
Happy New Year to everyone! I am beyond excited about what we can accomplish in 2020. All it requires is some new and old ideas and some new and old habits. And yes, there are some old ideas and habits that we need to put in the shredder.
First and foremost, we will have a lot of Candidates for President. This will make our primaries infinitely more exciting and interesting than the other side. Locally, this is our chance to shine. Lots of interest leads to lots of publicity and lots of debate. Locally, we should focus on excitement leading to something we must improve…..voter turnout! We actually improved our numbers significantly in 2018. Let’s make it a trend. How many new young voters can we engage? If we listen and support them and make them feel welcome……..we can continue to improve our numbers. It may even translate into more people willing to be local candidates. One key here locally……we must make ourselves attractive to unaffiliated voters and some Republicans. That is something we all must always keep in mind. It’s a strategy that has worked elsewhere.
And yes, many of us have PTSD from 2016. What should we do about that? I introduce my favorite word…. Resilience! Let’s not repeat our mistakes but learn from them. So…..I declare we avoid attacking each other, our past choices, and ALL of our candidates. Judgement blame and shame are not Democratic Party Values. We are the party of debate, inclusion, social justice, environmental justice, and economic justice. Yes we must debate the difficult issues and figure out who is the best Candidate for President. Let’s focus on the issues and who can do the job. All candidates are humans who have made mistakes. We must accept this unconditionally.
We must have faith in each other and in our Presidential Selection Process. We must be OK with passion and disagreements. We must give it all of the positive energy we possibly can. Faith must be stronger than fear. Let’s go out of our way to be the good guys because that is who we are.
We will have intense discussions on Social Media. Our social Media Team will try very hard to post balanced articles on all of our candidates. We will strive to be fair and just. However, we will not shy away from controversy. We will embrace it and watch the interest in our Presidential Race Soar. We have a Presidential Primary in Idaho on the Democratic Side in 2020 for the first time. Let’s make it memorable with a huge voter turnout!