Horse and Buggy Democrats

At a recent meeting of Rockingham County Democrats, a citizen asked Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democrats, about the efficacy of the famed and vaunted New Hampshire "ground" game.

Buckley had finished his customary pep talk about all we have to do to win New Hampshire for the Democratic presidential nominee, whoever that may prove to be, was to get out and knock on doors as we always have. "Nothing beats neighbors talking to neighbors, one on one, in New Hampshire," Buckley intoned.

The leader of the "senior" faction of the Democrats, Gary Patton, remarked that, actually, on his block, neighbors had tacitly agreed to not discuss politics, as it was "disruptive of the balance" of neighborly comity.

He might have added that on Navy ships, politics and religion are forbidden topics of conversation for the same reason. Discussions of both tend to get emotional and testy and group harmony tends to fray.

The fact is, when groups of volunteers are sent out from the Democratic field offices, during the canvassing campaigns which begin in September of each Presidential election year, the canvasser is handed a map of a part of Hampton he or she usually doesn't know and when they knock on doors they have to introduce themselves as a "Hampton" town person because they are strangers in that particular neighborhood and often know nobody at any of the doors, or at best, they may know someone the home owner knows.  It's not "neighbor talking to neighbor" in anything but the most arbitrary sense of geography and town lines.

What if we showed these graphs to our neighbors?

Another man remarked that people living in Hampton, which is almost entirely suburban, value their privacy and isolation and  hate strangers ringing their doorbells, trying to push one agenda or another. Democrats canvassing are about as welcome as those Mormon boys in their white shirts and black pants trying to convert you to the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints, pressing their pamphlets on you.

Phone banks have been largely abandoned since caller-ID. The Dems who manned them realized they were not even able to preach to the choir. The choir didn't want to hear it.

Buckley's interlocutor said, "We never saw, or only very rarely saw, a Trump canvasser knocking on doors in 2016. The streets were swarming with our Democratic canvassers. We flooded the zone. And Trump came within 100 votes of beating us in Hampton, without a ground game."

"Ah," Buckley raised his finger, "But we won. And if we hadn't canvassed, we would have lost. That's what happened where they didn't canvass in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin."

Which is to say if you hold a race and the Democrats harness up a team of horses on Friday and whip it mercilessly across hill and dale, and arrive at the finish line Tuesday evening,  10 seconds ahead of Donald Trump who had just hopped into his Ferrari ten minutes earlier, that the horse and buggy is the preferred approach to the race. That's our way to win elections. Always has been. Always worked before.

Mad Dog has thought about Lincoln and his famous "chicken bone" case, where he used a simple display defending his doctor client before the jury. The doctor faced a suit because the plantiff's femur failed to heal properly but Lincoln held up two chicken bones before his rural jury.  One was a bone from an old chicken which snapped in Lincoln's hands with a loud crack. Then Lincoln tried to break the young bone, which bent and gave but would not fracture. "The starch has gone out of the old bone," Lincoln told the jury.  Points of law, words, the old fashion manner of convincing a jury did not play well, even in the 1850's. What helped was a new idea: a demonstration, something visual, something familiar.

Mad Dog is not convinced door to doors work at all, but if we are to do any of this, would it not make more sense to arm our door to door salesmen and sales women with some visual aids?  A little kit of photos, charts and graphs to address the various claims Trump makes.

Like: it's the economy stupid: We can show the economy is the Obama recovery and Trump is simply riding it.

Trump is just surfing the wave Obama started

Things are continuing to look good, but not because of Trump

We can show he actually has done little to stop illegal immigration.

We can show his border wall is impotent and incompetent and falling over.

We can carry those visual aides with us.

Or better yet, as one man in the meeting suggested. Don't knock on doors. Hold block parties.