The Rockingham County Democrats met for their first post primary get together.
The chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, Ray Buckley, spoke.
Mad Dog had something of the sensation he got listening to Joe Biden's first rally in Hampton: He found himself just hoping Ray could make it to the end of his sentence.
If affability won elections, the Democrats would have no worries in New Hampshire: Ray chuckles his way through his remarks, fields a phone call from his mother and generally sprinkles smiles around the room like fairy dust.
But when a woman asked Mr. Buckley for three talking points about Governor Sununnu, he was unable to provide any. "We're working on those. I wouldn't want to provide them to you piecemeal."
Someone else in the audience suggested "Veto Sununu."
It went downhill from there.
Someone remarked he had canvassed for 3 months before the 2016 election in and around Hampton and never saw a single Trump canvasser. "We flooded the zone. Must have outspent Trump 100 to 1, at least as far as canvassing went, but after all that, Trump lost Hampton by only 100 votes. "So how effective was canvassing?"
Well, if we hadn't done all that ground game, Buckley replied, Trump would have won in Hampton. Dems didn't do enough ground game in Pennsylvania and lost there.
That's the way it always is with the NH Dems. If they get blown away as they did in 2010, well that was just a Red Wave, a national sweep New Hampshire got caught up in. But when the Democrats win, oh, that's because of all the local efforts, the door to doors.
"But where is the data on that?" another woman asked.
"Oh, it's out there," Ray waved vaguely.
Gary Cushing, head of the Seniors wing, mentioned that in his neighborhood he really could not "talk to his neighbors" as Ray suggested was the winning strategy because he would "disrupt the delicate balance" of sensibilities in the neighborhood, where neighbors who harbored different political opinions avoided conflict by sticking to safe subjects.
Another man observed that suburbs are places where people live in isolation, and they don't like people pounding on their doors. Block parties or pig roasts might be effective. Trump, after all, does rallies which foster a sense of community.
Another Dem asked again what we could say about Sununu, and Ray alluded to the Democratic party as a coalition of disparate individuals in which everyone has his own opinion.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Dems could agree to "message discipline," a woman, who turned out to be a marketer, observed.
Mad Dog had recently watched a history show on Netflix about the years following World War One, during which the United States Navy tried to figure out how it would win the next war. Navy brass was composed of men who had come up on battleships and destroyers. The idea that a tinny airplane might be able to drop a bomb or torpedo and sink a ship struck them as ludicrous. That's just not how naval battles are won, have always been run. And don't talk about submarines! What damage could a submarine do?
Ray Buckley is like that. The whole leadership of the New Hampshire Dems seems to be like that. They fight the last war because they cannot imagine the next war.
They have no idea what hit them in 2016.
The woman who raised the issue of talking points talked to Mad Dog after the meeting. "They were micro-targeting in 2016. Russians, who knows who. Send a Black man who lives in Chicago enough messages that Hillary thinks Black men are predators, it just might swing an election."
That is the woman who should be leading the charge in 2020, but she is not wearing the admiral's epaulets.
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