Friday, November 28, 2008

Winning Hearts & Minds

I just received this email from a State Committee member:

"The Uxbridge Republican Town Committee provides our high school library with subscriptions to "Human Events". the weekly edition of "Washington Times", and "National Review" as well as assorted books with conservative content after we've read them ourselves. We also try to select one or two recently graduated HS students to send to the National Conservative Student Conference held in Washington, DC each August. I personally contribute to the scholarship fund that subsidizes student attendance at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC and to Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute campus program particularly here in the northeast."
I like to think of myself as a product of Morton Blackwell's fantastic Leadership Institute. The summer after High School I attended the Candidate Development Program (8 days), then I attended the Youth Leadership School (campus activism) and a Global Warming school before being shipped over to Bonn, Germany to protest the Kyoto Protocol (greenpeace was stunned to find protesters protesting protesters).

The Uxbridge Republican Town Committee is doing great things to help win the battle of ideas and to promote our ideals with young students (before heading into the notorious college classroom).

We would love to see other Republican Town Committees do similar projects. Currently, the MassGOP staff consists of only a few people working hard on our top priorities of recruiting candidates and targeting towns to resurrect Republican Town Committees.

However, part of our strategy in the past 2 years has been to decentralize the MassGOP to empower activists to self-organize - this is evident in our online approach with MassRootsAction, a private training site which gives you, our activists, a tremendous amount of information and tools that have never been available before.

In this spirit, I want to offer one of you to spearhead this project of replicating what Uxbridge is doing across the Commonwealth. I know how valuable this can be. In the late 90's I used to read National Review magazine in my High School library.

Finally, to parallel my offer to spearhead this project, I recommend a very wise and important speech that Morton Blackwell gave in 1993 titled, "How To Be The Life Of The Party."

Morton has a lot of other great articles on this link. I especially like the "People, Parties, and Power" and "Power and Influence."

If you can help with this effort to expand the Uxbridge model, please email us at info[AT]massgop[DOT]com and I will then coordinate all that respond to form the team.


Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Christmas Party

I would love to see you at our Christmas Party! You can RSVP to ljones (AT) massgop (DOT) com or RSVP to our Facebook Event page.


Monday, November 24, 2008

Join Us

Over at RebuildTheParty.com they have just done a fantastic update and really expanded the tools and options.

A few state parties have created individual groups and I just launched "Massachusetts Rebuild The Party" group - will you join it?

Saturday, November 22, 2008

RebuildTheParty.com

The internet has had a huge impact on our world - shopping, traveling, reading, communicating, sharing, visiting, it's changed a lot of the way we do things. When was the last time you visited a travel agency or opened up a yellow book to find a phone number?

The world have politics has also seen an enormous change from the internet.

The first time I noticed the internet influencing politics was when John McCain was the first candidate in history to raise more than $1 million in 2000. Once Howard Dean's campaign made history in 2004, I was hooked - the internet, if used right, can do massive things. I read Joe Trippi's book, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and saw how the web took a small campaign in Burlington VT. to the national stage with millions of dollars.

I no longer thought of the internet as a top-down medium where a website informs the visitor. The web empowers everyone to be active and to participate; it was engaging.

The Democrats cleaned our clocks in 2008 both locally and nationally and the internet gave them a lot of ammunition.

There are a few reasons why Democrats are better with new media than Republicans:

1) Demographic - younger people are much savvier online and participatory, they are more likely to engage and not be casual readers. In this current Republican climate, younger people are more likely to be Democrat.

2) Geography - do you remember seeing the red/blue map based by county? Well, if one were to take that map and overlay it on a different map noting the counties that have dial-up internet and hi-speed internet, you will find that virtually all of the blue counties have access to hi-speed internet.

3) Power - it's natural for the party out of power to be innovative and advance new techniques and technologies. During the late 1990's after 8 years of Bill Clinton, it was the conservatives with FreeRepublic (and McCain's $1 million dollars in 2000) that were the online innovators.
Locally in Massachusetts, the Republican Party has made some great changes. In about 15 months the MassGOP went from having a static website to a much more engaging online presence - a blog, a private training blog, youtube videos, facebook, myspace, twitter, regular mass emails, and forms for people to give us feedback like this and this. We are also collecting cell phone numbers for mass text messages to grow our voice on talk radio with message alerts and to inform activists on the road.

"Great Rob, a bunch of new internet toys while we lost 3 seats in the legislature."

Correct - we got beat this year and those lost 3 seats are what you see. However, you don't see what we have acquired internally - the thousands of McCain supporters via the free sticker offer on our webpage, the thousands came to one of our offices or signed up via one of our web initiatives and petitions. This data on our harddrives at the MassGOP HQ is exactly what we needed to Grow Our Party. New blood.

These people are connected (obviously, since we captured them online) and they will be the engagers to move the Massachustts Republican Party forward and they will be invited to attend future trainings in their region.

Now we have the tools and workers to build the Massachusetts Republican Party. We will soon launch a few party building projects and provide a very special opportunity for you to communicate directly with me and the interns over lunch; stay tuned!

I was fortunate enough to be invited to help craft RebuildTheParty.com, a new national initiative to push the GOP toward what I have just written about. You can submit your idea and I encourage you to support this effort, spread it far and wide and endorse the plan today.


Saturday, November 8, 2008

Farm Team

Politics magazine in DC had this blurb about the MassGOP building the farm team at the municipal level.   It was written before the horrific election as they noted we had 19 seats in the House.  If you would like to run for office or if you know someone that would be a great candidate please email us at farmteam@massgop.com


Massachusetts
Robert Willingham has a tough job. How do you promote the GOP in a state with an almost uninterrupted history of electing “Massachusetts liberals”?
 
“In Massachusetts, the Republican Party is surely in a peculiar position next to other parties,” says Willington, executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party. “We don’t even hold a statewide office, we don’t have anything.”
 
Aside from a recent red hiccup with former Gov. Mitt Romney, the Bay State has nearly always been straight blue. Even the state house tilts blue: only five of the 40 state senators and 19 of the 160 state representatives are Republican.
 
So about two years ago, Willington started working on what he calls the GOP’s “farm team.” He’s training candidates in smaller municipal races like school committee and mayor, even candidates who usually don’t get party support because they’re officially running as nonpartisans. Willington teaches his candidates how to use tools—like his party’s Voter Vault—usually reserved for bigger elections. “A lot of Republicans have been winning [these nonpartisan races],” he says. “It’s just been under the radar.”
 
One of the success stories is Adam Lamontagne, Ward 1 representative in Chicopee, the second largest city in Western Massachusetts. Elected at only 21, he’s part of a wave of young officeholders that Willington hopes will claim bigger offices down the road.
 
“We’re building the bench,” he says, “so we have a stronger minor league team to take to the big leagues.”

—Abigail Shaha
 

Thursday, November 6, 2008

the building has begun.

This was a bad election and no one is more upset than I am about it. The GOP lost three open Republican seats. We went from 19 to 16 seats in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

Just north of us in New Hampshire, we had Republican incumbent John Sununu lose his senate seat and to the south of us we lost incumbent Congressman Chris Shays in Connecticut, the last Republican Congressman of New England is now gone. Typically, around 98% of incumbents get reelected. If Senator Sununu and Congressman Shays could not hold on in this climate, it would be very difficult for non-incumbent Republicans to win in Massachusetts.

Some of you want to give up and go into hibernation and I can understand, although I don't agree. The number of GOP activists is not finite. Yesterday morning I arrived to the MassGOP headquarters, and as you can expect, in a pretty low mood.

Then the phone started ringing.

An Unenrolled (independent) voter called from Tewksbury to ask how he could switch to become a Republican. After I told him how to register as a Republican, he asked how he could fight for the party and be active in building it.

Then, a Republican in Brighton called who has never been involved before but asked how he could run for office to carry the GOP banner.

A Democrat from Watertown called and is switching to Republican and is looking to get involved.

The phone continued to ring with similar stories. There are new people that have never been involved before but now they want to fight. These people are now awake.

There were 1,104,086 people in Massachusetts that voted for John McCain. There are 15,696 people that moved to Massachusetts this year that were registered as Republicans in their previous state. As crazy as this sounds, there are Republicans moving to Massachusetts. This is just the beginning of a massive effort to grow the Republican Party from the bottom up and reach out to these people with welcoming arms.

This Party will not grow if we keep looking to others, or to "Merrimac Street" (State Party headquarters). This effort is to empower you to self-organize and to become more independent with the tools that you need. The Party is here to be your ally and assist you with technology, trainings, and lists of names, numbers, and emails but it is you that has to work.

If you want to join the Democrat from Watertown, the Unenrolled from Tewksbury, the Republican from Brighton along with the others that called our headquarters to be part of this effort, you can do so right now.

Sign up and let us know what you are interested in. And most importantly, if we are to expand our party we need to share this blog post. For us to Grow Our Party, this opportunity must go viral so share this with your email list and post it on blogs.

In only a few weeks we will begin to have municipal elections and in 729 days we will have a state election; your active involvement today will mean a brighter future for tomorrow.

The building has begun and we can do big things.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Phone Banking

We are here at MassGOP HQ (85 Merrimac Street) making phone calls - all are welcome!