Besides being unimpressed listening to Suzie Jones Pranger tell us about her resume for 20 minutes at last Friday’s Democratic Forum (her resume is impressive, her speaking and presentation skills are not) She was taken off guard when she was asked very simple questions. I’ll defend her on one front, she had only been on the job for 5 days and probably should not have been thrown into a presentation like this so soon, and the party chair, Ann Tornberg did eventually bail her out.
I wanted to ask Suzie what she would do to get more registered Democrats. James Abourezk beat me to the punch. After himming and hawing for a moment, and pausing, Jim asked again. Suzie said she was going to “pull old lists and start contacting those people” then rambled about Gregory County or something. I left early.
Like I said before, in all fairness, she has only been on the job for 5 days, but she better start educating herself real quick on the reality of party building, because if the Dems continue to lose members at the rate they have been, there may not be a party in SD in a few years.
Sadly, if huether is an example of a Democrat in this state, she has her work cut out for her drawing people to the party.
Throw her into the fire. She’ll learn from hard hits and come out a winner. It’s obvious Huether will be the Democrat for governor. She must lose this one and perhaps also president endorsement. Thankfully, I’m indy. I’ll be leaning republican for awhile. I think Lorrie Gill (mayor of Pierre) would be a good governor. For president I’d like Carson/Fiorini VP. No way Hillary. Time for her and Huether to disappear into Palin type trivia questions.
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We can talk all we want about registering voters, but the reality is that most new voters are trending Independent.
The SDDP needs to put its priority into candidate recruitment for statewide races. Even if it is a facade at first, we need to give the appearance of a “full service” political party.
Regardless of the voters registration or the registration of potential new voters we have to give them a reason for wanting to be a Democrat or at least a reason for voting for Democrats; which should automatically cause the Democratic party label to be more acceptable to new voter registrants in turn.
In other words, we should be more interested in running someone against Thune than worrying if the voter registration booth is properly manned, at say, the Turner County fair this summer.
You need to have the merchandise if you want the consumer to show-up!
Oh, I agree Winston, but if you are running a state political party you need a multi-level tiered plan.
She has a better plan than Zack did. His plan was there are enough registered Democrats they just need to focus on turning them out. How did that work…
Lewis, that all sounds great if you have the manpower and money, but we need statewide candidates first, because we lack the manpower and money.
A “multi-level tiered plan” is a piece of paper if we do not have manpower and money, which we do not have. For now, we need to give the image of what we can be and that is best done through political personalities or candidates.
Candidates have charisma not political parties themselves.
The SDDP needs to develop a political kit where they help candidates (not discourage potential primaries) , practically holding their hands through the petition process, any necessary filings with the SOS office, positioning statements, and hopefully some fundraising, which should also make it possible for constitutional candidates to come on board months before the current last minute state convention nominations.
And, the SDDP must rid itself also of what I have dubbed the “Starvation Theory,” where some think you can attract voters to a given Democratic candidate just because they were denied a choice in the race listed above the competitive race. This strategy is the most naive, self-serving, and destructive approach that I have ever seen in South Dakota politics and it unfortunately played out in 2010, and to no avail I might add.
In the past, there was always the favorite Democratic candidate (probably the only one sure to win or a good chance of winning) in a given election year, but at least we still ran other candidates for almost all of the other statewide races, but now we have muted ourselves to this scorched earth practice of trying to starve the voter or tricking the voter into voting Democratic. It is so sad…Why would anyone want to register to be a Democrat in South Dakota right now? Who are our leaders or our candidates?
That said, we must run someone against Thune in 2016!!!!
Corinna!
Too many crazies have taken over the party with desperate agenda’s that claim to be the silver bullet but has divided the party and some just won’t go back.
I would agree that the party is divided, and characters like MMM don’t help.