Rightroots’ Goals

04 Aug, 2006 by John Hawkins

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By the way, I just realized today that I’ve never talked about the two goals Rightroots has for the 2006 election cycle.

#1) From our debut on Aug 1 onward through the elections, we want to raise more money for our candidates than the Netroots crowd raises for their candidates.

#2) We want the Rightroots slate to have a higher winning percentage than the Netroots slate.

Of course, we could have achieved our 2nd goal easily by picking candidates that were guaranteed winners. However, during the selection process, we actually passed on several candidates because we thought that they’d win easily without our help. Instead, what we tried to do was to pick candidates in competitive races, where a relatively small amount of money might actually help put them over the top.

In any case, when it’s all said and done, after the elections in November, we’ll see if we managed to meet our goals.

P.S.: After being live for less than 96 hours, 9 of the 18 candidates that we’ve backed have now passed $1000 in donations. It would be great to see us put 12 candidates over the $1000 dollar mark by midnight.

If you want to donate to Rightroots, click here.

Update #1: From the comments section:

“In my humble opinion, y’all shouldn’t judge your success based upon the relative success or failure of your left wing counterpart. Base your success on the success or failure of the candidates on your slate.” — jones

The problem with going that way is that this is really uncharted ground. Nobody on the right has really done anything like this, other than a $10,000 fund raiser that Redstate did for Van Taylor.

So, how much money do we have to raise to be a “success?” How little do we have to raise to be a failure? If, let’s say, 8 of our candidates in these competitive races win and 10 lose, is that a crushing failure, a huge success, or something in between? Since this is such a new venture, it’s hard to say.

That’s why I think it’s a good idea to compare ourselves to the left. At least that will give us some sort of bar we can use to measure how much or how little we achieve with this effort.

Update #2: From the comments section:

“KerryHaters did a fund raiser for a Senatorial candidate for South Dakota or Nebraska, for some screwball that talked a good talk until he was elected, and immediately held Bush hostage for some PORK FOR HIS HOME DISTRICT.

KerryHaters had the best intentions, and let it be known the winning candidate they helped put over the top was playing mighty dirty politics, just like a Liberal or Jeffords would have done.
I forgot the guy’s name, he was so personable and said all the right things – BEFORE the ELECTION! Had TONS of help nationwide because of KerryHaters’ help.

Maybe it was the guy that beat out Tom Daschle? Cannot remember his name.” — Rose

John Thune is who you’re thinking of and he is a solid conservative. He did end up having a beef with Bush over a military base in his state, though. One of the things he said, when he was running against Daschle, was that he could save the base and Daschle couldn’t. That was a big deal in his campaign. Then, after he was elected, the base was initially targeted to be closed and he raised holy hell about it. Eventually, the base was removed from the list and everything worked out.

It’s hard for me to hold that against him since that was something that he campaigned on and that was really important to his state. Plus, we’re talking about a guy with a 92 out of 100 rating from the American conservative union. That’s certainly an improvement over Tom Daschle.

Update #3: As of 9:54 PM, EST, we have gotten 14 out of our 18 candidates over $1000 inside of the first 96 hours of our existence. What a great start!