Posts tagged ‘DCCC’

DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen on Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead

by , posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 6:00 am

In Red to Blue: Congressman Chris Van Hollen and Grassroots Politics, author Sanford Gottlieb tells the story of Chris Van Hollen’s successful grassroots campaign for Congress in 2002, and the lessons Van Hollen, and others, took away from that campaign in subsequent election cycles.

Van Hollen’s district

is MD-08, located in Washington DC’s Maryland suburbs. In the primary he beat frontrunner Mark Shriver, a Kennedy cousin with a lot of money to spend and a consultant by the name of David Axelrod on his team. He then went on to unseat longtime incumbent Connie Morella in the general election that fall. Morella was a well-liked, liberal Republican who had been long thought to be unbeatable, having enjoyed more than a little bit of support from local Democrats through the years on election day. And Van Hollen pulled this off in a Republican year. This was the first congressional election to be held after 9/11. The Republicans won back control of the Senate in 2002 and added to their majority in the House. Only two Democrats unseated incumbent Republicans that year. Chris Van Hollen was one of them.

Van Hollen has brought this experience to bear in his subsequent work at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). And he was not the only one to go to school on that 2002 campaign. As Gottlieb puts it:

David Axelrod told Van Hollen in 2008 that he had learned some lessons from being on the other side of the 2002 primary. It was a really good grassroots campaign, Axelrod said, with the passion on Van Hollen’s side. Van Hollen carried the lessons learned in 2002 into the successful effort to build a House Democratic majority in 2006. Axelrod and David Plouffe may have applied those lessons in the 2008 50-state race for the White House. (Gottlieb, Red to Blue, 32)

Last week Van Hollen appeared with Gottlieb at a book event in Washington, DC and talked about his attempt to apply those lessons learned to his work with the DCCC. Van Hollen’s introductory remarks, plus the question and answer session that followed, are presented below.

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IL-14: Podunk, IL vs. the New Chicago Machine

by , posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 5:05 pm

Originally posted at Fireside 14, Prairie State Blue, MyDD, Open Left and Daily Kos.

Not long ago, I ran across this comment from a dedicated Foster volunteer and supporter:  

This will be unpopular… (0.00 / 0) 
…but you know I’m going to say it anyway! 
I am much more interested in what goes on in Northern IL than I am in what happens downstate. With work, I get more than my fill of politics in Springfield and the rest of the cornfields in IL. 
I just really don’t care what is happening in politics in Podunk, IL unless it’s really sexy and scandalous. Otherwise, I am bored.  (emphasis added)

by: bridgetdooley @ Thu Dec 06, 2007 at 22:18:39 PM CST

As anyone who lives in Illinois knows, anything not in the City or collar counties is routinely considered “downstate” (aka “Podunk” to Ms. Dooley) even if it’s north of Chicago.  The distinction here, if you are local, is that Kane and (parts of) Kendall, being collar counties, are typically considered part of the greater Chicagoland region, while everything west of the urbanized strip on the far east of IL-14 really qualifies as “downstate.”  

Which would seem to imply Ms. Dooley’s term “Podunk, IL” represents the vast majority of the geographic area of IL-14, containing somewhat more than half of the voters in the district.  (Of course, if you are a Chicago political insider, anything not in, oh, Chicago, pretty much qualifies as “Podunk.”  Much in the way that, to a DC political insider, anything not in New York, Chicago, LA, or DC pretty much qualifies as “Podunk” but we’ll get to that later.)  But maybe she really meant further downstate.

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