In 1992, I worked in the Clinton Campaign in San Francisco, where I was a fairly useless flunky. Anyhow, one day they hauled all of us over to Oakland, to a big union hall, to listen to some guys from the National Democratic Party who'd been sent in to help reverse the pro-Republican trend that had seized California in the 1970s and '80s.

The first thing they mentioned was that the demographics were in our favor, and they were certainly counting on those.

The second thing they did was outline the history. They looked at how many counties in the state had voted Democratic in the presidential election years of 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988. The trend was pretty ugly. The nadir came in 1984, if I recall correctly, when only Santa Cruz and Yolo Counties (small and dominated by liberal UC campuses) went Democratic. After the '84 election, the Democratic Party got serious about the matter: they broke the whole state down, and figured out EXACTLY how many people they had to register in each and every precinct in every county to reverse what was happening.

It worked like a charm. In '88, we took quite a few more counties, and in many of them the focused voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts clearly made the difference. And, of course, it worked in 1992 for Clinton.

At the time, I thought, "If I were a George Soros, I'd finance teams like this for every major state in the nation." This is TRULY what soft-money contributions were meant for. And I specifically thought of Texas. I later wrote some direct mail for the Anne Richards Campaign, and was profoundly disappointed by her defeat in '94. But I saw even then that Texas seemed to lack the kind of focused effort that had gone into California.

This is kind of nuts-and-bolts stuff, you know. It's nice when you have strong unions, since they often shoulder such work. (I know, for example, some folks who grew up in Chicago, and they've told me how when they were kids EVERY block had a Democratic Block Captain -- organized by the unions -- and those folks took their volunteer work quite seriously. Nevermind voting the bodies in cemetaries, they could turn out real, live voters like nobody's business!)

Well, you don't have strong unions much anymore, and surely not in Texas. But fundamentals are fundamentals. If the demographics are going your way, you COULD just sit and wait for it. But the benefits will accrue a lot faster if Democrats get serious about going out and doing the hard, tough slog door-to-door and person-to-person. Starting by doing what they did in California: figuring out EXACTLY how many voters they need to register in every major county, then setting goals and working like hell to reach them.

I'd add one other thing, a theme I've been repeating elsewhere a lot. For three decades, conservatives (and the GOP) have been SELLING and TEACHING conservatism. Not just immediate promises, though they do a lot of that (and lie about a lot of that) all the time also. But, they actually proselytize their worldview.

Liberals and Democrats, insofar as I can tell, do not ... and haven't for years and years. We just sort of expect people to join us based on the "obvious reasonableness" of our views or something. The osmosis theory of political education, I guess.

Sure, we argue with conservatives, and we preach to ourselves, but we almost NEVER try to explain to anyone beyond our own small circles just what it is we believe at the most fundamental of levels.

Texas Democrats might do well to consider this. Why should we have to depend on "changing demographics" to save our asses? Why should we have to "shift to the right" in order to stay even vaguely competitive? Why the devil are we conceding white males and older couples to the GOP? Maybe they ARE gone beyond reclaiming, but we should sure the hell be doing our best to educate the next generation about WHY liberalism is actually BETTER than conservatism!

This, too, is a fundamental ... no less important than registering voters and getting them to the polls on election day.

Don't forget to head over to Off the Kuff and use the links there to read what the Texans are saying about it.