Today's Must-Read: Yes, There Are Fifty States

Interesting piece by Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo on a grassroots effort to reinstate the 50-state strategy in the Democratic Party:

A friend sent a DKos post about a new organization, It Starts Today. The group hopes to "restart the 50-State Strategy" by raising small-donor money for every Democratic House and Senate race in the country, regardless of candidate. The reason is the Democratic Party has been playing the strategic targeting game at least since after 1994 and in the process losing ground in large swaths of the country:

Every time, it made sense in the short term. And, every time, this decision to be “strategic” and “efficient” also caused us to abandon more and more districts, essentially ceding them to the Republican party. As a result, each Democratic wave—think 2008—got reversed fairly quickly, as the Republican party rallied around a consistent message and fought back. Meanwhile, each Republican wave—think 2010—became that much harder to undo, as the Democratic Party focused on an increasingly smaller pool of “competitive” districts.

If you don't show up to play, you forfeit. It's been shortsighted, clearly, for Democrats in Congress, for winning the presidency, and for being able to advance an agenda when Democrats win it. Mark Warner put it bluntly when he told Yearly Kos in 2006, "[W]e cannot just go after 16 states and then try to hit a triple bank-shot to get Ohio or Florida." Yet that's how the party plays it again and again.

Let's face it, the Democrats' strategy for the past few cycles, ever since Howard Dean left the chairmanship of the party, has been a disaster. As Sullivan points out, not only have Democratic mid-term sweeps been reversed in the next election, but Republican sweeps haven't. And the GOP has made strong gains in state houses, and not just in red states: I'm still trying to figure out how our current governor in Illinois got elected, in a state where Democrats dominate the legislature.

Read the whole thing, of course.