Moving On

Now a full month after Election 2004, the future of the Democratic party remains unclear. Move left? Move right? Fight fight fight? The fighting is in effect. According to this story, Peter Beinert wrote a popular analysis of what went wrong in which he bashes groups like MoveOn.org, but MoveOn's not backing down. It sent a letter to its members saying:

“We can't afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers. In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back.”

By “we” MoveOn meant the grassroots supporters who gave time and money to help defeat Bush. And that's the most startling and meaningful thing to come out of this so far, as far as I'm concerned—the size of that grassroots base. Get this:

Financially, the DNC has not suffered terribly under this new regime -- it raised $309 million this year, compared with the Republicans' $385 million. As Arianna Huffington has pointed out, however, the DNC raised its money from a much wider pool this year. In 2000, its donor base was 400,000, while in 2004, 2.7 million people gave to the party.

2.7 million donors, up from 400,000! That's incredible. Maybe the DNC should organize a donor poll and ask all those 2.7 million donors to vote on the direction of the party. At least then it couldn't be accused of ignoring its members. How many donors gave to the RNC? According to the FEC, it looks like the Bush campaign had 210,109 individual donors; however, the number may not be directly comparable to the DNC's 400,000 because many more people may have donated to the RNC generally. The directly comparable number for just the Kerry campaign (not including donations to the DNC as a whole) is 219,493. Pretty similar. Meanwhile, another volunteer inside the Kerry campaign says the campaign itself was utterly incompetent, badly organized and badly run. I don't have much commentary to make on this; I'm just noting it for the record.

Posted December 18, 2004 08:01 AM | election 2004