Dave Wolf touched on a number of issues, so I'll address them from the bottom up:

Candidate recruitment is something we've done a miserable job of at the state level, and in some of the rural counties, our organization is nigh on nonexistent. We have some good progressive groups like the White House Project and others that particularly target women or ethnic minorities for candidate recruitment, but I don't think they have much of a presence out in the sticks. I'm thinking the unions have an important role out there because there is a surprisingly strong union contingent in many of the rural areas.

While I feel sorry for the occasional Dem that lives in a 90% Republican-performing precinct, areas like that are impossible to canvass. They are much better hit with phone banks, and believe me they get hit. Voter contact is both expensive and laborious, and when you can't get volunteers to put in time, you have to use the resources wisely. You want your volunteers and paid canvassers to spend more time knocking and talking and less time walking. Nothing is more frustrating than walking past ten 3/3 republican households just to hit the Dem who is not home because she is working three jobs.

The bottom line is that our voters are lazy. You have to hound them to get them to vote. On election day you have to conduct knock-and-drags, and drive them to the polls. The best thing we can do is make it easier for them.

Progressive organizations should use what we did in CD7 as an example. We mounted an aggressive vote-by-mail registration effort. That gave us 50 times as much time (30 days vs. 12 hours) to get out the vote. Ken Gordon would be Secretary of State today if the progressive groups had done in Denver what we did in Jeffco, Angie Paccione might have gained 10,000 or more votes if her campaign had just chased the 30,000 absentee ballots that were out in the last data update I saw a couple of days before the election. Just imagine what she could have done had the campaign actually ID'd the supporters they canvassed and pushed them to vote by mail and chased down every last ballot.

Absentee voting has been the cornerstone of the Republican's magic GOTV effort for years, and that's because it works. But it only helps if you actually ID your supporters, not just talk to them or drop literature. Raising awareness of Democrats is not enough, you have to aggressively target each voter and type them--are they persuadable? Are they solid supporters? Are they good voters? Are they died-in-the-wool flat-earth creationist homophobes with no hope of ever being on our side? Then you can target your efforts both regionally and in terms of message.

The best part of absentee voting is that we can stop bugging those people once they vote. Wouldn't it have been nice to stop getting those phone calls and mailers on Oct. 15th? It's a great incentive for people to turn their ballots in. It also gets the ballot in before the majority of the traditional super dirty push-polls and smear campaigns in the last 7 days and helps inoculate our people from right-wing voter suppression efforts.

And because of the idiotic campaign finance laws, the only way all of the candidates and progressive groups can know conclusively that a voter has been reached is when the ballot comes in as a matter of public record. Most people don't realize that state campaigns can;t talk to Federal campaigns and issue campaigns can't talk to either, and parties can't talk to a lot of advocacy groups and so on and so forth. So while it would be great to coordinate our efforts to set out who goes where, we can't do that. Everybody's going to continue to get hit by everybody multiple times, and I think it's going to wear very very thin in '08.