DEM POLITICAL DIRECTOR TELLS
UAW OF MOBILIZATION PLANS

David Boundy is trying to prove Will Rogers wrong.

Boundy, a former Teamsters organizer and Massachusetts native, is now the Democratic Party’s political director. He told some of the party’s noted loyalist-activists --1,000 United Auto Workers in D.C. on Feb. 6 for the union’s legislative-political conference--of how the Democrats are already organizing their troops and have sent operatives into every state.

All this planning and action, which will occur regardless of who wins the party’s presidential nomination, flies in the face of Rogers’ fabled statement: “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

The party’s new organization accompanies new funding. Campaign finance reports filed recently, covering the year ending Jan. 31, show the Democratic National Committee and its House and Senate campaign finance committees out-raised their GOP counterparts for the first time in ages, and have millions in the bank. Meanwhile, some GOP campaign committees struggle to pay off past debts.

But while the Democrats in prior years trailed the GOP in dollars, they out-hustled Republicans on the hustings--thanks to the legions of volunteers from organized labor. The last several election cycles, however, saw the GOP match the Democratic-labor coalition by organizing through Right Wing churches.

Boundy outlined a Democratic Party campaign structure that he said “frankly is based on union organizing.” The labor movement now uses parallel organizing technologies, he said, in the AFL-CIO’s Working Families toolkit.

The Democratic structure includes purchasing detailed voter listings from 47 of the 50 states, inserting them into the party’s database and then linking them to the names and addresses of a core of activists--a target of 45,000 by the end of March and 59,000 by Election Day, spread over the nation’s 199,000 precincts. “We bought Google maps and are applying them to the voter file, so we can ask you (each volunteer) to contact 25 assigned voters in your neighborhood,” he added.

The idea, Boundy said, is that rather than having outsiders parachute in from other states to talk to residents, especially in the swing states, neighbors would talk to neighbors about issues, the party and the candidates. And the 59,000 party activists would in turn recruit even more volunteers.

Those volunteers would be able to download and customize party brochures, position papers and materials to appeal to their friends and neighbors. “The idea is that the bullet points in the brochure would change from ‘the national Democratic Party’ to ‘Mary Reilly and the Elm Street Democratic Party,’” he explained.

There are already 183 paid Democratic staffers recruiting activists, in every state, Boundy added. That’s four times as many as at this time in the 2004 campaign.

In some battleground states, Boundy noted, planning didn’t occur until summer 2004 and the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) wasn’t fully up and running until late August. Regardless of whether Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) or Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is the 2008 nominee, “that (lag) won’t happen again,” said Boundy. The planning has already started, involving campaigns at all levels.

Boundy praised both Obama and Clinton for attracting hundreds of thousands of people by the Internet, including Facebook and YouTube. “Barack has 1 million on his list and Hillary has 850,000 on hers. But the likelihood of them doing something is small” in the fall campaign unless the party contacts them--and that’s the point of the new structure. “When Kerry accepted the nomination in 2004, there were 1 million volunteers in his database, but no one called them,” Boundy said.

Mobilized volunteers will undertake old-fashioned shoe-leather campaigning, he added--because it works. Phone banks among the general electorate, as opposed to unionists, are less effective than they were because millions of people now rely on cell phones, not land lines, and few cell phone numbers are listed, Boundy explained.

As a result, “it takes 460 calls to produce one new voter, because no one picks up robo-calls these days,” and “389 direct mail pieces are needed” to get a new voter. “But canvassing is an extraordinary vehicle: It takes only 14 visits to get one new voter. So even if you live in Steubenville, Ohio, and have a 19-year-old kid with blue hair and a nose ring who comes to your door” to ask you to vote, “you’ll remember that,” he said.

But the party will also have issues to run on, regardless of whether Obama or Clinton is the nominee, Boundy said. Top among them is that three-fourths of the electorate thinks the country is either headed in the wrong direction “or over the cliff” under the GOP Bush government.

“But Bush won’t be on the ballot, and they (Republicans) will rally around” probable nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) “and open their checkbooks” for him, Boundy warned. “But on our issues, this is a guy (McCain) with a 17% lifetime AFL-CIO rating, a supporter of ‘free trade,’ someone who opposes raising the minimum wage and someone who votes against health care at every turn. And what we also have on our side is an enormous surge in turnout.”