Goal: Elect progressive champions

Leadership

Organization’s Objective

Progressives have traditionally left candidate recruitment to the Democratic Party. But throughout the 1990's, a central component of the Party's political strategy was to recruit candidates who could self-fund their campaigns or were thought to be able to draw financial support because of their more conservative fiscal and social positions. The Party encouraged candidates to abandon or avoid popular progressive issues in order to try to increase their appeal to swing voters. This has proven to be a failed strategy; Democrats consistently lost seats in each election. Worse, by trying to moderate their core views and values, Democrats have come to be perceived as weak and indecisive, with no bold ideas of their own.

Conservatives, first working outside the Republican Party and ultimately taking it over, have worked for more than 30 years to get where they are today – in control at all levels. They built powerful media and message enterprises to hone their ideas and make those ideas sound reasonable to mainstream Americans. They recruited “movement conservatives” to run for office, trained them to run effectively on their agenda and systematically fielded them in key state and local races that would nationalize their agenda, mobilize voters up and down the ticket, and put them in charge of redistricting.

In the late 1970’s, when Democrats controlled the majority of elected offices from State Legislatures to the Presidency, conservatives created GOPAC – their candidate and recruitment operation. It was resurgence on the right. The product of new leadership that was willing to look long term to win power. Despite having been out of power for decades, this new conservative Republican leadership knew they must marry their need for short term victories with a long term strategy for taking back power. It worked.