Victory has a thousand fathers, so it is not surprising that the useless DNC and UTTERLY useless DLCC both stepped up to claim some credit for the Hansen win the SD10 special.
Hansen’s campaign manager, however, points to the contribution of the start-up grassroots organizing group “flippable” as deserving praise:
“I would go out on a limb,” said campaign manager Eric Raser-Schramm, “and say Flippable was more helpful.”
A 527 non-profit advocacy group, Flippable’s stated goal is to create a nationwide network of progressive activists dedicated to winning down-ballot races. “State legislative elections are the future of the Democratic Party,” Flippable co-founder and CEO Catherine Vaughan told VICE News. “They determine the future of policy and the future candidates for higher office.”
Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House were generally not great for Democratic politicians not named Barack Obama. And they were particularly bad at the state level, where Democrats now control only 31 of 99 state legislative chambers. Though the party holding the White House historically loses ground elsewhere, no two-term president since World War II has overseen a collapse of nearly 1,000 state legislative seats like Obama did.
He had hopes of partially reversing that trend on his way out of office last year, taking the unprecedented step of campaigning for 150 state legislative candidates in the 2016 election. Democrats, however, still lost seats. And Flippable’s three co-founders say they saw that decline as evidence that the Democratic establishment, including the DLCC, couldn’t be trusted to fix the problem.
…if you ask Raser-Schramm, they already demonstrated their ability to organize a nationwide progressive network around a winnable state legislative election. He credited Flippable with spurring the tremendous surge in grassroots fundraising and volunteering that he said was unlike anything he had seen in 14 years in Delaware politics. Thanks to Flippable, he said the campaign received donations from people in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, totaling $130,000 out of the campaign’s total haul of $475,000.
He said Flippable and its partner Sister District, another new group that focuses on moving volunteers to districts that are competitive, helped bring more than 1,000 volunteers to a campaign that was decided by only about 12,000 votes. Hundreds of those volunteers came from New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and other states, and he ultimately had to turn away some people hoping to phone bank because, he said, there were no more Delaware voters left to call.
