Back in 2005, I proposed to the small Coordinated Campaign team at the Marion DEC that we should really focus on municipal races (that is, city council races.) They are incredibly small and easy to win, and they pay huge dividends down the road when we're looking for candidates at the county and state level. I was basically told to go ahead, yet due to my own greenness and naivety, I really got nowhere. Besides, I had to go attend my first semester of college at UF at the end of the summer.
Yet had I been successful then, we could have started seeing some of that effort bear fruit for the 2008 elections. You see, as I alluded to earlier, city councilmen and women make great candidates for the county commission, school board, countywide constitutional offices (tax collector, property appraiser, etc...) and state representative. The bottom line is that city councils are where we incubate and develop future candidates. This, by the way, is how Republicans slowly took power in Florida: they started at the municipal level and slowly but surely worked their way up the ladder.
In areas of the state where Democrats are currently out of power, DECs should really focus on recruiting city council candidates as a way of building the bench for future elections.
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Here in Leon County, City Commissioner Andrew Gillum is going to run for Curtis Richardson's legislative seat in 2008. Richardson started out on the School Board. Marjorie Turnbull, our former legislator for HD-9 started out on the County Commission. Of course, Scott Maddox started out on the City Commission here too, but we try to ignore that memory.
I've heard a lot of good things about Gillum - mostly from People for the American Way. I can't wait to see what he'll do in the Legislature.
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