Weekend Update

I spent Saturday morning & afternoon at the Lincoln Club's Leadership Institute training over in Costa Mesa. I've been to these before and it's nice to go back every so often to hear about new technology and tactics to win elections. Matt Lewis & Erin Delullo put on some great training for candidates, potential candidates and grassroots activists. Steve Frank also made a cameo appearence and updated us on some the ways campaigns are utilizing the conservative blogosphere to get their message out and get people from around the country to make calls on behalf of candidates. It was great stuff. Erin is an expert at high dollar political fundraising. Matt is great at teaching people how to micro-target voters for a campaign. In these days of lower & lower voter turnout, elections are being decided by an ever smaller electorate. As he says, in this business "it's all about profiling and discriminating". Meaning...you want to discriminate against people like non registered voters/people that don't vote and profile people like persuadable voters with a high propensity to vote. His belief is that 3-5% of the electorate in a race controls the outcome and I would tend to believe him. It was good stuff. I was able to see some familiar faces and also get to meet some other up and coming activists and candidates from around OC and the state. I want to once again thank the Lincoln Club for this school. It is invaluable IMO. Kudos also go to Dave Sparks and Rick Wagner who organized the training.