The Convention Needs Interns … And Preparing for Caucuses
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 12:06 PM by Dan Slater(Cross-Posted to DemNotes at www.DemNotes.com)
Last night, I was in Denver again for a meeting of the Denver 2008 Host Committee’s Volunteer Committee (that’s a long name!). I am one of the co-chairs of that committee, along with Landri Taylor and Cec Ortiz, who are both wonderful people with which to work. The Committee is continuing to work to ensure that we plan for every possible contingent to identify and utilize the 7,000 to 10,000 volunteers that will be needed to put together the most memorable Democratic Convention in the history of our Party.
If you haven’t yet signed up to volunteer, you can do so on the State Party’s website (www.coloradodems.org), or at the Denver 2008 website (www.denverconvention2008.com). If you have signed up, you should have received about four different e-mails from the Host Committee over the past few months providing short updates. If you have signed up, but haven’t received those e-mails, you may want to check your spam folder and junk e-mail settings to be certain they aren’t being mis-identified as spam. You also may want to try signing up again online.
In the next couple of months, you will be able to set your volunteer profile online, and that will help us identify where we can use you as a volunteer as things heat up closer to next summer. So, when you get the e-mail about your online profile, be sure to go online and get that done — hopefully, before the end of October.
Right now, though, the Host Committee is in need for more college interns. If you, or somebody you know, is interested in being an intern for the Host Committee / DNCC, please send an e-mail to the Host Committee with your resume or qualifications to info@denverconvention2008.com - be sure and put “Intern” in the subject line, so your e-mail doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of e-mails received by the Host Committee daily.
Also, the Host Committee is looking for volunteers who can donate a full day or more a week on a regular basis to helping out at the Host Committee offices. Send an e-mail to the address in the prior paragraph with the subject line “Full-Day Volunteer” with your availability.
Thanks again to the thousands of you who have already signed up to volunteer!
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Saturday, I was also in Denver to help out with the “Colorado Caucus Convention” put on by the Obama campaign in Colorado. Over 500 people attended, most of whom had never been involved in politics before.
I promised that DemNotes was not going to become an Obama-centered experience, so I want to focus on how training folks with one campaign has got a lot of people thinking about the February 5 caucuses and how preparation for those meetings is so critical, all across this state.
Many of you who read DemNotes are county party officers. For you, it is certainly not too early to start thinking about February 5. It’s easy to pass it off as being too far away because it is in 2008, but it really is right around the corner. In fact, the deadline to register as a Democrat to participate in the caucuses is only December 5. It is important to start thinking about where you want to hold precinct caucuses in your county — and it is also important to remember that February 5 promises to be very different than prior caucus nights.
Presidential campaigns all across the board are already planning on how to turn out their supporters to caucus night on February 5. It is not unreasonable to think about how your county will handle a flood of possibly three or four times (or more!) the normal caucus attendance on caucus night. Where you’ve put six or seven precincts in a gymnasium or school cafeteria, you may only be able to put two or three. This requires a lot of planning. How do you as a county party also encourage attendance? How do you bring out new voters? Consider putting caucuses on college campuses or closer to the neighborhoods of each precinct. Every person that turns out to caucus is exponentially more likely to be your party volunteer in September and October, when we need them to win this state for our nominee and Mark Udall.
It’s also not too early to thing about scheduling caucus training for December and January (or earlier!). I’m more than happy to come to any county in this state to do a PowerPoint presentation about how to run a caucus smoothly (and, no, I won’t be pushing for any candidate in that presentation). The precinct caucus is the first step to organizing a successful precinct and county party, and the more county parties are prepared for caucus night, the easier things will be for you and your candidates in the fall of 2008.
Because 2008 is going to be a tough year, and precinct-by-precinct organization will win the day for us in November.
The Park County Democratic Party “adopted” a Colorado landmark this month — 14,148-foot Mt. Democrat in the northwest corner of the county.
All Welcome