It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer  of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of  course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.

 

Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really  overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor  got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from  the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday.  It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama,  never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since  both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio  by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.

 

As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything  Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.

 

In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now  look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.

 

Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:

 

1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.

2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.

3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.

 

The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:

 

1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..

2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.

3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.

4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).

5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.

6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.

7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.

 

Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,

 

Editor, The Amazing Democrats. 

Join us on our blog everyone is talking about: https://theamazingdemocrats.wordpress.com

“Like” us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AmazingDemocrats

Follow us on twitter: @DemocratAmazing

“No matter what side you’re on or not on, your opinion and vote does really matter”. – Be involved and be heard. 

by Philip Bump (The Washington Post)

When we speculated last fall that a campaign run by political action committees was on the horizon — an electoral system that operates completely separately from the candidate — it seemed a bit like political science fiction, a rise-of-the-robots future to contemplate.

Well, the robots are here.

Jeb Bush’s imminent presidential campaign is expected to outsource a great deal of its campaign efforts to Right to Rise PAC, according to the Associate Press. The report, which cites several unnamed confidantes of the Bush organization, outlines how Right to Rise will function as Bush’s campaign exoskeleton. It will reportedly run television spots and direct mail, and may also operate the campaign’s field program — that is, voter contact — up to and including Bush’s get-out-the-vote efforts.

There are enormous advantages to a strategy like this, and only one real — if significant — downside. The advantages:

1. The PAC can raise much more money than the candidate.Federal campaign contribution limits apply only to Bush, not Right to Rise. Donors can only give Bush $2,700, maximum per primary and general election. They can give Right to Rise as much as their little hearts desire.
2. The PAC can coordinate with other PACs.Right to Rise can share information and strategy with any other PAC that might want to weigh in on behalf of Bush. Let’s say he gets the endorsement of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity. Once we clear the skies of flying pigs, AFP and Right to Rise could work together to figure out where to send AFP’s battalions of grass-roots volunteers or how to divvy up spending on mail. They can do this now, of course, but usually PACs are working to compliment a campaign structure, not to compose it.
3. Right to Rise can have Bush help fundraise.In March, the Post’s Matea Gold wrote about the rise of PACs in political campaigns, noting that candidates can still appear at fundraisers for affiliated PACs, although they can’t ask for more than $5,000.
4. It frees up Bush to spend a lot less time on the exhausting process of raising money.That said, Bush will have to spend far less time trying to raise money into his own campaign. He’ll need some, of course — he needs to travel and so on — but far less than if he were also buying TV spots and running scores of field offices and so on.

And that one downside? Bush can’t coordinate with Right to Rise. At all. Once Bush is a candidate, he and Right to Rise cannot strategize about what each is doing. Right to Rise could put out a mail piece making an argument that Bush objects to, in theory, and Bush can’t prevent that from happening. Of course, it will help that, as the National Journal reports, a top Bush strategist appears to be moving over to Right to Rise.

This downside, by the way, is replete with loopholes. The boundaries of what counts as coordination are constantly being tested by campaigns and by PACs. You might remember Mitch McConnell releasing that weird footage of himself in various campaign-friendly locales; that was so PACs had B-roll footage of him for their ads. Or maybe you remember the Republican strategy to share poll numbers by posting cryptic tweets — an effort to get around the stipulation that poll numbers not be shared between campaign organizations and PACs unless the numbers are made public.

There’s also the loophole that Bush can’t coordinate with Right to Rise once he’s a candidate. Right now, while he’s still “deciding” whether he’ll run, he can talk to Right to Rise all he wants. It’s only once he makes his official declaration that the (gauzy) wall goes up. So right now, Bush and the PAC could be talking about, oh, having the PAC run TV and what the messages will be and so on — the toplines of which are exactly what the AP reported.

A campaign like this was an eventuality. In 2004, five campaigns were outspent by outside groups. In 2012, 32 were. In 2014, 28 campaigns were outspent by outside groups — to the tune of $216.5 million dollars, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.  In most cases, that spending has been single-issue organizations trying to secure victory for a candidate who passed their litmus test. But, as in the Republican Senate primary in Mississippi last year, they’ve also worked together, sharing information, data and strategies.

“This isn’t the product of some genius thinking,” one of the AP’s insiders said. “This is the natural progression of the rules as they are set out by the FEC.” Which is correct. The FEC, hobbled by a partisan split among its commissioners, has defaulted to tacit approval of any gray areas, into which campaigns are happy to step. It’s not without risk, particularly if members of the campaign can’t resist the urge to figure out how to work with the PAC. The benefits are much larger.

It’s early, and this is an early report. But a PAC-led campaign was going to happen at some point, and given the scale of resources needed for a presidential race, it makes sense (in retrospect) that it would happen first at that level. If Bush doesn’t win, it’s unlikely to curtail the trend.

Or, as they might say in science fiction: The future has arrived.