Joe broke the news on Monday that the DNC's "Organizing for America" group, formerly known as "Obama for America," contacted Mainers by email, urging them to vote on Tuesday, but without mentioning what the election was about, nor which way to vote. Among the measures up for a vote was ballot measure 1, the repeal of gay marriage in that state. A number of us were concerned as to why the DNC wouldn't inform gay voters that 1 was on the ballot, let alone not urging them to vote "no."
Shortly thereafter, a second Mainer received another email from the DNC's OFA. This one urged her to call five people in New Jersey, in order to help Jon Corzine's re-election for governor. This was disturbing for a number of reasons. First, why would the DNC ask Mainers to help out in New Jersey, while not asking Mainers to help on "1" or any other ballot measures in their own state? Second, the email was proof that the DNC was in fact doing more than sending generic "get out the vote" messages to advocate. In states they deemed worthy, they were actually organizing for specific things on the ballot. Marriage in Maine simply didn't pass muster.
That's when I received a call from a senior DNC official. Part of the call was off the record, and I will respect that confidence, even if I was misled (more on that below). A portion of the call was on background, meaning I was permitted to report what I was told, without saying who exactly told me. I was told in that call that my story about the Corzine email was flat out wrong. I was told, verbatim, that "the DNC did not send an email to our Maine list asking them to make calls in New Jersey."
Shortly after I received that call, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post's Plum Line contacted the DNC about this story, and the DNC refused to comment. That struck both Joe and me as odd, since the DNC had only half an hour before given me a comment. Why the sudden clamp down? Did they know that they had misled me, and didn't want to mislead any other journalists?
Subsequent to the DNC's claim that they hadn't intentionally contacted Mainers, a second Mainer got a DNC/OFA email asking him to call five voters in New Jersey to help Corzine.
We now know that what I was told was untrue. Or at the very least, it was purposefully misleading. Mainers were intentionally included in a broader email blitz that the DNC did, nationwide, to help Corzine's race. We know this because DNC Treasurer Andy Tobias admitted it in a lengthy email message to DNC donors yesterday. Here is an excerpt of Tobias' email to the donors - an email sent a good 30 hours after my conversation with the DNC official:
1. An email went out asking activists to make calls to New Jersey. It was insensitive not to omit Mainers from that email. I apologize that no one thought to do that. I can’t imagine it could have cost No On One even a dozen votes, but I still wish someone would have thought of this in time to catch it. Mistake noted.My analysis of the email, after the jump...
2. A different email went out to Mainers urging them to vote. As the only thing of substance anyone was voting on in Maine was Question One, and as Democratic activists vote our way, this was a small but positive effort to be helpful.
I would have liked to see that email discuss No One One directly, in case there may have been an email-enabled Organizing for America activist someplace in Maine who did NOT know where Maine Democrats stood on this issue. (Out of the country without Internet access until the night before the election?) But I’m told there was concern that advocating specifically for a ballot initiative, whether LGBT or otherwise, would set a precedent for every other ballot initiative. Bureaucracies are nervous about setting precedents.
A few points here:
1. Tobias admits that Mainers were included in the nationwide Corzine email blast. The quote given to me by the DNC official was intended to convince the gay community that no such email was sent, at least not willfully. That was untrue. Tobias' quote also proves that I was lied to, or at the very least intentionally misled, in the off the record part of my phone call with the DNC about this issue as well.
2. Tobias confirms that Mainers did receive a get out of the vote email from the DNC/OFA (this was not disputed by the DNC). And to his credit, Tobias states that he wishes the email had mentioned No on One, the pro-gay campaign fighting the marriage repeal effort.
3. The notion that mentioning "No on 1" in the Maine GOTV email would have had little to no effect is absurd. If Democrats in Maine know how to vote on the anti-gay ballot measure, and thus don't need guidance, then Democrats in New Jersey equally know to vote for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and thus need no coaxing from the DNC and OFA.
And what's more, Obama won Maine in the 2008 presidential election by 58% (421,923 votes) to McCain's 40% (295,273 votes). We lost marriage equality in Maine by 53% (299,483 votes) to 47% (267,574 votes), or by 31,909 votes. If Obama won Maine with 421,923 votes, and we only needed 299,484 votes to win on gay marriage repeal, then something is wrong here. A lot of Obama voters, 122,439 to be exact, did not turn out and vote, period. So it's obvious that not all Democrats in Maine already knew to vote and which way to vote. They didn't vote at all.
But more to the point, would the DNC have us believe that the aggressive intervention of the DNC and the President could not have helped sway the President's own voters to get out and vote against ballot measure 1, when they otherwise sat home? Clearly President Obama was able to motivate these extra 122,439 people a year ago, but we're to believe that he couldn't motivate them today? We only needed 26% of those people to turn out and help us. We got none of them. And we'll never know if the fierce advocacy of the DNC and the President would have helped, because they didn't even bother trying. And then they tried to mislead us, to boot.
4. And finally, the DNC has concerns about getting involved in local ballot initiatives? Why? They did it last year under Howard Dean, when they donated $25,000 to the coalition fighting Prop 8's repeal of gay marriage. President Jimmy Carter did it in 1978, when he came out against the Briggs Initiative, that would have banned gays and lesbians from being teachers in California. But regardless, why does the DNC (and the White House) have a problem getting involved when a core Democratic constituency is having its civil rights taken away by the far-right base of the Republican party? We were promised that this administration would be our fierce advocate. Now all we get are excuses.
And the DNC and the White House wonder why they have a growing problem with the gay community.
PS I think the labor movement might have a problem with the DNC's assertion that nothing else of substance was on the ballot in Maine. In fact, conservative activist Grover Norquist was trying to pass his TABOR proposal, the so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Read More...
