Ground and Pound Machine (1 of 3) or What is a Campaign?

What is a campaign?  Media purchases and TV Commercials or list building?
It always comes back to this…  Republicans major on media, Democrats major of identifying who their voters are and getting them out!  Democrats have been committed to a new and better strategy for voter turnout for some time!

In states like Oregon, where I live, it seems that everyone must be liberal and we are a completely BLUE State.  But looking at the registration of the state, I find that this isn’t true.  There are lots of Republicans and lots of conservatives in Oregon.  In fact, the registration is 35% Democrat, 25% Republican and 40% not affiliated with any party (and this move away from any party is in vogue everywhere).  So why does the state seem so blue?  On a football field you can start out with two teams at the beginning of the game.  They can look very similar in their uniforms until they start to play.  The team that is better coached, uses a better game plan and has more skilled players with better conditioning is usually the winner.  I believe this is why Oregon appears BLUE.  The D’s have a better game plan than Republicans do.  In fact this article describes exactly what the D’s do:  http://blog.oregonlive.com/mapesonpolitics/2010/08/trent_lutz_shifts_over_to_head.html.  In the article you will find that they call the effort, “Ground and Pound”.  You could say that Democrats have a turnout machine and Republicans don’t.  In a recent conversation I spoke with a local farmer.  He harvested a particular crop for which he had designed his own machinery to harvest the crop.  This self-designed machine gave him a definite competitive advantage.  In the same way, by designing and adding to a turnout machine, the D’s have a very strong competitive advantage over Oregon Republicans. Republicans here don’t even have a thought that this is what needs to be done.

Continued…