'Tis the season for political reckonings. As the national Republican Party performs a messy post-mortem on its failed strategy to get Mitt Romney elected President, the Democratic Party in Indiana is also asking itself what it needs to do to be more effective. The Indianapolis Star says that "Indiana Democrats have plunged to their lowest level of power in decades after Tuesday's election."
This week the Palladium-Item's editorial page rightly took the local Wayne County Democratic Party to task for being too quiet and minimally effective in local politics. (I am on the P-I editorial advisory board but I did not contribute to that piece.) Today's edition features some analysis of the local party's current leadership, with about the amount of internal finger pointing you'd expect from an organization in some disarray. It's the candidates! It's the leadership! It's the unions! We just need to get on Twitter! And so on.
I've followed local politics for a while now, perhaps never so closely as last year when I was a candidate myself running on the Democratic ticket. It was an eye-opening experience in many ways, including discovering first-hand the significant organizational deficiencies in the Wayne County Democratic Party (and how well-organized the local Republican Party is, due in no small part to the tireless efforts of its Chairwoman, Misty Hollis). Unfortunately, I've seen some of those deficiencies come into play again in this year's campaigning.
Continue reading "8 ways for the Wayne County Democratic Party to be more effective"