuild the Party is how we intend to get from Point A to Point B. That we have admirable and oftentimes lofty goals, and what we need is a roadmap for accomplishing them.

Let me give a great example of how the bit about five million new Republican online activists gets done in real life, and it has to do with the first outrage of the Obama era: the auto bailout.

With all deference to our friends in Michigan, a functioning RNC would be able to take a hard line against the bailout-of-choice for the auto industry. Or against insert-Obama-outrage-here. It doesn't really matter. We'll have plenty of issues once these guys actually get in.

Practically, this means that the RNC needs to be able to publicly stick its neck out on core issues where 80 or 85 percent of our House and Senate conferences agree. Currently, this is very difficult because even when Congressional Republicans take a good, populist position, the White House has to take the Responsible Presidential Position, which usually serves as a wet blanket as far as firing up the base goes.

But without a White House, the RNC can align itself with galvanizing positions on key issues. And one by one, it can start launching online petition drives around them, of which the good ones can get in the hundreds of thousands of signatures. The auto bailout would be a good prototype, but again, the specific issue really doesn't matter as long as the RNC is bought into the basic idea of aggressive recruitment based on opposition to specific Obama policies, not just vague direct mail boilerplate against the "Obama-Biden Democrats" I got during the campaign.

Not all of them will catch fire. Not all of them will be Drill Now. But some of them will be. Even Eric Cantor's "Call Back Congress" petition during #DontGo got 35,000 signatures based on little more than recruitment to the blogosphere -- just imagine if the RNC had gotten involved and put its list to work? And every little bit helps in getting to the goal of five million.

The price of power.

Kos:

But there's also disdain for the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush/McCain/Lieberman policies. But in a city known for tone-deafness, there clearly isn't a more tone-deaf group than the Senate Dems.

I'm done with Reid as Senate leader.

A Kos commenter:

I hope Reid is as forgiving

when we all support his primary challenger.

Stoller:

I sort of get tired of making this point, but Democratic leaders are often not on our side, they often don't agree with us, and it's foolish to consider them as teammates.  They aren't.

Sirota:

With its congressional majority, the Democratic Party has refused to seriously try to end the war, to stop the bailout and to stop the trampling of civil liberties, just to name a few off the top of my head.  In fact, with their votes, they have aggressively worked to start and continue the war, pass the bailout and destroy our constitutional rights to privacy. So, are we really surprised that they have rewarded Joe Lieberman with a chairmanship that he can use to investigate the president he said poses a danger to America?

Jane Hamsher, on the phone with Howard Dean:

JANE HAMSHER: With all due respect, Governor Dean, we were all just told to go screw ourselves.  That our concern for Barack Obama and that our concern about the war and everything else that we fought so hard for within the Democratic Party is meaningless.

And Obama hasn't even been sworn in yet.

A big part of the Rebuild platform is running everywhere and not giving any Democrat a free pass. That should start in the 2010 races for the Senate -- and it needs to start now. Look how many previously popular GOP incumbents were taken out in 2006 and 2008 because popular Democrats decided to stake their careers on taking them out.

I've put together this prelimary list of potential challengers to all Democrat incumbents up in 2010. Many of these are simply readouts of statewide officeholders, and a couple of others come from this insightful Free Republic thread (go John Elway!). But we should not limit ourselves to this list. Who are the rising, outside-the-box leaders in the state legislatures or the private sector who could be enticed to take on the total Democratic stranglehold on government in the midst a deep, deep recession (wink, wink)? I want to hear some in the comments.

Among the most promising and potentially gettable recruits on this list are Elway (Colorado), Linda Lingle (Hawaii), John Hoeven (North Dakota), and Rob McKenna (Washington).

Arkansas - Blanche Lincoln

• Former Gov. Mike Huckabee - Run Huck Run! I really wish he would recognize that he has a hard ceiling for any POTUS primary run, but could be elected in a cakewalk back home. The Dems have no shortage of self-sacrificing figures like Mark Warner who could have gone higher but instead performed a valuable service to their party by limiting their longshot national ambitions, keeping themselves in the game, and growing the party.
• Former Rep. Asa Hutchinson
• Rep. John Boozman
• Note: Despite this being a McCain +20 state, there are NO Republican statewide elected officials and only 1 out of 4 GOP representatives. Arkansas is probably ripe for a some sort of organized project akin to Karl Rove's turning Texas red in the '80s and '90s and Tim Gill et al. turning Colorado blue in the 2000s.

California - Barbara Boxer

• Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (declared)
• Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Rep. David Dreier
• Rep. Devin Nunes
• Rep. Mary Bono Mack

Colorado - Ken Salazar

• John Elway
• Former Gov. Bill Owens
• Attorney General John Suthers
• Rep.-elect Mike Coffman - former Secretary of State just elected to replace Tancredo, so it's unlikely he'd make a race in 2010, but he should be noted as a potential future statewide candidate

Connecticut - Chris Dodd (potential retirement)

• Gov. Jodi Rell
• Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele
• Rep. Chris Shays - defeated for re-election and would clearly not be a perfect Republican vote, but still has the best track record of surviving in Connecticut
• Former Rep. Rob Simmons 

Delaware - Biden vacancy

• Auditor General Tom Wagner
• All ears for any potentially talented State Reps or Senators. We need to start somewhere.

Hawaii - Daniel Inouye

• Gov. Linda Lingle - term-limited in 2010

Illinois - Obama vacancy

• Rep. Peter Roskam - safely re-elected 58-42% in a close seat against the Obama tide; ran a great campaign in 2006
• Rep. John Shimkus
• Rep. Mark Kirk - hung tough in a liberal seat against an Obama-esque Dem nominee
• Mike Ditka

Indiana - Evan Bayh

• Rep. Mike Pence
• Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman
• Sectetary of State Todd Rokita
• State Treasurer Richard Mourdock
• State Auditor Tim Berry

Maryland - Barbara Mikulski

• Former Lt. Gov. Michael Steele (if not elected RNC Chairman)
• Former Gov. Bob Ehrlich
• Because of its proximity to DC, there may be somebody of national prominence who lives in Maryland, though they would  have to start making a name for themselves statewide now

Nevada - Harry Reid

• Former Gov. Kenny Guinn
• Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki
• Rep. Dean Heller

New York - Chuck Schumer and potential Clinton vacancy

• Rudy Giuliani
• It's pretty slim pickings to find a good statewide figure or a non-parochial GOP Congressman, so we may be left looking to business or sports for other options

North Dakota - Byron Dorgan

• Gov. John Hoeven - declined to run in 2008 because of re-election bid, but wouldn't be up in 2010 and would be the ideal GOP statewide nominee
• Secretary of State Al Jaeger
• Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem
• State Senate Majority Leader Bob Stenehjem (Wayne's brother)
• State Tax Commissioner Cory Fong

Oregon - Ron Wyden

• Sen. Gordon Smith
• Rep. Greg Walden
• Former Gov. candidate Kevin Mannix

Washington - Patty Murray

• Dino Rossi
• Attorney General Rob McKenna
• 2006 Sen. nominee Mike McGavick

Wisconsin - Russ Feingold

• Rep. Paul Ryan

As we debate how to rebuild our party with new technology and stronger grassroots, watch for the media to fawn all over Obama's use of the Internet as President as he brings (some) of the tactics of his winning campaign to the White House.

It began this weekend with the release of President-elect Obama's YouTube address and the transformation of the anachronistic radio address. This generated an explosion of media interest, even though 1) the format is not especially compelling, and 2) at least initially, ratings and comments on the video have been turned off, preventing ordinary Americans from talking back -- contrary to what happened on My.BarackObama.com during the campaign.

Jonathan Klinger has written about what happens when the bottom-up culture of the campaign meets the top-down culture of government. Still, assuming Obama is able to overcome legal hangups about comments on the White House website and YouTube channel -- as HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt and Blogger Bob of the TSA have on their government-hosted blogs -- we can expect to see unprecedented innovation (a.k.a. stuff that's now standard campaign fare but totally unknown to government).

Here's what I think we can expect from the new WhiteHouse.gov. The media will fall all over themselves when these happen even though they are nothing new if you've been watching Obama's new media efforts during the campaign. Be on the lookout for:

• A blog with comments on WhiteHouse.gov.
• A greater emphasis on e-mail collection and frequent campaign-style advocacy e-mails from figures ranging from Rahm Emanuel and the President himself. The DNC or Obama for America 2 will have THE LIST, but I predict an independent effort to create a millions-strong list inside the White House (with a splash page not out of the question). Remember: official sites get FAR more traffic than campaign sites, so the ability to collect 10,000 or more e-mail addresses a day is not to be overlooked if they put sound conversion-maximizing practices in place.
• "A day in the life of the President" YouTube documentary series. This will get more views than a comparable NBC special if it's any good.
• Using UStream to live-stream ALL the President's or the White House's public events. The campaign saw that when they posted several minutes of original content daily on their YouTube channel, people watched. The White House will have hours of such material AND the bully pulpit.
• A White House Twitter account with the occasional original tweet and @ reply. The Bush team deserves credit for jumping on Twitter long before it hit critical mass, although its tweets are limited to a Twitterfeed of the White House website. Check out 10 Downing Street's Twitter feed for an indicator of what's coming. 
• The White House will experiment with user-generated policy recommendations, akin to Dell's IdeaStorm or the petitions feature on the Number 10 site, where citizens can create their own petitions and collect signatures right on the site. 

I just got back from the RGA conference in Miami. And though most of the learning and listening for me happened in sideline conversations, Tim Pawlenty put his finger on why the "traditionalists vs. modernizers" debate David Brooks is trying to foist on us is the wrong one. Pawlenty argues we need to return to our core principles and apply them to 21st century issues. This is essentially Newt's argument too. And 21st century issues doesn't just mean taxestaxestaxes. It means we need to be for broad, sweeping, dramatic free-market solutions to issues like health care and the environment that don't let us get painted as any less visionary or aggressive on those issues.

Let me lay down a few propositions here for discussion and debate.

For the foreseeable future, the GOP will continue to be the party of the Reaganite triumvirate of a strong national defense, free markets, and traditional values. Any effort to displace any part of the coalition will be met by fierce and automatic resistance. When Bush tried to transplant free markets with "buying good policy" on Medicare and education, the patient nearly died on the table from blood type mismatch. With the GOP in the minority, now is not a good time to be throwing parts of our coalition over the side -- but to keep everybody in the fold and add new people.

American elections are by and large not referendums on ideologies. They are contests of personality, optics, and performance in office. This goes the same for when they win or we win -- whether it's 1980, 1994, or 2006/2008. The Democrats did not have to change their ideology to win; they needed to change the charisma level of their standardbearer and needed an economic crisis and a prolonged unpopular war.

Because ideology doesn't matter in elections, and so much of politics depends on ephemeral characteristics like personality and who was in when the economy cycled south, the parties paradoxically have relatively wide latitude to govern ideologically without fear of public backlash once they get in. This is why cries of "socialism" were so ineffective during the campaign, and likewise why Bush got most of what he wanted in his early Presidency, even before 9/11. If Barack Obama is able to adopt far-left policies and make it look like he's making the trains run on time, the country will enter a new liberal era not by virtue of public opinion, but by acquiesence to what appears to be competent governance. In 1993-94, the Clintons tried to move the country to the left and looked incompetent in the process. It was the latter more than the former that opened a door for conservatives in 1994.

There is a relationship between ideology and competence in that ideological governance makes the other side fight harder, while middle of the road policies usually stymie effective opposition (but don't move the ball ideologically). This means that Mitch McConnell must obstruct to increase the likelihood of Obama being seen as ineffective or incompetent (independent of his ideology), but we have to lead with our positive alternatives to inoculate against the inevitable charge that the GOP is too negative.

What does this mean for the current party debate?

It means that the GOP will stick to its traditional principles, while distancing itself from examples of Bush's botched execution. It also means that modernization will happen in other, more useful contexts  -- be it in the aggressiveness with which we apply conservatism to a nontraditional issues, revamping how we use technology and modernizing our grassroots efforts, and most crucially, by fielding younger, more inspiring candidates who can transcend petty battles between the "so-cons" and the "fis-cons" by providing a better hope of winning elections and restoring both factions to power.

This is not the United Kingdom, where there is a center-left majority in the population and the party as currently constituted could not possibly have won. In an ideologically flexible America, the political tenor of the times will be determined by the respective positions of the two major parties. If the GOP moves to the center and Democrats stay the left, America will be a center-left country. If the GOP represents the right and Democrats the left, America will be in the center. But if we can continue representing the right, and goad the Democrats into the center, as happened in the '90s, America will be a center-right nation again.

I'll confess that at this point in 2004, I had at least a passing interest in 2008. By May 2005, I had set up my 2008 Presidential Wire, and I had begun coding it 2 months earlier.

This cycle though, I won't be focused on 2012 for a while, and it's because of I've learned from 2008. 

Barack Obama was not even mentioned as a potential candidate until October 2006. Mitt Romney, by far the most well-prepared of the early 2008 contenders, was defeated in Iowa by Mike Huckabee (who was accused of slacking on the early ground game) and in New Hampshire by John McCain (whose early organization got shredded). The hottest GOP contenders at this point in the last cycle were George Allen and Bill Frist. And all John McCain's early legwork got him was an excessive burn rate and campaign implosion, until he retooled into a leaner, meaner machine.

In October or November of 2007, few people would have predicted Barack Obama or John McCain as the nominees. If we can't predict three months out, what makes us think we can predict three and a half years out?

Nor was 2008 a total fluke. There are structural forces at play here. On the one hand, the campaign cycle has been lengthening. But on the other hand, the Internet, and specifically a richer information ecosystem that allows us to pay more attention to also-rans like Huckabee and Ron Paul is operationalizing the Feiler Faster Thesis where challengers rise and frontrunners implode faster.

This means that in a primary, money and organization don't go as far. McCain got nominated with half the resources of some of his competitors. Mike Huckabee got to be the second to last guy standing on financial and organizational fumes. When Barack Obama's YouTube channel is worth more than the entire budget of a respectable primary campaign, you know something is up.

So, I implore you, quit focusing on 2012, and focus on 2010 and on showing the Republican Party can rebuild at the state legislative, Congressional, and statewide levels in 2010. (That's where we're starting with Rebuild the Party.) Start blogging about potential candidates for Congress now. Even if we somehow manage to unseat Barack Obama in 2012, it won't mean very much if our ranks in the House and Senate remain decimated, and we've redistricted into oblivion until 2022.

Save the GOP alerted this Kos nugget on Our Conservative Movement Leaders retreating to a country estate in Virginia to plan the future for us:

I attended one of these for our side in early 2005, and the experience was so miserable that it ended up being a major inspiration for Crashing the Gate. It was full of the same progressive "leaders" who had gotten us into our predicament, and their solutions were the same bullshit that had gotten us in the mess in the first place. So I left that retreat even more motivated to wage war against our party's political and issue-group establishment. Our victories in recent years have come, in large part, from our ability to bypass that crowd.

Those early tensions are mostly erased, as a new balance has been struck by issue groups more and more aware of the need to be part of a holistic progressive movement, rather than focus obsessively and divisively on their own single pet cause. It really is night and day. But that didn't come out of that conference. And it certainly wasn't billed as a way to generate a new grassroots movement. The notion of having a bunch of top-down movement leaders create a new "national grassroots" operation by fiat from up and above, by the same jokers who created the mess the GOP is currently in, is pretty laughable.

I believe we have fallen prey to the same problem that befell the left in its years in the wilderness. You had environmental groups, abortion rights groups, womens groups, unions, minority groups --  but no progressive movement.

Today on the right we have social conservative groups, economic groups -- subdivided into tax cutters and spending hawks, national security groups, gun groups, etc. but no truly mass-based conservative movement. Perhaps the best exponent of across-the-board conservatism is Rush, but he has no lists and no way to mobilize his audience directly to donate and volunteer.

When conservatism was a minority we may have needed single issue groups to pick off, say, pro-gun union members. But since Reagan, an entire generation has grown up thinking of themselves as nothing but conservatives. And they have no representation among the 1980s-era groups.

Whatever happened at that country estate will be irrelevant to the future of the movement. I'll bet not a single person under 40 was even at the table. The future will be shaped digitally, Here Comes Everybody-like, on blogs like this one, RedState, Save the GOP, the American Scene, and the dozens I have a feeling will be created in the wake of Tuesday's wake up call.

Earlier this evening, a group of under-40 operatives pulled back the curtain on RebuildTheParty.com, a 10-point action plan for the next RNC Chairman.

The premise behind the plan is simple: every Republican has a stake in the outcome of the RNC election, so every Republican must have a voice in the process. Collectively, we intend to bring pressure to bear, not for a specific candidate, but for a set of principles that will force our new leadership to deal head on with the GOP's structural failures -- a yawning online gap, a failure to mobilize our grassroots, and an inability to recruit either strong candidates in every district  or encourage sophisticated activism at the local level.

A number of us have been talking about these problems for months now. Well, the time for talk is over and the time for action is now. That's why the plan outlines a number of specific proposals and success metrics: 5 million new online activists, a minimum of $100,000 raised online by target Congressional candidates, candidates in all 435 districts, 25,000 new people who can work on campaigns and run their neighborhoods. It's time to start holding people in the party accountable for online success the same we hold people accountable for the number of voter contacts.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be fleshing out individual pieces of the plan and likely be getting more specific in our recommendations. We also know that we can't micromanage the process and that the next Chair is going to have to chart his or her own path. Having worked on campaigns, however, we know that necessity is the mother of invention. The primary purpose of the Rebuild the Party plan is to create this sense of urgency and necessity. We challenge the idea that the Internet is more than a fun little add-on or that it's enough to prove you "get it" by setting up a Twitter account. The Obama campaign proved that the Internet is so much more than that: it is a serious platform for transforming literally everything about how your campaign is run, from media to fundraising to field.

And the best part? You can vote on key tenets of the plan, submit your own, and vote them up in a Digg-like process. The best user generated ideas may be included in future releases of the plan. Participate in this platform by visiting Ideas.RebuildTheParty.com and registering.

Beyond disappointment at all the opportunities we missed this election, I felt something else on Tuesday night: liberation. I felt like a huge burden had been lifted off our shoulders, that we could finally get to work building the Republican Party we really want not just defending the one that we had. Our mission will no longer be subsumed in the immediate work of winning an election. The time to build the next right has come.

As a sidenote to Obama's 66-32 blowout among 18-29 voters, check out how these same voters voted for the House. Not much different: 63-34.

So, in casting an identity politics vote for Barack Obama, a hip young (by political standards) African American, young voters were also apt to vote straight ticket for the Democrats down ballot. Nor is this new: the 2004 Democratic margin in the House among these voters mirrored the Kerry vote (+11 for Democrats vs. +9 for Kerry).

People have been focusing on whether the youth vote was up. It was -- slightly: going from 17 to 18 percent. But the real story about the youth vote is not how many "new" voters Obama got to show up. It's how he produced a gargantuan 25% swing among existing young voters, or those who were sure to vote for the first time anyway.

How big?

18 percent times a 25 percent increase in the Democratic margin equals 4.5 points, or a majority of Obama's popular vote margin. Had the Democratic 18-29 vote stayed the same as 2004's already impressive percentage, Obama would have won by about 2 points, and would not have won 73 electoral votes from Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, or Indiana.

So, to clarify here: Obama's youth margin = 73 electoral votes. Without the economic crisis, this would have been the difference.

In the House, the youth margin for Democratic candidates was up 18 points from 2004 and 7 points from 2006 (with a 50% increase in the voter pool from '06). The 18-29 demographic's net contribution to Democratic margins in the House went from 12% x 22% = 2.64% in 2006, to 18% x 29% = 5.22% in 2008. How many of our guys lost by 2.6% or less? And it wasn't about "more" or "new" young voters. For the most part it was the same young voters, who were conditioned to vote for Democratic candidates after switching to Obama.

Related to this are African Americans. Here too, turnout was up a point from 12% to 13%, or Census + 1. But that's only part of the story. The biggest part is Obama's increased margins, moving from 88-11 in '04 to 95-4 in '08. The black vote's net contribution to Democrats moved from 9.7 points to 11.8 points (91% x 13%), or an increase of 2.1 points.

Now, let's be generous and shave 10% off the youth effect assuming some of these youths are African American, but also tempered by the fact that the young black vote is already so highly Democratic that a 25% swing is impossible here. 4.1 percent (18-29) + 2.1 percent (AA's) equals 6.2 percent. Obama's current popular vote margin is 6.1 percent.

Obama's entire popular vote majority is accounted for by his increased appeal to youth and African Americans.

This is not to say that a white male (or female) Democratic candidate would not have won the election. The youth and African American figures would have moved some, though not as strongly for them, and if it was Hillary, you'd have seen a similar phenomenon with women voters. So, simply transposing 2004 figures onto 2008 isn't the right baseline. But this is a dramatic statement nonetheless. Obama has reshaped the electorate. And it's been only partially through new voter registration. He has gobbled up every last, existing young voter and African American (FTW, I get the distinct sense that Condi Rice too voted for Obama).

For more in uplifting news, don't miss Greg Mankiw.