The comments @aoc is making about Democratic ground-game weakness are being dismissed. I have seen, up close, exactly what she is talking about.
Covering the 2018 election, I decided to report on key swing seats. FL-26 and FL-27 were at the top of my list. If Dems faltered, Miami-Dade would be written up as a missed opportunity.
After arriving in Miami, my first task was perfunctory: find out where and when candidates were speaking. For Republicans, this took around 15 minutes. For Democrats, it took five days.
That is not five days spent waiting for Facebook updates to be posted, or emails or calls to be returned. I drove all over Miami, visiting every Democratic campaign office I could get to in person.
What I found was a stunning level of disorganisation. No-one was in charge. No-one knew who was in charge. Even entry levels of enquiry like "who is your press contact" were unanswerable.
More senior staff (when people knew who they were) were AWOL, not on the trail but at home or on leave. I kept being told a particular individual "knew everything"; when I finally found him (it took several days), he was a backpacker volunteer who had been living in Spain.
(Needless to say, he didn't know anything). Meanwhile, GOP staff were sharing booth-by-booth early voting totals with me. Their granular understanding was impressive.
When I asked a Democratic staff member about this, she said (on the record!) that "Republicans are a lot more organised than we are".
There were almost no other press there, and no-one (apart from Republicans) with a sense that these seats could decide the election if it was close.
Driving around polling locations, the physical GOP presence at polling booth, in terms of signage, personnel and voter information, dramatically outweighed their opponents.
When I finally heard Debbie Mucarsel-Powell speak, I was contacted by someone from the Democratic campaign in Washington. They were unhappy about my questions to the local campaign (after days of being messed around, I was also letting my frustration show).
I asked them questions about what I had seen, and was surprised when they berated me. The campaign was excellent, they were going to win, lawn signs don't matter, etc. They would speak to me after the election, and I would see they would win FL-26 and FL-27.
And they were right - they did win those seats. Only Andrew Gillum, the Demoractic candidate for Florida governor who had been a polling favourite, lost a narrow election because of weak turnout in... Miami-Dade.
You can imagine that now, in 2020, the Democrats losing FL-26 and FL-27 is absolutely unsurprising to me. And the Democratic establishment response to those who impugn the ground game is the same thing I heard: you are wrong.
You can follow @rgcooke.
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