January 28, 2005
D-Trippin'
By Jim Dallas
Jesse Lee of the D-Trip's Stakeholder blog and Old Man Wythe are having a terribly civil debate about party-building.
While Greg is no big fan of Howard "Come-All-Ye-Children" Dean, it's clear that he's got some good ideas about party building. You know, like running more candidates. It's such a good idea it'll make you want to scream!
Also, I'll ask here what I said earlier in Greg's comments: why on earth do we elect the SDEC out of state senate districts (instead of, say, fixed groupings of counties)? Have you seen a map of state senate districts recently? Do they bear any relationship to political reality? No. And they always mange to get even funnier lookin' each 10 years. Makes it kind of hard to give the SDEC long-term leadership when their base constituents keep shifting around.
Posted by Jim Dallas at January 28, 2005 03:31 PM
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One defense of the SD-based organization is that our own internal political culture is such that those district boundaries will not move much (save for party control changes). Two reasons: the Texas Lege is still relatively bipartisan (the Senate moreso), so when they redo the maps, they look out for each others backs and very little significant change is often made. Second reason is that the number of seats is stable.
I've seen other states use Congressional Districts as the basis ... I personally find that even more odd given the number of shifts & losses of seats.
So it ain't perfect, that we choose Senate districts ... but I think we'll live with it just fine.
And a little bit of inside baseball here, but we are in the process of developing regional subcommittees that are based on a much more rational breakdown of the state into regions and SDEC members will serve on committees for their region in addition to their senate seat.
Two people from the same SD could be in two different regions depending on where they live in the district. It won't replace the current system, just be an addition to it.
yeah, the SD party districts are just not annoying for SDEC, but for TYD as well. We base our regions on SD makeup- So like region I (all west texas) almost was at the end of Bexar County, until I steped in.
I just said that for the Byron's benfit and probably a chcukel (since his region is odd too)
