So far, I think I’ve read it a couple of times today on how South Dakota Republicans have had precinct people since about 1917. And the people claiming this are woefully misinformed.
If someone is going to talk about the issue, they at least owe everyone the duty of honesty and accuracy. I wrote about this last year during the debate over SB40, and it remains true.. Precinct people were not part of the process until 1990:
In the 1990 GOP convention when GOP Chair Dwight Adams (Doing double duty as Mickelson re-election chair) threw the doors open to bring more people into the process in exchange for precinct peoples labor, it was lauded as an expansion of the process. In fact, I wrote about it in Dakotawarcollege’s early days waaaaay back in 2005:
Dwight took the party representation for the State Party convention and blew it wide open. He went from having county representation comprised of only a few select individuals on a county wide basis to opening it up to dozens or more per county. He opened up participation and guaranteed that precinct level representatives would be part of county delegations at the state convention. What he did was in effect a molding of the command structure of the party to a military model. It was an organized and well defined structure from the state chairman at the top down the precinct level.
The system was transformed! The “carrot” was that the precinct level people could vote for the candidate of their choice and on issues at convention. But in turn, they also had to be active in precinct level activities, such as poll watching, etc. This in turn gives the party a literally endless pool of volunteers and activists – activists, many of whom someday might be candidates.
With the simple change of a set of rules, the number of people who attended conventions exploded. While the loyal opposition still might be pushing 100 or so for their convention, in some years the GOP has had numbers exceeding 800 or more. (Why do you think Frank Kloucek sometimes makes an appearance at our convention? It’s where the people are). County GOP meetings have people attending simply because they identify themselves as precinct people – another positive effect.
I would make the argument that no other single factor has helped ensure the party’s continued electoral success than making it more participatory. It’s not that people didn’t identify before – party registration numbers illustrated that – but more people than ever could dig into the nuts and bolts work that happens behind the scenes with the party.
You can read that entire piece here at Dakotawarcollege Classic.
The issue that has come about since I wrote that piece in 2005 is that there’s a lot of the precinct process that has changed in the years since 1990. Technology has made precinct watchers obsolete. The phone tree has been replaced with auto dialers and call centers, and a lot of their job has gone away. But, while the call to action for working together has gone away, it’s been replaced in some cases by those who have no interest in being representative of their communities for the GOP, and are more interested in weaponizing the process. These are the people who are recruited for one candidate, only to vote and never be seen again. These are the same people who complain incessantly that when a convention is held, it should all be a free lunch, as a number attempted to do in 2022.
Agree or disagree with the proposal, please quit making things up, people.
Starting to look like a box needs to be added to more than a few of these posts to add the campaign sponsor disclaimer revealing who bought and paid for the dissertation.
This post at least returns the discussion to the level it should be on…the convention rules. The Central Committee is aware of these issues despite the pundits who seem to think we aren’t competent to run a meeting and discussions about tweaking rules (or returning them to the original ones) is being vetted.
I for one would not waste my time, travel, lodging, or effort to attend a state convention where all we had to do was walk around candidate booths and contribute money.
Draconian measures especially proposing constitutional amendments eliminating an entire process that has existed for years are the wrong way to deal with this. Time for the adults to enter the room
As long as those adults are voting for fringe candidates that by far outweigh what those candidates received in the primary, then no, we don’t need precinct reps. In one of the previous posts Anne had a good write up about that issue, along with the actual responsibilities precinct reps should be doing instead of being ideologues.