Bleary-eyed.

That describes the look on the faces of many of our county chairs here in Georgetown this afternoon. We’ve been on a whirlwind tour of running county parties all day here, with little in terms of breaks. Why? Well, the job of being county chair is an incredibly taxing one, and throwing all of those duties into a one-weekend training is a challenging task.

Billy Compton and Mark Ferrandino are now delivering a presentation on campaign finance and reporting. Billy’s up right now talking about state campaign finance law; Mark will then discuss Federal campaign finance law.

But the day has been incredibly busy, and the many folks that I’ve spoken with have indicated that they’ve found this session helpful, even though it is exhausting. Since I last reported this morning, we’ve discussed the delegate seleciton plan, had some information sharing among county chairs about the key points to remember in terms of running the party, and a lengthy discussion of fundraising at the county party level.

After lunch, we heard a very interesting presentation from the CDP’s Technology Director, Mike Weissman, about upcoming changes to VAN (our State Party online voter file application) and efforts to improve technology at the county party levels. Because DemNotes is a public site, I don’t want to go into all of the details about the fantastic tools that we’re going to have for the 2008 elections in VAN, but rest assured that your county parties and campaigns using VAN are going to be able to really drill down and target — and contact — voters at every level of Colorado politics. VAN was already sophisticated, but it is really entering the next stage of sophistication over the next few months.

We then had a presentation from Democracy for Colorado about organizing precincts using the “ThinkPrecinct” program. If you haven’t had a chance to go through that training, talk to your county chair about setting up a local or regional ThinkPrecinct training program — it will really help you get your precincts and local party organized.

After the ThinkPrecinct presentation, we had a great discussion with Jen Walmer, who is the Arapahoe County Chair, and Don Weigel, who runs the House Majority Project, about how to use precinct vote history data and other technical data to help target in counties. We also had a discussion about how the House Majority Project works with county chairs and campaigns to help determine which races are going to get the most support through “targeting”. I REALLY don’t want to get into any of the specifics of what Don had to say about specific races, but I’ll just say I’m so very happy with the state of things right now in terms of where we are in the State House.

Tonight, we’re going to have round-table discussions about best practices in each county, followed by dinner here at the ranch. I’ll write more tomorrow as we get into the training by the DNC.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 5:02 pm and is filed under CDP, Counties. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.