How We Won: Dallas County Turns Blue

by: R. Kirk McPike

Wed Nov 15, 2006 at 18:09:38 PM CST

Meanwhile, candidate recruitment was taking place. SDEC member and former Dallas chair Ken Molberg and other party leaders helped persuade many excellent attorneys into joining a long roster of 2006 Democratic candidates. Several of these candidates had run in 2002 and narrowly been defeated. Many of these candidates hoped that the party in 2006 would do more than the party in 2002 had done to support their campaigns. Slowly but surely, a consensus emerged in support of Darlene's goal of running an aggressive, party-coordinated countywide campaign. The only question was how to fund it and how to structure it.

Under Texas law, judicial candidates cannot campaign for other candidates on the ballot nor financially support other campaigns. However, they are allowed to campaign for their party's ticket  ("vote Democratic") and donate funds to this end to the party itself. After outlining this to the candidates, Darlene Ewing and the DCDP Executive Director, Steve Tillery, worked with local Democratic leaders and campaign veterans, including Lisa Turner, Shannon Bailey and others,  to develop a general campaign plan that called for an aggressive get-out-the-vote effort amongst the Democratic base. The candidates themselves donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the party to fund the campaign's operations. Many of the candidates were able to afford these contributions thanks to a coordinated fundraising event featuring Senator John Edwards organized in conjunction with Baron & Budd, one of Dallas's major law firms.

With a basic plan in place and funding flowing in, Darlene and Steve hired the campaign staff. Jane Hamilton, a veteran of the 2004 Martin Frost campaign, was brought in to serve as the overall campaign director. I was moved out of the party office and into the campaign staff, and charged with running the field campaign in the North. To work with Jane in the South, Shay Cathey and Dorothy Dean were brought on board to coordinate volunteer and field operations. Former party chair Bill Howell was hired to organize our walk and call lists, and his knowledge of the County was instrumental in helping us target our efforts. Sarah Duncan was hired to both replace me as party office manager and to undertake the arduous task of herding our 47 countywide candidates. Sarah kept them informed of upcoming events and served as the party's communications hub. An outside consultant, Jeff Dalton, was hired to handle the campaign's marketing, for lack of a better term. Jeff designed our website, direct mail pieces (more on that later) and the famous "Had Enough?" signs that littered the city in the month of October. For a countywide campaign in Dallas, that's not a very large staff. However, though mostly young, we all had fairly extensive backgrounds in campaigning, and I think the results show that we held our own.

Two offices were set up to  execute two very different field programs. In Dallas Democratic politics, there's the 23rd Senatorial District (often inaccurately referred to as being "the South") and then there's everywhere else ("the North"). As the voters in the South routinely vote Democratic 75% of the time or more, and voters in the North tend to vote more Republican, different strategies were employed to mobilize and turn out the party's vote. As I ran the field program outside of the 23rd, I am more knowledgeable about that strategy, of course.

Our goal in the North was to hit known and suspected Democratic voters as hard as possible. With virtually no budget, my workforce was comprised of me and an ever-changing army of volunteers, many of whom were college students who required volunteer credits for their political science courses. Other volunteers included representatives of the county's three most active Democratic clubs, the Young Democrats, the Stonewall Democrats and the Lake Highlands White Rock Democrats, as well as candidates and their supporters. Many of our candidates deserve special recognition for putting themselves out there during this campaign. The core of my thrice-a-weekend walk program was comprised of dedicated candidates who let me send them out all over Dallas County from Oak Lawn to Rowlett, from Grand Prairie to Richardson, from the M Streets to Coppell, our candidates and volunteer walkers knocked on thousands of doors. All the while, they were also regularly walking in the South and making appearances at public events. Sarah did a great job keeping the candidates divided up and organized, so that we could make the most of the limited time we had between Labor Day and Election Night.

As an aside, I'd like to again reinforce how hard our candidates worked. These folks were dedicated to this campaign, and without them it wouldn't have come together. While the Republican judicial incumbents did little more than show up in parades and write a few checks for nasty attack mail, our folks walked weekly, helped in our phone banks and wore themselves out physically and fiscally in pursuit of victory. Don't let the Dallas Republican News or the right-wing rag the Observer put doubts in your mind about the quality of our incoming Democratic judges. This is a dedicated bunch. They'll be great judges. And it wasn't just our judicial candidates, either. Our county administrative candidates and DA candidate were out there walking blocks, too.

Apart from walking, the major focus of my North office was phone banking. Starting with lists of Democratic voters in 50 targeted precincts, we ended up pushing through almost 75 precincts in our first wave of calls. During the GOTV period, we hit our confirmed contacts again, as well as other combinations of voters, early voters who had not yet voted early, over 60 voters with a Democratic history, etc. This is where my college student and club volunteers really stepped up to the plate.  While I prepped universes and printed lists, I did very little of the calling myself. It was because so many other folks gave of their time and energy that we were able to reach out to as many voters as we did. Their efforts, combined with Jeff's mail and the candidate walks, visibly closed the Democratic performance gap in the North.

To the degree that all field programs are alike, the South's operations were similar to the North. Jane worked on the ground in the South alongside Ms. Dean and Shay. After the staff combined in the South office, Shay focused on turning out volunteers and working to gain exposure for our candidates in the South's African-American churches. The main operations in the South used paid canvassers and a phone bank to stir up interest in the heavily-Democratic SD 23. Candidates walked out of the South office, and on the Sundays leading up to the election Shay organized a series of extremely successful church visitations. I don't imagine that so many candidates have ever reached so many homes within these core Democratic precincts. Jane worked with Jeff to devise specific walk materials and push pieces for the Southern audience. While structurally different, both the South and the North worked on the same basic strategy that had informed the coordinated planning since January  finding every Democrat in Dallas and pushing them to go to the polls.

And while the field operations in North and South met voters at their doors or on the phone, several waves of direct mail began flowing into their mailboxes. Jeff Dalton produced several different mail pieces. They were all very good, and they were all very positive. Our campaign's mail touted our candidates' credentials, endorsements and personal histories. This was in stark contrast to the Republican mail, which was entirely negative, often brutally so. The Republicans tried to paint our candidates as unqualified and corrupt, while our mail highlighted our candidates' experience and trustworthiness. However, they appear to have sent their negative messages into their own base, so even in going negative, the Republican effort was clumsy -- it doesn't appear to have impacted swingable voters. In response to the negative Republican mail, Jeff worked with Darlene, Larry Duncan, Sunny Letot and others to organize a volley of in-kind response auto-dialed calls and targeted radio ads, while other media buys sought to encourage Democratic voting. Senator Royce West produced television ads, radio spots and auto-dialed get out the vote messages.

Going into the campaign, there were reasons for optimism. Dallas's demographics have been trending our way for some time. We had a broad slate of qualified candidates. We had an energized staff that was committed to winning. We had the support of Democratic organizations such as the Young Democrats and Stonewall, and the backing of organizations like TexVAC. We had a party leader who was committed to running a slate campaign. And we had some helpful wind at our backs (I consider George W. Bush to be my most productive campaign volunteer). But through our coordinated campaign, we took a good situation and made it extraordinary.

With 47 wins, there's a lot of credit to go around. It starts with the candidates themselves, who put their names on the ballot and their signatures on the checks that started the coordinated process. It falls heavily on Darlene Ewing and Steve Tillery, who didn't waiver in their intention to run a coordinated campaign in the base. And it goes to Jane Hamilton, the campaign director, Dorothy Dean and Shay Cathey, the South Dallas team, Jeff Dalton, the designer, Bill Howell, the list builder, Sarah Duncan, the wrangler, and, I suppose it's not too arrogant to say this, to me, the party's staff in the North. And  it goes to everyone else who got involved and got out our vote. When you win this big, you know it was a team effort, and I want to be sure to spread credit as far and as wide as possible.

There was no dispensable part of our 2006 coordinated campaign. We didn't win because of the North. Or the South. Or the mail. Or the calls. We won because of all of it. The coordinated campaign was the difference between a win and a sweep. Because we worked everywhere, mailed heavily and didn't stop until the last polling location had closed, Dallas County turned blue. If you remove any component of what was done, you would have, in my estimation, cost us races. For those of you keeping count of such things, the average Democratic countywide candidate in Dallas County took just shy of 52% of the vote this year. That's none too shabby.

Dallas didn't go blue by accident. It took the hard work of hundreds of people, dozens of candidates and many organizations to get the job done. The agenda set out by Darlene Ewing in May 2005 set the stage for the victory achieved in November 2006. Every step along the way was an essential one  hiring Steve Tillery, rebuilding the office, recruiting the candidates, getting them on board, working out a plan, hiring Jane Hamilton, filling out the campaign staff and pushing forward with a positive attitude even in the face of vicious Republican attacks. It's a model other counties can duplicate. It's a challenge for our state to emulate. Even when there were no Republicans in Texas, there were Republicans in Dallas. After last Tuesday, you don't see too many Republicans around here anymore.