Training in Salida … And Fixin’ To Head to San Francisco!
(Cross-Posted to DemNotes at www.DemNotes.com)
Sunday night, I drove over to Salida to attend the last in a multi-leg training tour of Southwest and South-Central Colorado. Party leaders from Chaffee, Saguache, and Fremont Counties were treated to precinct training (courtesy of Democracy for Colorado’s “Think Precinct” folks) and training on VAN, the Colorado Democratic Party’s online voter database.
Both trainings were great introductions to their topics — the Think Precinct training was a wonderful motivator to get out in your neighborhood and organize friends and neighbors; the VAN training was a good beginning course in some of the many features in VAN. It was long (boy, was it long!), but it was well worth it. The Salida trip capped off a weekend of training that included such exotic (and rarely-visited-by-Democratic-trainers) locales as Pagosa Springs and Creede.
Tomorrow, we pack up and head out to San Francisco. There, we’ll participate in the DNC’s Western Regional Caucus annual meeting. The last time we met like this was in 2005, when we went to Helena, Montana. That was a great opportunity to focus on issues and policies important to the West, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they have for us this time.
Pat, Sherry, and I are off on the same plane tomorrow afternoon (and my family is joining me — it’s San Francisco, for Pete’s sake!). Once there, we expect to hear presentations on detailed polling data, organizing techniques, and policy discussions. As always, I’ll be sure to post plenty of updates while we’re out there. Since this is for all of the DNC Members in the West, I’m sure we’ll see our other DNC Members, such as J.W., Mannie, Debbie, Maria, and Ramona, but I just don’t have the details on when they’re headed out there.