Tea Party working to take over GOP from ground up starting as precinct leaders

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/us/politics/15party.html

Across the country, they are signing up to be Republican precinct leaders, a position so low-level that it often remains vacant, but which comes with the ability to vote for the party executives who endorse candidates, approve platforms and decide where the party spends money.

A new group called the National Precinct Alliance http://www.nationalprecinctalliance.org/ says it has a coordinator in nearly every state to recruit Tea Party activists to fill the positions and has already swelled the number of like-minded members in Republican Party committees in Arizona and Nevada. Its mantra is this: take the precinct, take the state, take the party — and force it to nominate conservatives rather than people they see as liberals in Republican clothing.

snip

Ms. Stefano, a stay-at-home mother and former television reporter, will have to get 10 signatures and put her name on the ballot to run. But the National Precinct Alliance estimates that about 60 percent of the roughly 150,000 local Republican committee seats are vacant and can be filled by essentially showing up.

“Even if you’ve got a slight majority, you just need maybe 26 states, then you can have your say in how the party goes,” said Philip Glass, a former commercial mortgage banker in Cincinnati who is the national director of the precinct alliance.

The precinct strategy, like the Tea Party movement itself, has spread via the Internet, on sites like Resistnet.com http://www.resistnet.com/ . A National Tea Party Convention http://www.nationalteapartyconvention.com/home.aspx in Nashville next month will feature seminars on how to take over starting at the precinct level.

Advocates hold up the example of Las Vegas, where a group of about 30 people who had become friendly at Tea Party events last spring met to discuss how they could turn their crowds into political influence. One mentioned that there were about 500 open precinct committee positions in the local Republican Party.

They recruited other activists and flooded the committee — the Republican Party says it now has 780 committee people, up from about 300. In July, they approved a new executive committee, and Tony Warren, one of the organizers and a new precinct committeeman himself, said six out of seven executives are “constitutional conservatives,” in keeping with Tea Party ideology.

[Union Yes]

1. K&R. Thanks for the heads up. I'm making a batch of popcorn.

:popcorn:

[WonderGrunion]

2. I wish progressive activists would pay attention to this

Protesting in the streets won't get candidates you like on the ballot. Voting in November won't get a candidate you like on the ballot. Phone banking and canvasing won't get a candidate you like on the ballot. Taking over the party at the precinct level and showing up each month to local party meetings will get your candidate's name on the ballot.

[drm604]

3. This is exactly right. I wish I could rec your post.

This is what I tell progressives that advocate supporting third parties but, for some reason, they won't take the idea seriously.

[struggle4progress]

5. It might depend on the state. Precinct-level organization of the Dems doesn't always

translate to choice of candidates. If you want better candidates, you may have to find folk you'd like to see in high office ten or fifteen years from now, and then push them up through lower level offices so they can develop the needed contacts and experience

[MineralMan]

6. I wrote an OP some time ago about this and it's in my journal.

It's instructions on how to do this in the Democratic party, at least in caucus states:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/MineralMan/26

[struggle4progress]

4. The GOP is circling the drain. These wingnuts are going to drag the party far to the right.

It'll be pretty clear to most folk that Teabag candidates are wacko, and I expect the Teabaggers will mostly lose elections. But they won't lose every single election, and the potential impact on Congress is unclear to me

The essential issue here, to me, seems to be avoiding a national strategy of triangulation: we really want Dems who run as Dems (not as Repub-Lites) in most districts: otherwise, on the Progressive view, Congress might slide a bit downhill

The DLC gang will want to triangulate, so we'll have the familiar pressure within the Dems to move right. Since triangulation is generally a losing strategy for our party, we could lose from seats from that. There will also be the standard effort to get the more centrist Repubs to switch over to the Dem side of the aisle. The net result might be that we nominally pick up a few seats, but they are filled by former Repubs and Blue Dogs, while the Repub side of the aisle becomes even more hardline than it is today