(550 people came to our forum (with 100+ turned away), so I figure people would be interested to know how our members voted on endorsement. - promoted by Jim in Chicago)
NDFA held its regular monthly meeting last night (normally 1st Thursdays of the month) and discussed the 5th Congressional Special Election, and the thorny topic of whether we would endorse a candidate. No endorsement was made, as there was no consensus among our voting members on who was the best candidate in this race. In order for NDFA to endorse, we need 75% of voting members to vote to endorse a candidate.
First, what does an NDFA endorsement mean? More than the candidate getting to tout us as endorsers, it means we organize volunteers to go work on the campaign, and generally those who can donate money do so. But we're all about volunteer work, and putting time in where your mouth is -- so its those volunteer hours that's really important to the campaign's we endorse/adopt (we have two tiers in a normal election cycle, where there are multiple races that we're interested in ... but that's a topic for another day). Its because we're committing to organizing volunteers, and because we need the volunteers to turn out to be effective in our work for the campaign, that we have such a high threshold for endorsement: our members have to want to work for a candidate, and with their vote implicitly commit themselves to volunteer hours for that candidate. There's no tally, we don't check up, but if we endorse, we expect a good number of our members to show up to do the good work of the campaign. |
| Second, who are "voting members?" Anyone can be a voting member: the criteria is that you attend three meetings and do three campaign activities for an endorsed/adopted candidate within the last 12 months. At this point, we have somewhere around 48 people who qualify to vote. We do this because we think the people who actually do the work (i.e., volunteer for campaigns) should get to decide who they want to work for ....
We try to operate by consensus. We want our members to be passionate about the candidates we agree to work for: and that means listening to our members and talking and arguing our way through the process of endorsing.
What happened last night? Well, five candidates were nominated by voting members: Jan Donatelli, Sara Feigenholtz, John Fritchey, Tom Geoghegan, and Mike Quigley. Each candidate had a voting member speak passionately about why they were great candidates, be great in the Congress, have done great things, and why we should support him/her. On the first round of voting, the following were the results:
Donatelli: 7 Yes, 23 No, 8 Abstain
Feigenholtz: 10 Yes, 22 No, 5 Abstain
Fritchey: 1 Yes, 25 No, 11 Abstain
Geoghegan: 19 Yes 12 No 6 Abstain
Quigley: 14 Yes, 11 No, 12 Abstain
We then had more discussion, and a second round of voting was agreed to, with Mike Quigley and Tom Geoghegan having made the cut into round two. Again, we had passionate arguments for each candidate, and equally passionate arguments about why NDFA needed to endorse in this race. The results of the second round were:
Geoghegan: 19 Yes, 13 No, 5 Abstain (59% -- did not meet 75% threshold)
Quigley: 18 Yes, 13 No, 5 Abstain (58% - did not meet 75% threshold)
So, even though our members quite like both Mike Quigley and Tom Geoghegan -- and we heard arguments about viability for both, which candidate has better ideas, which has a proven record of accomplishment -- we couldn't come to agreement to endorse. People who don't think Mike is the right guy -- or running the right campaign -- really don't want to work for him. People who feel like Geoghegan is less than inspiring in person, who feel he can't win because he doesn't have name recognition or troops in the district ... really felt strongly.
So, in the end, we like Mike, and we like Tom, and there will probably be members who work on all five campaigns that were nominated last night.
And anyone who gets to vote in this race for real has a lot of good candidates to choose from, and a difficult decision to make. Who knows? My personal opinion is that it will be close, and that voters who go to the polls won't make up their minds until the last minute. |
