I want to thank Rory McShane for bringing this to light via Facebook and allowing all of us to start our week on a grand note of schadenfreude.
It seems that the Maryland Republican Party is not the only political entity which labors under the adverse condition of being out of power and having the embarrassment of fiscal misfortune. At least we weren’t forcibly evicted from our West Street headquarters!
In fact, in reading about the issues being faced by the Alabama Democratic Party I noticed several similarities to our MDGOP party situation over the past few years, but done on steroids: a new Chair walking into a field of financial landmines and dealing with factions threatening to break apart from the party – and, in Alabama’s case, not just taking their ball and going home, but absconding with furniture, office supplies, and voter lists while adding insult to injury by redirecting donor funds. What is happening with Alabama may even border on criminality, depending on their campaign finance laws.
Stunningly enough, this situation has festered for almost a decade and a half, according to the AL.com website story, as the party initially spent itself near bankruptcy in a failed effort to enact the regressive tax called an education lottery back in 1999. (Fourteen years on, Alabama is still one of a handful of states which has no state-run lottery.) Former Party chairman Mark Kennedy last month blamed a Republican-backed 2010 initiative banning PAC-to-PAC transfers in the state for the party’s ongoing financial crisis.
Yet a quote from Kennedy could be the key to our rebirth in Maryland:
Unlike the Republicans, we just as a party have not developed the kind of broad donor base a modern political party needs and the Republicans have.
The same concept came up in our recent Chair race, as the two challengers to interim Chair Diana Waterman both pledged to go outside the traditional avenues the party has used to raise funds, whether through more internet fundraising or growing the donor base tenfold. Obviously this should be a priority for us going forward.
This story is doubly humorous to me because, up until 2010, the Democrats controlled the Alabama legislature and had done so for 136 years. But now the shoe is firmly on the other foot because the GOP owns 23 of 35 State Senate seats and 66 of 105 State House seats, as well as the Governor’s chair. Their partisan breakdown is “only” R+14, though, whereas we run in a D+30 state here. But other states have found at least some success with similar demographics.
So take heart, Maryland Republicans, because there appears to be a political party much more dysfunctional than ourselves out there. Hopefully we are working in the right direction – let’s allow the other side to do some infighting for a change.
By the way, I received a note from Collins Bailey the other day as well as confirmation from party activist Don Murphy, who’s planning on attending: the Republican Party of Virginia seeks volunteers for their state convention this coming weekend. The RPV convention site is here, and I imagine the interest in the event from Maryland is so we can begin to upgrade our convention in a similar manner.