I am going to say the quiet part out loud. Nobody knows how to win an election as a Democrat in rural Texas, at least not in deep red rural Texas. The Texas Democratic Party doesn't, none of the statewide campaigns do, political professionals, activists, consultants and operatives don't either. We have completely lost that institutional memory. Anyone who tries to tell you they know what will work in rural Texas politics is either lying to you or selling something,
So why does The 134 PAC think it does? We don't. We admit it. But The 134 PAC is not about knowing what works in any given county. The 134 PAC is about being a political laboratory, free from the restrictions of the party and unreasonable expectations. Over the next twenty to thirty years we are going to figure out what works and what doesn't by being present and fostering county parties with the freedom to throw away the book and start experimenting. It does not really matter what you do, so long as you do something. If it succeeds, we want to emulate it across the region. If it doesn't, that is great because now we know that doesn't work and we can move on to something else.
Thomas Edison was once asked about his thousands of failed experiments. He is supposed to have answered that he did not fail to make a lightbulb a thousand times. Instead he had learned a thousand ways you can't make a lightbulb. This was required before he could ever be able to discover the one way that worked.
We are going to fail and flounder a lot over the coming decades, have no doubt. But the more we experiment, the more we do, the more counties we assist and work with, the more information we will glean from all these experiments and together we will learn how to compete and win as rural Democrats. Try something new for the next month. Do something old in a new way. Ignore the advice of the state party and political professionals. Ignore anyone who tells you it won't work. They don't know what they are doing either. You may prove them wrong.
Jon Mark Hogg is the co-founder of The 134 PAC
First of all, we have to field some good candidates. Not just placeholders, but people that would be good public servants if they won their seat, and it will help if they are young, because we're trying to build for the future and attract young volunteers and voters. We have to keep doing that even when there is little chance of winning. Obviously they won't be richly funded, but there has to be a baseline level of funding so they can get around in the district and make contact with far-flung potential volunteers and voters.
The recruitment of the candidate needs to happen early in the cycle. Like immediately after the Nov election.
We need to run 2018 style voter-centri…