Democracy is expensive!!
Posted : October 11, 2004 at 2:49 pm [America/Los_Angeles]
[via Daily Kos: ACT by the numbers]
ACT has been notoriously tight-lipped with its metrics. They don’t want to tip their hand to the GOP, but some information trickled out in this Time piece profiling our top ground war general — Steve Rosenthal.
He has $125 million at his disposal–including $10 million from billionaire George Soros–which is about seven times what the national Democratic Party spent getting out the vote in 2000. Rosenthal’s America Coming Together is the largest of the new political-advocacy organizations known as 527s for the section of the tax code that created them. On Election Day, Rosenthal expects to have 45,000 paid workers on the streets rounding up every Democrat they can find to
vote.
ACT will spend $10 million on election day alone — which is over half what the DNC spent on all GOTV in 2000. They have 86 field offices in the key states.
ACT is not only key for our efforts this cycle, but moving forward. The future of a progressive electoral majority isn’t with the media consultants, it’s with the ground generals, think tanks (Center for American Progress, Media Matters, Rockridge Institute), and with our own message machine (blog and Air America).
Sign up for ACT’s battleground efforts here. Plans are for the 45,000 paid canvassers to be supplemented with 25,000 volunteers. I know dKos can generate at least a few thousand to that
effort.Update: One more number — in the last two weeks of September, canvassers logged 99,036 hours in the field (close to 12 years).
Wow! That’s a lot of money just to get people to vote come Nov. 2nd.
I have mixed feelings about spending all this money for something as basic as “ensuring that people exercise their right to vote”. However, I must say that I am impressed. Impressed to see people realizing that this Election is indeed very, very important.
- Anand
Category: United (or not) State of American Politics 2004