Six-PAC

Swing State Project on Importance of State Legislatures

Check out this tremendous post at the Swing State Project (cross-posted here at Daily Kos) about the state of the state houses.  DavidNYC picks up on the DLCC's post-election press release discussing the Democratic successes of 2005, and he distills out these key points:

• Dems gained 46 legislative seats nationwide in 2004, moving 10 legislatures into Democratic control, while only four became GOP-held.

• Dems gained one seat (or possibly two) in NJ and one seat in VA this year.

• As a result, Dems now have eight more legislative seats nationwide than the Republicans (3,661 vs. 3,653). Not an especially meaningful measure of legislative strength, but at least it's an indicator that Dems haven't fallen behind on the state level, even if they have on Capitol Hill.

• Don't dismiss the importance of state legislatures - they are our political farm system: 57% of congressmen and 44% of governors once served as state legislators.

• This is the big one: Twenty of the 36 states in which state legislatures control redistricting are within just four seats of switching party control. These 20 states represent 195 congressional districts.

And as we've discussed before right here, the state legislatures collectively pass 75 pieces of legislation for every 1 that Congress passes -- so state representatives and state senators have a pronounced impact on our laws and our lives.

Deeds Update

By November 10th, with 100% of precincts reporting, the final tally on the first count showed McDonnell winning by 904 votes out of 1,941,651 cast. That's a difference of .05% -- not five percent, but one-twentieth of one percent. That's how close we are to turning this whole thing around in even more dramatic fashion next year, building on 2005's major gains and the impressive Democratic showing with a 2006 that could -- could -- be something special. Every vote counts, and every dollar counts.

Deeds Not Done

Creigh Deeds keeps closing the gap.  The Richmond Times-Dispatch had him down by fewer than 6,000 votes in a story posted earlier this morning.  With absentee ballots still in play, the latest hot-off-the-presses figures (but still unofficial figures of course, pending state board of elections certification and an almost certain recount) looked like this as of 11:52 a.m. on November 9th:

Precincts Reporting: 2423 of 2426 (99.88%)

Candidates	Party	Vote Totals	Percentage
R F McDonnell	Republican	968,873	50.01%
R C Deeds	Democratic	966,897	49.91%

That's 1,976 votes folks, or as the SBE tells you, 0.1%.

WaPo on NoVa

Here is one of many Washington Post stories discussing Democratic successes in Northern Virginia House of Delegates races.  The story leads with news of the convincing wins for Bulova, Marsden, and Caputo, and also highlights Hilda Barg's near miss in upsetting incumbent Jeff Frederick.

Ahead of the PAC

A few months ago, Six-PAC said we'd do two things:

1. Explain that state races are important to every single one of us. It's about the bench team, about changing the playing field for Congress, about policy waves, about momentum. (The longer explanation is here). And we're going to keep shouting about it till we're blue in the face -- or at least until more states take on that same bluish tinge.

2. Explain which state races are the closest and most critical -- so we can focus resources where a little support does the most good. We chose six candidates, then swapped in another two as it came down to the wire.

So did we get it right?

You bet we did.

We have new Democratic governors in New Jersey and Virginia. Our small (but growing) band of nascent state political junkies didn't have much to do with these big-ticket races, true. But we've proven that the Six-PAC model works. Now we need you to help us spread the word.

We gave you eight races to watch. From the returns thus far (some ballots are still trickling in), we know:

* The Democratic candidates we supported won in at least four of the races we endorsed: new House of Delagates members David Bulova, Dave Marsden, and Chuck Caputo were victorious in Virginia, as was new Assemblyman Nelson Albano in New Jersey.

By the way, Caputo's win comes at the expense of Chris Craddock, the right-wing extremist we profiled on Halloween. Craddock went down in convincing defeat. But even this relative rout was less than a 3,000 vote margin because statehouse districts tend to be small. These races are close.

So, "four out of eight?" you say. "That's not so hot." Well with all due respect, it is pretty hot. We picked eight of the closest races we could find in Virginia and New Jersey, and batting .500 in the most hotly contested races isn't half bad.

* All of our races were unbelievably close, with two of the apparent losses potentially headed for recounts due to skin-of-their-teeth GOP edges after the first count. The numbers are still in flux, but our top-billed race was perhaps the closest of them all: Creigh Deeds, running for Attorney General of Virginia, is less than 0.5% short with almost 2 million votes cast. Only a few thousand votes, at most, separated the candidates for this imprtant statewide office.

We were also especially gratified to see Eric Ferguson running so well in Southwestern Virginia, which has been Republican territory for too long now. Eric put together a brilliant race in the 9th district, but came up just a bit short against an entrenched incumbent.

In the end, we probably weren't big enough to really swing the pendulum on most of these races -- either the Dem victories or the losses. This was in essence our test run before 2006, to see if we could pick the right races and get the word out. We did our job with the picks. Now we need your help with that next step.

Which is why this is not a request for money. (Of course, if you really, really wanted to give...)

Instead, we need help gearing up for 2006. Picking the right races, setting up infrastructure in a whole bunch of new states, getting out the word. We were focusing on a few cities until now, but we're ready -- and rarin' -- to grow.

So if you think that it's a good idea to start building for the future right now, spread the word. Tell your friends and family, neighbors and colleagues. Let them know we're out there, and tell them to sign up at www.06pac.org if they're interested.

And thanks for all of your help so far.

The Six-PAC team

Building Towards Accountability

Six-PAC's national launch and 2005 endorsements announcement party last Saturday in DC was a hit.

Tonight, it's NYC, as we hit the big city with a party at West in the West Village.  Go here for details, then go West to be a part of the first-ever Six-PAC event held on the shores of the Hudson River.

(And don't forget -- Six-PAC goes bi-coastal next Thursday, 9/22, with the San Francisco launch.  Tell your neighbors, tell your friends, tell your kinfolk and your casual acquaintances.)

There's been an interesting discussion the last few days at TAPPED, the blog of The American Prospect, about political accountability.  It all started with Jonathan Chait's piece in the LA Times, arguing that Bush and co. keep chugging right along -- despite all of their incompetence in Iraq, with the budget, and after Katrina -- because they face no electoral consequences for their many missteps and misdeeds.

As the TAPPED post notes, Chait also says that it's also exceedingly hard to hold the majority party in Congress accountable for anything:

ONE REMEDY ought to be the prospect that voters could throw congressional Republicans out of power.  Yet that is extraordinarily difficult to do. Republican states, which tend to be more sparsely populated, are disproportionately represented in the Senate.  Bush won less than 52% of the vote in 2004, yet 62% of senators represent states that backed him.

The House is even tougher to flip.  Not only did 59% of the districts vote for Bush in 2004, the seats are so gerrymandered that less than a tenth are even vaguely competitive.  Political scientist Michael P. McDonald estimated that the Democrats would need about 57% of the total House vote to win control of the chamber.

So what are Democrats to do -- apart from going ahead and winning 57% of the vote in 2006?  Well, there are no quick fixes, but one thing that we must do is take back the state legislatures that re-draw Congressional District lines after the census comes out every ten years (or, in the case of Texas, that re-draw district lines whenever Tom DeLay damn well pleases).

Six-PAC is focused on helping candidates for state and local offices, concentrating on the people running for these crucial but often over-looked jobs.  The numbers show that all of the various state legislatures pass 75 pieces of legislation for every 1 that Congress passes, so state reps and state senators have a tremendous direct impact on our laws and our lives.

Just as important in the big picture is redistricting.  I'd never advocate for gerrymandering or incumbent protection plans, and Republicans love the "I know you are, but what am I?" defense when it comes to the gerrymandering charge.  Whatever the sins of the past may be, however, the right-wing faction of the Republican Party that runs the White House, the House of Representatives, and too many state houses has shown a great willingness to dilute Democratic votes and voting rights in general in an all-out push to entrench themselves.

One of the best ways to fight back is to take back state legislatures in places like, oh, I don't know, Virginia, and to hold onto them through 2011 (when the next round of redistricting starts).

America needs better leaders. That's where you come in.

If you're here and reading this now, odds are that you've already heard about Six-PAC's national launch. But in case you haven't, did I mention that Six-PAC is having a National Launch?!

Starting tonight, we begin our efforts in earnest and leave the boundaries of the beltway behind for the first time. Oh, we'll still have a party in DC too; that's too much fun to pass up. But we'll also be in New York City this Wednesday the 14th, and in San Francisco on Thursday the 22nd. More details, you say? Go here for all of the pertinent info.

Even more exciting is that we finally have some concrete plans for your energy and your hard earned dollars. We've announced the first ever Six-PAC Six (special 2005 version) -- a group of candidates running in the November 2005 elections in Virginia and New Jersey. This is a special group of Democrats -- proven leaders running tough races in close districts, and doing it in states that Democrats need to keep blue and turn blue in 2006, 2008, and beyond.

It's hard to focus on politics at a time like this, of course. Did I say hard? Maybe even wrong to focus on politics. Hurricane Katrina was and is a disaster of unimaginable proportions. It has already affected the lives of millions of people in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama, in the most tragic and heartbreaking ways. It likely will continue to alter the life of the United States and its people for decades to come.

While the administration here talks out of both sides of its mouth on the topic ("Let's not politicize the disaster . . . unless we're blaming the local government in Louisiana, of course!"), this really is no time to lose sight of the bigger picture. So what's the point of Six-PAC? Why is something like this relevant in these momentous times?

Two main reasons, as far as I'm concerned:

1.) By banding together with each other, we can share our strength and work to make things a little bit better for the survivors of this storm. Six-PAC has decided, for tonight's national launch here in DC, to donate towards Katrina relief half of every dollar you contribute over the minimum $20.06 we're asking for at the door.

2.) And while I'm not suggesting we "politicize" human suffering either, there is such a thing in democracies as holding government accountable for its failures. No one at any level of government deserves all of the blame for the catastrophe or for the woefully inadequate response in the first few days after the flood. If that inadequate response teaches us anything, however, it should be that "compassionate conservatism" is a failure. It has proved to be neither "conservative," as the Republican Party spends us into the biggest deficits in history; nor "compassionate," in a time when our elected officials would rather point the finger at the storm's victims than at themselves.

Let's keep working together to change the situation. Let's elect leaders who respect and treasure their constituents and share their values, not empty shells who simply shrug as they abdicate the government's responsibility to protect its citizens.

And let's get started.

We're back

Yes, we're back -- "we" meaning your friendly neighborhood Six-PAC bloggers and (only slightly more importantly) -- "we" meaning Democrats.

In case you weren't obsessively checking the news from the southwestern corner of Ohio all day yesterday, Democratic candidate for Congress Paul Hackett gave Republican Jean Schmidt a big scare, losing the Ohio 2nd District special election by just 4 points.

So what, you ask? Hackett, an Iraq war veteran who openly criticized that military campaign during his congressional campaign, lost 52-48.

While we aren't in the business of celebrating losses here, Hackett's accomplishment was an amazing one. He went down swinging in a district that has been about as solid as they come for the GOP in recent memory. This was the closest election in the district since 1974, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. Recently, it hasn't even been close, with Republicans winning the seat with 44% margins and up.

At Six-PAC, we're focusing on state and local races, where the time and effort of an eager but newly formed PAC are more likely to make a critical difference. Still, Hackett's heroic effort in what has traditionally been (to put it mildly) a staunch Republican district proves that Democrats can run strong races in virtually any part of the Country.

We'll be here to help turn near misses like this into victories time and time again -- later this Fall in Virginia and New Jersey, in 2006, and beyond.

Six -- It's the New Four

In the wake of 2004, can Democrats really appeal to Joe Sixpack? We think that they can, and in fact that they already do. And we know a thing or two about Six.

A six-pack is a convenient way to hold your liquor. (And we know a thing or two about holding your liquor too.)

But a Six-PAC (because who needs that extra "k" anyway?) is a progressive political action committee working to win the most hotly contested elections at the state and federal level. We'll shower attention on those close and critical races, reeling in victory after victory to put the lie to the supposed "conservative revolution" that's based on nothing more than a good Republican PR machine and a handful of votes that Democrats can and will get in 2005, 2006, and beyond.

Watch this space for more details, and come check us out over at www.06pac.org.

[Note: This was our first post on our diary over at Daily Kos.]