As part of its rebuilding, retrenching, and strategy to win back one branch of the legislature and/or the governorship in 2010, the Republicans will be tempted to redirect resources from Denver to other areas. This would be a mistake.
I ran in Denver because I live here. Running somewhere else isn't possible for me, because I need to live near a shul, and all the shuls are here in District 6. So wearing me out isn't the issue. I have no choice.
Abandoning Denver is the first step to abandoning Westminster, Arvada, and Arapahoe (which isn't safe now, either). It's thinking tactically rather than strategically, and that all the good tactics in the world won't help a rebuild tarnished brand. We want to change the map, not just build walls here and there, and I think to do that, we need to think big. If we abandon Denver, we leave the other party free to do the same thing.
Look at District 6. We managed to get almost 33% - up significantly - and turn out nearly 12,000 votes for our side in a year when the tide was running the wrong way. We did this with a party where barely 1/4 of the precincts had active precinct committeepeople, where we had to spend time reconnecting with Republicans who hadn't been visited, mailed, or otherwise contacted by a local candidate in almost a decade.
There is still a lot of upside to our party here, while I think the Dems have mostly maxed out. When the Denver Return Book comes in, in a week or so, I want to see how the national, state, and local candidates, and ballot initiatives ran, relative to each other, here in Dist. 6. But let's assume for the moment that we all ran in lock-step. If we can even get this district back to 55-45 on a voting basis, that would be important statewide. Had we had 55-45 this year, it would have meant about a 9000 swing; tell me the Amendment 46 people wouldn't have killed for that. Our registration is marginal if we only include actives, but if we include all voters, the numbers are better. So by reaching inactive voters, something we didn't focus on this year, we improve our chances significantly.
Howard Dean - curse him - figured out that the Dems needed to find a way to be competitive in the South, even if that meant finding horses for courses, and tempering the national agenda. Nudge the country to the left over time, and they'll get what they want. We need to do the same thing, nationally in the northeast, and locally, here in Denver, Boulder County (which as a county, is actually less blue than Denver). We can start nudging the state and country back to the right.
