Pearl River      Ok, I will make an exception and read a column about door knocking.  In ACORN organizing, if there were a list of ten commandments, one of them near the top of the list would be “thou must door knock!”  It works.  It’s still the best of all political tools.  And, as Jonathan Alter points out in his reminder, Is Door-Knocking Dead? No, It Made One Big Difference.

A longtime rule of thumb in politics is that a superior get-out-the-vote operation does not guarantee a win but it’s usually worth a point or two in the final results. That continued to be true in 2024, where Harris’s ground game was much stronger than Donald Trump’s.

This worked …down the ballot, thanks to Democratic volunteers. While overall turnout appears to be slightly lower than in 2020 (the totals aren’t in yet), it has been higher than average in battleground states, which led to smaller-than-average margins and shorter coattails there for Trump.  While Harris has lost or is losing in all the battleground states, her troops helped turn out ticket-splitters who saved Senator Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, as well as other Democratic Senate candidates including Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, and, quite likely, Ruben Gallego in Arizona and Senator Jacky Rosen in Nevada — all by only a point or two.

So all the tapped-out donors, doorbell ringers, postcard senders and phone bank-sters need to know that without their efforts, the next decade would be much worse for the country, with Trumpist judges degrading the judiciary and reams of destructive bills passing the Senate….Republicans now have less hope of a national abortion ban. The same will most likely go for gutting the civil service, abandoning NATO, confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a cabinet post or elevating Judge Aileen Cannon to the Supreme Court. Probably not enough Senate votes….Yes, all that money and toil from Harris supporters didn’t help elect a Democratic president. But we owe those volunteers what Paine called our “love and thanks.” They helped democracy stay alive to fight another day.

Let’s hear a big Amen from the congregation!  Field work and doorknocking saved democracy.  I want that on a t-shirt!

I’ll admit to reading one other columnist, because I couldn’t resist the headline, “I’m the only one who knows what really went wrong with this campaign” on Alexandra Petri’s piece in the Post.  She nailed the reason Harris lost and was willing to shout it out, saying,

Okay, I will tell you: not enough texts and emails from the candidate.  Every time I got one of those on my phone or in my inbox, I felt fired up. And I’m sure that’s how everyone else receiving them also felt. So why were we only receiving (and this is a rough estimate; I think I am lowballing it) 346 of them per hour? That wasn’t enough. We needed more. Do not say to me: “Your assumptions are wrong. Obviously, we tried the strategy of sending more texts than any human being could possibly want to receive from a candidate in the course of a lifetime, and that strategy failed.  False.  It has not yet been tried. We received only a countably infinite number of texts. We should have received an UNCOUNTABLY infinite number of texts. What were they even doing at headquarters?

Heck, what do I know, maybe she’s right?

Although there’s still a mystery to me about tall of this phone bombing, which for me was light from what others told me.  The FCC supposedly had issued an order tightening up on this mess and barring mass texting.  ACORN’s Voter Purge Project had to switch to an email program to 1.5 million purged voters to re-register, because no company would enable us to text because of this rule.  So, how did it happen?

Maybe when the next campaign implements Alexandra Petri’s infinite text program someone will explain how it works.