50 States

I have decided to finally start a project I have been thinking of undergoing for some time. I want to start organizing supporters of Newt 2012. While we will start small and just have a few states, my hope is to eventually have state captains in every state. (Someone from every state has signed up on Newt.org.)

I am not part of the official campaign. Neither is this blog or this project.

Here is the post I wrote that explains why this is so important.

While there will be some trial and error, the general outline of this project will be:

One person in charge of each state.

Each state will have a dedicated Google Group. (E.g., Newt 2012 -- Texas.) I think it would also be best to have a national list.

The ultimate goal is to be better prepared than the other campaigns in all the states -- not just Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and Florida. Every campaign is going to be devoting nearly all their resources to those five states for the next seven months. It is not a slight on the states that follow those; it is simply political reality.

The GOP Primary figures to last long past those five states, however, and that is where we come in. If we can build a solid infrastructure in those five states as well as the later ones, that will give Newt and his campaign a huge leg up. They won't have to start from scratch when the campaign gets to that point; they will be able to expand on our efforts.

As the post I linked to earlier goes into more detail on, this is the way Obama beat Hillary. They were tied after the big states, but since his supporters were the only ones to seriously organize the later states, he won overwhelmingly.

We can do the same for Newt.

For anyone interested in helping with this project, here are the two best ways to contact me: you can e-mail me at joshgosser1776@gmail.com or contact me on Twitter @joshgosser1776. If you are on Facebook, join the Newt for President page I help run.

Obviously, if you have friends or family who support Newt, ask them to join our effort.

For those who use FreedomWorks' FreedomConnector -- which is great -- you might be able to find Newt supporters on there. I would not recommend spamming people about Newt, but if you have some people who you regularly communicate with, see if they have a candidate they prefer. If they do not -- or they are not solidly behind the one they are currently supporting -- see what their vote-moving issue is and show them videos of Newt on the topic. (For example, if you come across someone who votes almost entirely based on the 2nd amendment, this video would be a good one.) There are a good number of videos on this blog that could come in handy. Newt's solutions are also something good to circulate.

Again, if you have any questions at all, feel free to contact me.

This can be a huge key to getting Gingrich the nomination and, ultimately, the Presidency, and I hope you will help out in it.

Newt's 50 state strategy

(Update: I have a website now dedicated to this: Newt50States.com.)

After Super Tuesday in 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were neck-and-neck in the delegate count. Soon, however, Obama had a commanding lead -- even when no big states were up for grabs. Obama was able to do this because his supporters had -- on their own -- been organizing for months.

And in small states, especially those that were holding caucuses instead of primaries, the organization is what made all the difference.

Though a much smaller amount of delegates were available from, say, Montana than California, Obama won by such a commanding total that he racked up delegate after delegate.

Clinton's camp made the fatal mistake of thinking the game would be over after Super Tuesday, not paying any attention to the legion of states that would hold contests after February 5. And thanks to Obama's supporters, his campaign did not have to divert funds away from the Super Tuesday effort. They relied on the supporters to have an infrastructure in place.

Once Super Tuesday was over, Obama's campaign came in and added onto the efforts of their volunteers. But without the legwork done months and months in advance, they would not been nearly as organized as they were.

That brings me to Newt's campaign.

As it should be, the vast bulk of the attention so far has been on Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. Some coverage has been done of Florida and Nevada. But other than that, not any state has been brought up in the campaign coverage.

Which in past Republican primaries would make sense. After all, in past years, many states were "winner-take-all." Democrat primaries, on the other hand, handed out delegates on a proportional basis. That is why the Republican primary in 2008 ended so soon while the Democrat one dragged on for months and months.<br/>
This time is different. Thanks to rule changes, those states wishing to have primaries March and before have to award delegates on a proportional basis.

So while the big three -- Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina -- will still have a huge impact on momentum and fundraising, the race will almost certainty not be decided for a while.

Which means that the path to the nomination may well lie in small states way down the calendar. Those states in which just a little bit of an organization can make a huge impact.

By pushing a 50 state strategy -- while still focusing on the early states -- I believe Newt sees that.

Newt will run a local and state-based campaign, not a top-down approach

Ralph Z. Hallow of The Washington Times has some new (as far as I know) info about how Newt's campaign will be structured:

Mr. Gingrich has recruited some of his party’s most sought-after campaign strategists and advisers and will conduct a unique 50-state “10th Amendment campaign” that throws out the old model of regional political directors. The campaign will rely instead, he said, on leadership and direction in each state from people who live in the state and understand the nuances of local politics.

...

The Gingrich national campaign will set up “a fairly large headquarters in Atlanta” and a “fairly small headquarters in Northern Virginia.”

Instead of the division of the country into geographic regions with regional political directors, the structure typically employed by presidential campaigns, the Gingrich organization will use what the candidate calls the “10th Amendment campaign.”

It’s a reference, he said, to the Constitution’s “federalist” amendment that reserves to the states and local governments all power not specifically granted to the federal government.

“Everything stays in the states, instead of someone from Washington telling the local people how to do the things that the local people know more about.

“We expect New Hampshirites to help carry New Hampshire, Iowans to do the same for Iowa, South Carolinians to do the job for their state, and so on,” Mr. Gingrich said.

Most of the following I have already wrote about, but it is worth mentioning again:

There has been a methodical buildup of the Gingrich operation over the past few months even as some political observers openly doubted he actually would take the presidential plunge.

Mr. Gingrich has recruited people considered to be at the top of the game in politics.

Linda Upmeyer, Iowa’s first female House majority leader, will be chairman of his organization in Iowa, which will be the first state to hold a presidential nomination caucus next year.

He has locked up the services of two other sought-after advisers to Texas Mr. Perry: Craig Schoenfeld, who ran George W. Bush’s fundraising organization in Iowa in 2004, and Dave Carney, the New Hampshire-based political consultant.

He also has recruited former Polk County, Iowa, co-chairman and experienced campaign operative Will Rogers.

Former South Carolina GOP Chairman Katon Dawson, considered one of the state’s most talented political operators, will run Mr. Gingrich’s operation there, he said.

The idea to avoid a top-down approach is exactly the right way to go. It is the idea behind the free-market: let a lot of different people try different approaches and then others can pick up on what works best. It is the same kind of campaign that Barack Obama ran. As well as, in many ways, the campaign that made Obama's possible: Howard Dean's in 2004. Both campaigns had competent leaders at the top, but they did not dictate to supporters how to go about advancing their candidate. (What is remarkable is that liberals can easily see the value of bottom-up approaches in campaigns, yet when it comes to economic matters, they are just interested in the top-down approach.

Newt calling it the 10th Amendment campaign is a great message due to the rising attention being paid to the last amendment of the Bill of Rights with the explosion of federal government reach into areas that had not before been under its' domain.