While today's primaries may be a watershed moment for either campaign, propelling them to a final victory in March or April, it looks increasingly likely that this campaign could continue until the Convention. It is also almost certain that Superdelegates, and/or Florida/Michigan, will play a decisive role in who the nominee is going to be. As Chris Bowers points out at Openleft (http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3633), there may be a serious crisis of candidate legitimacy coming out of Denver. If Obama is the nominee only because Florida/Michigan delegates weren't seated, or if Clinton is the nominee only due to Superdelegates, the primary will be resolved on a totally undemocratic note, and the eventual nominee would have a difficult time pulling the party back together, and voters nation-wide will have been exposed to a constant stream of Democratic ugliness televised nightly. But even if the party unifies around a nominee at the convention, in terms of campaigning, we will be at a critical disadvantage, one we need to circumvent.
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While Labor Day is the generally acknowledged start of the campaign season, anyone who's ever worked in a campaign will tell you that the summer months are crucial. This is when you start planting the themes of your campaign in the back of voter's minds, before the fall media blitz and the resulting campaign exhaustion. This, also, is when field campaigns are critical. The weather is warm, so people are more likely to be outside, and the days are longer, so you can be at the doors for more hours. Schools are out, and anyone in a field office will tell you that high school and college interns can be a huge asset backbone of field operations. Finally, summer field programs allow you to collect issue positions, so that as soon as fall hits, you can send targeted direct mail pieces.
Now, I do not know if Clinton or Obama plan on contesting Virginia in the general election. But having observed the direction that Virginia has been moving in since 2001, I would say they would be intensely stupid not to. And if the nominee isn't selected until the convention, the Democrat won't be able to build the foundation of his or her campaign during the summer, and will face a much steeper fall campaign than they should. As Democrats who all desperately want one of our own to replace Bush in the White House, we have a responsibility to ensure that the eventual nominee runs as strongly in Virginia as possible, even as we bicker over who that nominee should be. And as I see it, there are basically two approaches we can take.
I was in school at Vassar College in NY during the 2006 election, and Vassar was represented by Sue Kelly, a moderate GOP Congresswoman. There was a growing sense among the Democrats in the 19th district, however, that she was vulnerable, and a hotly contested primary broke out on who should challenge her. The problem was that this was in New York, and the primary wasn't until September 13th. In order to give the eventual nominee a fighting chance against Sue Kelly, local Democrats built an organization called Take 19, which assembled volunteer lists, collected voter data, and basically did everything a field organization does, so that on September 14th, John Hall would have a field organization outside of his primary partisans, ready to get him elected. While this may not have been a decisive factor, John Hall did end up defeating Sue Kelly, despite entering the primary as a serious underdog. I could envision a similar plan in Virginia in 2008 (Virginians for a Democratic President, or some such).
Fortunately for us Democrats, though, we have a better option, and his name is Mark Warner. We all know that Warner is going to win in 2008, and win big. It's not clear to me how larger his coattails will be, if they are at all (I suspect that many voters will vote for Warner, but also for Goode and McCain, in the 5th district). However, he can help out the presidential candidate in another way. Knowing how likely his victory will be, Warner may be inclined to campaign conservatively - including running a limited field operation. This would be disastrous, and we should do everything to discourage this. A strong field operation across Virginia would be able to cultivate the volunteers, compile the voter issue preferences, and get the party IDs that the presidential candidate will need starting in the fall. I don't know election law that well, and don't know how coordinated, if at all, a senate and a presidential field campaign can be, but worst case scenario, the presidential campaign should be able to buy the field information from Warner's campaign. Best case scenario, the presidential candidate is just added on top of the field scripts, and there is a fully coordinated campaign. In my mind, an operation of this sort is really the only way a Democratic candidate could win Virginia in the event of a brokered convention.