One Vote Wonders?

The WaPo this morning looks at the Democrats’ $50 million effort to lure the Obama “one vote wonders” back to the polls in a mid-term election where he is not on the ballot. With the Obama brand besmirched with BP oil, it is a gamble to see whether or not 2008 was a fluke, and some are skeptical.

Matt Bai wrote about Obama “surge” voters in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:

“Let’s be clear — these are not Democratic voters,” Cornell Belcher, the Obama campaign pollster, cautioned me. “They’re Obama voters.” The lesson that Plouffe and his operation took away from the dismal 2009 elections is that Obama can act like a matchmaker of sorts, introducing the party’s candidates to new voters and vouching for their intentions, but it’s only going to matter if the candidates themselves embrace the so-called new politics. What that means, practically speaking, is that the White House is urging candidates to divert a fair amount of their time and money — traditionally used for buying TV ads and rallying core constituencies — to courting volunteers and voters who haven’t generally been reliable Democrats.

Obama’s Organizing for America will drive the effort, Bai wrote, having “virtually supplanted the party structure.” In my follow-up at HuffPost on Monday, I pointed out that in 2008 some local party officials remained skeptical of the Obama effort in Western North Carolina until late in the game, wondering

… until late October where they fit into the Obama Election Day strategy, or if the strategy was simply all about Obama.

In the end, the Obama team led voter registration and drove an intense get-out-the-vote effort targeting first-time voters, leaving poll greeting and ballot education at the polls to county parties. The hounds to the hunters.

It worked. In Buncombe County, Democrats won 36 of 36 races and tipped the state blue by 14,000 votes.

But there is a difference between moving in and fitting in. As in 2008, there is the same recurring question: Are OFA’s activities meant to help the party or to help OFA? So long as the question still gets asked at the county level, the marriage of the DNC and OFA will remain unconsummated.

Karen Tumulty’s WaPo A1 story highlights the skepticism still alive among party regulars:

Some veteran Democratic Party operatives are … skeptical that the $50 million investment will pay off — except, perhaps, in keeping the grassroots operation alive for Obama’s reelection bid two years from now. Some even suggest that the president’s team has put his long-term interests ahead of his party’s immediate struggle for survival.

“I have zero confidence that they’re heading in the right direction here,” says one longtime Democratic organizer who didn’t want to be quoted by name criticizing his party’s major midterm election initiative. Added another: “I think they’re going to come in for a very rude awakening. It’s going to be brutal.”

If that turns out to be the case, the doubters say, Democrats will wake up the morning of Nov. 3 wishing they had spent that $50 million on more traditional methods, like television ads, for reaching their base and persuading independents.

But not this Democrat. Whether or not 2008 was a fluke, it is time to turn the page on many of the traditional methods, and on 0-7 experts like Bob Shrum. In 2006, Howard Dean’s 50-State strategy started nailing down the coffin lid on the days when, come October, county parties asked, “Who has the signs?” Obama’s 2008 effort finished the job. So was it just Obama? You don’t have to look much further than Buncombe County in 2010 for proof of concept:

… back in Buncombe County — Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler’s conservative district — progressive Patsy Keever embraced the “new politics” and ousted an incumbent state representative in the recent North Carolina Democratic primary. Even though outspent 4-to-1, Keever’s boots-on-the-ground campaign — led by an Obama field veteran — trounced a traditional one built around ad buys and bulk mail.

In the words of Stan Lee, “Nuff said.”