A Citizen’s Guide to Burning Down the California Republican Party Part 5, What Happens When the Swamp Spends Huge?

I’ve heard it for years. Munger. Blame everything on Charles Munger.

Charles Munger has help. CREPAC – the Realtors. Dental PAC. Chevron. PG&E. The California Chamber of Commerce (aka Chamber PAC) also JOBSPAC. If you look at the reports, you will see this crew behind every effort to take over partisan offices and central committees. Heck, if you look really close, you will see Sierra Pacific Industries, Eli Lilly and a host of other household names in there as well.

If you look even closer – you will see that Charles Munger is no longer bankrolling the California Republican Party and further research shows that his voter registration efforts have abated. If those statements were not clear, take a look at the CAGOP Treasurer Report at the next convention, you will see much smaller checks from Mr. Munger to the CRP. Ask any of the major vendors that do voter registration, they will tell you their efforts are no longer funded by Mr. Munger. It appears that he is focused on buying mail and TV ads for campaign independent expenditures only now, and who knows if that continues with the irrelevance of the GOP in California.

The lesson here is know your enemy. Know who they are and what they are doing. You can learn a lot from searching the California Secretary of State’s Website.

Lesson Number 2? Know why Donors do what they do. For most it is a business decision and is not steeped in ideology. They need people they can work with. It sounds slimy, but it is the world we live in.

If you’re a conservative activist in California, you know that your candidate for Assembly, State Senate or Congress is not going to be in favor. This means from the beginning of the campaign, the volunteers and activists have to organize and work smart.

1. Stay off social media with conspiracy theories while you are campaigning actively for a candidate. Chemtrails, Flouride, Illuminati stories are a few such items I see, it does not matter if you believe this stuff is true, most think it is crazy. Accept it and drive on. Persist and you will make your candidate look bad.
2. Sign-Waiving is useless. If you are on overpasses or street corners, you are wasting your time. I have seen this time and time again amongst tea party and conservative groups.
3. Walk Precincts, knock on doors and talk to people. This is what people / volunteers hate doing. This is the single most effective thing you can do for a candidate. Even the most poorly funded candidate can afford voter lists from the county that can be used to make precinct lists.
4. Make Phone Calls if you are not physically able to walk neighborhoods.
5. Let the candidate and their staff do all the public events. You simply can not meet enough people by going to rotary clubs, republican clubs, etc to win an election. The candidate and their staff can find new volunteers at these events you can work with, but you should be on the phone and at the front door.
6. Give your candidate money. Ask others to give them money. The more donors a candidate has, the more likely “The Swamp” does not go after them. There is strength in numbers.

Too many times, when the mass money from “The Swamp” comes, it overwhelms the Conservative Target because there has been precious little contact in the neighborhood. When the Mail and Ads come down and the target of them is standing on the street corner with signs, it actually makes the attacks more effective because raising the visability of the subject of smears causes people to ask the wrong questions.

IF you’ve actually been out there doing the work and telling individual people the story, then the attacks do not work.

Once “The Swamp” starts dropping the money bomb then what?

1. Get ahold of everyone you know on a personal level, tell them that “CREPAC, the Spirit of Democracy or whatever” is spending huge to elect a tax-raiser (or whatever the issue is). Are you going to let them win? Can you help us reach people?
2. Then late at night or early in the morning when you can’t call people or walk precincts, use social media and email to forward your guy’s stuff. It takes 7-10 repetitions, so once a day on social media and once every other day via email is the right interval. Again, if you are doing this without also walking precincts or making phone calls – it is a waste
3. Give your candidate money. Ask others to give them money.

Money – Conservatives are the worst donors in the world. This is why Conservative candidates are sitting ducks a lot of the time for “The Swamp” to take out. Stop calling yourselves “Fiscal Conservatives” as an excuse for not donating to causes. If you support something, yet are unwilling to even give $20 to it, you really don’t support it. Remember “Faith without works is dead”.

I have a really hard time feeling bad for groups of people that complain about a Heath Flora or a Rocky Chavez in a safe district who are “Moderates” that go up on Cap and Trade when they never knocked on a door, made a call or gave a dime – yet there they are on Facebook fighting the good fight.

Drop the campaign sign, get off of Facebook, stick a crowbar in your checkbook and then let’s complain about election results.

Next up – I am going to tie posts 1-5 together so that there is a clear sense of what it takes and what you can do to burn down the California Republican Party and take our party back from the donors, squishes, unprincipled, elitists and (fill in the type of heresy here).

You can’t win unless you take ownership of your part. You can’t win unless you are willing to do the work. To be continued.