From the County Chair – What Does Your Party DO When We Are Not in an Election Cycle?

By Alex Piland, Chair, DPSC

The Executive Committee of the Democratic Party is working hard to help focus the efforts of our party.  With that in mind, we have come up with some tentative goals and strategies to meet those goals.

The goals include coverage of all thirteen wards and 51% of the precincts in our county.  Currently we have coverage of 8 of the thirteen wards.  Our current precinct coverage is 74 out of 155 precincts covered.  Our goal will be coverage of a minimum of seventy-nine precincts.  Of course, we will also make sure that new ward and precinct chairs are trained and supported.

We have the goal of increasing voter turnout by 1.5%; we are awaiting a fixed number from our data team, but one of the big strategies for reaching this goal is to increase voter registration.  We have approximately ten thousand unregistered voters in our county, so we will have to find them and get them involved.  Part of our project wish list includes establishing a focus group to try to find out why registered democrats don’t always vote.  That will be a herculean, but important, task.  This effort could shed some light on how to help increase turn-out and win even more elections, so it is important that we accomplish this.  Who knows?  The simple act of reaching out to occasional voters might help to show them that their vote is critical!

Another important goal is to find quality candidates and support them.  We will be putting extra effort into the county and municipal races in order to reach democratic majorities of those governing bodies.  You may not know that we have developed a candidate support program during the last election cycle, and we complete after-action analyses after every election to find out how we can help candidates succeed in our county.  That is ongoing and is proving to be effective.  Groups that we will target to help find these candidates include the Democratic Party of New Mexico’s Caucus groups, Emerge, Progressive Dems, Sandoval County Indivisible, and especially Labor.

Since we believe in constant improvement, we will also continue to review and revise our web site and document the processes that we have developed and are improving.  This also includes our data review process.

This is all very difficult work, but do you know what makes these goals easier?  I hate to say it, but money.  Money will make things easier.  That is why we have a goal of $50,000 that we will raise for this election cycle, and that does not include the fundraising we will need to continue in order to pay for the expenses of the lawsuit.  (I’ll talk more about that next month!)  While we are not currently running candidates, we do have ongoing expenses that we must cover.

We have just begun planning for our biyearly Keep Sandoval Blue Fundraiser, so you will be hearing more about that soon.  In the meantime, stay true to our values, stay healthy, and be happy.