Open Letter to the FDP State Executive Committee

Dear Florida Democratic Party Executive Committee: 

It is time to elect a new Florida Democratic Party Chair!!!

Some of you may know me, many of you don't.  Back in the day - and on again and off again for 20+ years, I've been a hack who worked on Democratic campaigns in Florida.  

You have the job of electing a new state party chair, and I wanted to offer some perspective from someone who has seen the good, the bad, and more often that not, the ugly.  I don't envy your job, but I encourage you to be throughtful and deliberate - even if it requires taking extra time. 

The party has been through more rebuilding exercises in the last decade than the Jacksonville Jaguars.  And while I have never been asked to participate in these exercises, I offered some thoughts arond each.   If you are curious about my previous thoughts, you can read them here:  2021, 2019, 2017, 2015.  I can assure you, they are basically the same as this piece.

For the purposes of this election, it isn't really worth spending a lot of time on how we got here.  I’ve got a more thorough piece I am working on about how we got here.   I wish I could tell you this train wreck hasn't been a long time coming, but that would be a lie.  More on that whenever I get the stomach to finish the other piece.

Before before I get to the question at hand -- the next FDP Chair, I think there are two things that are critical to set the table.

1.  The job is utterly thankless and impossible.  Period.  Full Stop.  

There is nothing glamorous about the job, unless your idea of fun is endless nights at Hampton Inns and Marriott Courtyards staring out the window at parking lots and air conditioning handlers, spending your days not getting your phone calls returned by donors, talking to reporters who want to know why you haven’t fixed everything in 3 weeks, all while being roasted on twitter and elsewhere for being bad at your job by people who have never won in an actual competitive partisan election.  And here’s the fun part: What does success look like?  Even the cycle where I set the - sadly the still standing - record for largest net gain in the State House, I had more critics than fans.  As Chair, you will wake up every morning, run headfirst into a brick wall without a helmet, and repeat daily.  Someone has to do it -- someone really good, but needs to having realistic expectations is going to be critical to success.

2.  The current system is built in a way that works against the party's success. 

I believe, as I will lay out in another piece, that the seeds of the party’s current state were laid in the spring of 2010, when there was a conscious effort and decision – not by anyone at the party – to outsource basic party functions to outside C3 and C4 groups.  The goal of building long term outside infrastructure wasn’t a bad one on its face – but rather than being a value-add proposition, like Americans for Prosperity is for the GOP, it ended up being a choice for donors on whether to support the FDP or other groups, and for a variety of reasons, the other won the day.   As a result, outside of individual candidates – and in this case, mostly Presidential efforts standing up operations for six months every four years, the party has never had the resources to do the work it needs to do in a consistent and sustained basis.  Honestly, I don’t know if there is the ability to get some of those donors back into the tent (or find new ones).   Oh, and one more thing – raising money to the party is brutal without a major statewide figure committed to it.  I was there in 2005 and it sucked.  

Ok – so onto the actual job.

In my view, the Florida Democratic Party has one job, and only one job:  Win Elections.  

That’s it.  That is the only job.  Winning elections. 

The Chair of the Florida Democratic Party also only has one job:  Provide the resources and direction to meet that mission.  Again, that is the only job.   

Everything else, to be quite frank, is both secondary and should be agnostic to that.  I don't care if they can give an inspiring speech, or even if they are afraid to talk in public.  Nor do I care how clever their tweets are, or how much they can "own" the other side.  I care if they can win -- and by win, I mean win an election with a partisan letter next to their name in a seat the other side can win.  I encourage you to care about nothing else either. 

One of the things I genuinely respect about my Republican hack (hack, if you are unfamiliar, is an honorific of respect given by one's political peers to good political operatives) friends:  They really don’t care.  They just want to win.  They figure winning solves problems, and they are right.  You know what encourages discipline?  What motivates working hard?  Winning.  And winning is fun. 

Besides Florida Republicans, you know who is having fun right now?  Jacksonville Jaguars fans.  Why?  We are winning.  You know who isn’t?  Both Florida Democrats and Tennessee Titans fans.  The end of the Titans season was like the Florida Democratic Party the last 3 cycles.   At least I can revel in the Titans failure.

But I digress.  Kinda.

Good candidates don’t all look alike.  They don’t hold all the same views, and some might even hold views that other Democrats disagree with.   But in the end, the only litmus test is “can they win” – and not in the aspirational, maybe lightning strikes in a bottle/wow they gave a great speech someone should give them money/we should help them because they decided to run kind of way/wow he-she insprired me with that cool video in a Trump +23 district, but in a do they have something that gives them appeal, and the network to raise money to communicate that appeal.   Basically, if you use the word “but” in a sentence to describe a candidate, they probably aren’t going to win.  That is just real talk. 

The Party’s job is to help find these people, and make sure the foundation is there for those candidates, and in this case, that is mainly to register voters, then turn those voters out.   If the next Chair of the FDP only did one thing – register voters, then turn those voters out – at an even marginally successful rate, we should give that person a 10-year contract.  (And for God’s sake, we should not care how they vote – by mail, early, or on Election Day.  Let’s stop spending money to get people who are going to vote to vote in the way we prefer them to vote…It does not matter, Schale screams into the abyss).  

In my view, Karen Thurman was the perfect Party Chair for the era that I worked there (2005 to early 2009) – a moment not dissimilar to this one, except we took over a party in legitimate worse shape than this one.  We inherited so much debt that we couldn't even get a credit card.

She had won tough partisan elections herself - elections against Republicans, so she knew that it took.   She didn’t have any further political ambitions, this wasn’t the biggest title she had earned in her life, and she sure as hell didn’t need the job.  She had a rolodex to raise money, had enough of the trust of donors to take her calls, and she understood that limited resources should be deployed in smart ways to win.  I remember once having a conversation about a candidate who had some positions well to the right of the current party, and her answer was “Steve, honestly, who gives a shit – Can they win, and will they vote for the Democratic Leader?”   The answers were yes, and we got that person across the line.  As the kids might say, she DGAF about anything, other than winning.  If I am voting for Chair (and I am not), I am looking for another Karen Thurman. 

Furthermore, as a voter for the next Chair, I encourage you to ask every candidate three basic questions: 

1.  Can you raise money?  If their answer is “I have a plan to get small donors” or some other whimsical Field of Dreams kind of answer, that means no donor is going to take their call and you shouldn't vote for them.   All the things that everyone wants the party to do will cost money - a lot of money.  If the candidate for Chair you are talking to doesn't get that, well, we will just be having this conversation again in 2 years. 

2. What is your plan to register voters?  Like the Jaguars record over the last few decades, the Dems win-loss record on voter registration is obviously bad to anyone who has looked at them.  There is no way to spin it, no sugar-coating.  This isn't all the Party's fault - much of this work has been out-sourced to the C3 and C4 tables -- but you need to drive the policy to take it back.  So ask the candidates what their plan is.   And if they tell you they have some cool "texting outreach" or other plan that isn't putting actual people on the ground talking to actual voters, you should find another candidate.  And as the last few cycles proved, this isn't work that is effectively done virtually. 

3. What is your plan to recruit candidates to build a larger – and broader (in every sense) bench?

I know I said 3, but I am going to add a 4^th

4. The Party need to rebuild real volunteer capacity.   We are leaning way too much on paid canvassers.  Paid canvassing is a band-aid, it isn’t a plan.  Volunteers are committed, they believe in the cause, and will be warriors for it.  

And in my opinion, that’s all any state executive committee should care about.   There are a million things the Party could do – many of which it should do – but the fastest way to do a lousy job is to try to do too much.  If I am voting, I want someone laser focused on those narrow functions, because doing these basic, core party functions even moderately well will still be a herculean task. 

I am sure you have other ideas, and I'll be honest, most of you are right.   

“But Steve, we need a better message” – you know who are good messengers – more winning candidates. 

“People don’t know what we stand for” – you are right, because the Party is broke.

“We need better outreach” – 100%, but you know what is great outreach: registering voters.

“We need to do more in X community” – sure you are right, and you know what, we've basically done a lousy job in every community, so find me a Chair who can raise money. 

“We don’t do enough XXX” – Yup, you are right.

“I am a Titans fan and I have some ideas” - BLOCKED.  See, I said most of you were right.  Not all of you.

But the problem is the next Chair can't do all the things that everyone thinks it should to do.  They won't have the resources. They have to be laser focused on doing a few of them well, controlling the things that person can actually control.

Right after I took my party job in 2005, I sat down with fellow Florida Man Chuck Todd, who was then at Hotline.  He said to me “people say there isn’t enough outside the box thinking” among Florida Democrats, to which I responded “Chuck, we don't have a box -- the problem is we need to build the box before we can think outside of it”

We built the box when I was there.  We built a good voter file, and recruited good candidates (and gave the voter file to candidates for free).  We registered voters, ran a narrowly targeted turnout operation, and built a real registration advantage.  We put in places the things you needed to take advantage of political winds.  And over the next decade, that box was been smashed into pieces, grinded up in a woodchipper, and shot into the next stratosphere.  

So, the next Chair gets to start over, building a new box. 

And the best person for the job, quite honestly, just like Karen Thurman in 2005, probably has not raised their hand, and will need to be talked into it. 

I say this in every piece like this – there is no silver bullet.  There is no "one thing" and anyone who tells you they, and they alone, have the key to our success should be run out of the room.  No one person, one candidate, or one thing has created this shibacle, and no one person is going to fix it.  The road back will be a slog, and the likelihood is whoever takes the job, if they do it right, will be setting the table for someone else’s success.  That is the nature of the upcoming task.  It needs someone with the relationships and the temperament to see it through.  It is hard work, and someone needs to do it -- but we did do it after 2004.  

Can we do it again?   Ask me after the Jaguars win the Super Bowl. 

Good luck to you.  And just like the Jaguars hiring Doug Peterson after a decade or more of futility, taking the time to get this one right isn't just important - it is vital to the getting the institution back on track. 

Sincerely,

Steve Schale, Florida's resident has-been/grizzled veteran hack