Martin Frost Q&A

Byron @ BOR has an impressively thorough interview from DNC candidate Martin Frost. Gotta admit, he deserves props for taking it seriously and giving it a good once-over with detail.

Coupla quibbles, though ...
(what, you didn't see that coming?)

I strongly believe that the next Chair must pursue a 50-state party-building and campaign strategy ...

Fine and well ... but there's this followup from a previous TexasTuesday.com interview nugget that leads to this ...

BL: You are now advocating a 50-state strategy, yet in previous blog Interviews you said:

"We cannot afford to swing wildly at every pitch hoping for a homerun. We need to pick our pitches carefully, hit singles and doubles and run bases aggressively."

Did you change your mind? What is your strategy for finding and funding viable candidates in unfriendly territory? Do you believe Texans in general and Texas Democrats in particular would have been better served by a "254-county strategy" in 2004? Why or why not?

MF: This question gets to the nub of the problem with the DNC over the past several years. State leaders like me have had to design strategies to fit their resources. Because the DNC did not make significant investments in non-presidential states, Democrats in places like Texas were forced to fend for themselves with the limited resources they were able to raise on their own, and as a result had to limit their investments.

So, yes, Texas Democrats and Texans in general would have absolutely been better served by a ?254-county? strategy. And I don?t know of anyone in America who has spent more time, effort and personal political capital than I have on fights with the DNC for more resources for my state.

Of course, no matter how many times the DNC told us ?no,? I never gave up on Texas Democrats. Instead, I worked extraordinarily hard to personally raise national money for campaigns and state and local parties in Texas. But as one Congressman ? and even as the DCCC Chair -- I was never in position to fund an entire statewide operation in a place as large as Texas, where a statewide race costs tens and tens of millions of dollars.

Frankly, that is one of the reasons I want to be DNC Chair: So I can finally use the DNC to make the investments in state and local party-building for which I?ve been fighting. Again, my record at the DCCC is illustrative. While we never had the resources available to the DNC today, I adopted a strategy of expanding the playing field and challenging Republicans everywhere possible. We ran races in states that never came close to making the map used by the DNC and Presidential campaign (despite my best efforts to convince them to forgo their presidential-only targeting).

In closing on this point, I want to make sure I don?t mislead anyone. Even the DNC lacks infinite resources. And any honest strategist will tell you that the baseball analogy cited in your question ? picking your pitches carefully ? applies to every resource allocation decision you make. If you have fewer resources (as we did in Texas), then you can only afford to seriously invest in fewer races. If you have the DNC?s resources, then you can swing at more pitches ? but if you flail about wildly, you?ll probably just end up wasting a lot of money as you strike out. (For more on this point, see Answer 11 (below)).

But unlike everyone else in this race, I?ve had years of experience in strategically managing the resources of a large political party committee. So when I?m Chair, the DNC will make smart and significant investments in building strong party structures and in supporting campaigns at all levels ? especially with an eye toward down-ballot candidates whose short-term success determines the strength of our farm team and the long-term success of our Party. After years on the outside of the DNC looking in, I?m eager to get inside and start making these reforms.

Here, Martin tries to peddle this off on the DNC. Sorry, I'm not buying it. The DNC can offer many beneficial resources to campaigns across the board, but I'm not aware of many that have been lost save for a few shiny nickels, trinkets, and staffers from the DNC. If memory serves, the Texas 5 all had more or less suitable DNC help. But prior to that, where was there really a major race lost because we had to hoard our resouces in this money-poor state of Texas because the stingy ol DNC didn't come through for us?

When Frost talks of expanding the map and running races in places heretofore unconsidered winnable, I'm also curious how he rates the loss of Roemer's seat in 2000. Not that I fault Frost for the loss, but if he's selling his record as illustrative, what gives with Roemer's reasons for retirement and what eventually did fall short for us in that race?

But even still, Frost doesn't back off his baseball analogy. Here's the rub ... the last two most notable 50-state strategies were run by Mike Dukakis and Richard Nixon - both in losing campaigns. The problem is that if you view a 50-state strategy as a matter of pouring resources from the top down, you end up looking at the baseball analogy with it making perfectly clear sense. But if you view a 50-state strategy with guiding a grassroots organization to sustain itself while it builds, growing the party by connecting Dems to one another, giving them a candidate who gets out of the house, actively campaigning, even if on a shoestring ... and most importantly, campaigning with ideas that positively reach all 50 states ... then you see the baseball analogy as fatally flawed.

That's where I think Frost is most off track. He sees the job as a simple calculus of money and staff. And to a large extent, that's not entirely a wrong view. There will always be those dogfight elections that require oodles of both. But to complete the map and spread the blue, it takes another viewpoint to grow the party ... and I don't believe Martin Frost has that viewpoint. I could offer some pithy little quip like he's too old school, but well ... wait ... I will. Because it just seems to fit.

Byron has another worthwhile post on Martin's effect in Dallas County this past election. (sheesh, Byron, are you on the take? ... have you sipped the kool-aid? ... if so, what flavor is it?)

Being in Texas, it's not hard to identify the ripple patters of some of the races we had on hand. Both Richard Morrison and Martin Frost lost races that were steeply uphill, but both managed to positively impact downballot races. Everyone's favorite example of this, of course, is Lupe Valdez. But I'll single out Katy Hubener's near win as a feather in Frost's cap. Hubener's district, I believe, is all or nearly all enclosed in the 32nd CD. My primary rooting interest in Frost beating the spread was that he might put Katy over the top. And to his credit, his campaign nearly did. Sure, a lot of judges got elected, too. But until we start cutting into the lead the GOP has on lege seats, that'll be meaningless in due time.

Yet, even here ... I have to add a cautionary note. Dallas County has been trending Dem for a while. Granted, these things don't happen on their own. They take active campaigning to reach that point. And Frost ran one. Great for him.

The math Byron puts forth, I'm going to quibble with as well:

Valdez won by just over 17,000 votes, so Martin Frost?s GOTV operation can legitimately lay claim to providing over two-thirds of her victory margin.

See, when I was manning Sharpstown Mall, I did some numbers on where our people were going to be voting (hopefully). We registered about 250 people from Hubert Vo's Dist 149. Vo won by 33 votes. So our operation there can legitimately lay claim to providing Hubert Vo with more than enough votes to win (assuming that more than 33 of those 250 voted)?

Yeah, I could say that. But I'd have the everloving tar beat out of me from people that slaved away knocking on doors and were on the ground fulltime in the Vo campaign. Narrow wins have many authors ... narrow losses have many people looking for a hiding place.

The other math Byron points out indicates that Dallas County was on the edge of being a 50-50 county leading up to 2004 (I'd peg Kirk as an exception for winning the county much as I'd peg Ann Richards' 1990 win there as such). Valdez won a fill percent or so over 50-50. Great. It helps that she had plenty of material to highlight as having gone wrong in the Sheriff's department in a tight county with a growing Hispanic population. I'd argue that the last name had more to do with that extra bump than anything since Hispanics have been trending increasingly Republican for much of the past decade.

Of course, this is all just nitpicking. So be it. Frost doesn't deserve the crap being lobbed his way over the Sessions airport security ads. But I don't quite agree he deserves to have a Capital driveway named after him because a lesbian Hispanic Sheriff got elected. I'd just as soon point out his inane streaking and sign-stealing maneuvers as illustrative of how barren Frost is of issues and principle. Frost is very much in the mold of a special interest Democrat, and that's a mold we should have broken a long time ago. There will always be a few. We have Gene Green here in Houston. As a Congressman, there's a lot I like about him. But I don't quite see him as DNC material.

Yet, through it all, many a Texas Democrat see Frost and envision those big fat 6-figure checks rolling into Congressional races, or that extra staffer or two in a statewide race, and think everything will be just dandy.

That's not to say there isn't a very real frustration to being an ATM state. Just that I'm not certain Martin Frost has the right vision to fix that which ails us as a party nationally any more than he did in Texas (with or without the DNC's help).