I have a lot of experience in recruiting, building, organizing, and activating local electoral volunteers (community organizing, sans the communism).
We can do a very good job of this, but two elements are critical:
1. a local core of one or more organizers committed to giving significant time and effort.
2. just a little money, to allow the organizers to meet a few expenses and to provide them some centralized administrative and data management help.
I know about the methods that work. It’s been done with conservatives — even in the Chicagoland area. ;-`
About $150,000 should be all it takes to allow a state the size of Illinois to be organized with a huge standing army of grassroots activists.
I think the conventional grassroots mobilization methods, even upgraded and intensified as they were by Karl Rove in 2004, have become as outmoded as a cavalry charge in 1939. They did not work in 2006 or in 2008. I do not think that we even know how the new Blitzkrieg version of electoral warfare actually will be conducted. I think were moving into a new method of conducting elections as radical as Blitzkrieg in 1939 and the Gulf war. I am convinced that no one in the Republican party establishment has read Rommel's book.
That is not to say that just because conventional grassroots organizations are outclassed by the new cyber/Alinsky methods they should be abandoned. To the contrary, we have got to go with what we have if only to mitigate the disparity. But in doing so must not deceive ourselves that we are accomplishing very much. Those of us who predicted the electoral disasters 2006 and 2008 have become extremely wary of mindless optimism which is so often seen, for example, on these threads which has the fatal effect of masking mortal peril.
