Legislative District Skill Banks and Farm Teams

Each legislative district Democratic organization needs a liberal skill bank containing many liberals with various competencies and experiences. These skilled and experienced liberals are potential recruits for various party building and maintenance tasks and for candidacies for public office. Just as a baby has to crawl before she can walk and walk before she can run, so liberals need to begin with smaller responsibilities and advance to larger ones as they obtain competence and experience.

Local social service, business and government organizations provide the training ground for our volunteers and candidates. They are similar to baseball farm teams, except they can serve conservatives as well as liberals. We should seek to maximize the selection of liberals and minimize the selection of conservatives to leadership of these groups. Even the election of a conservative to dogcatcher may lead to her occupying higher offices.

Legislative districts should begin by listing of leadership positions of county and city councils; school, fire, water, sewer and other local districts, officials of voluntary caring and advocacy organizations, etc. These are places to look for liberals and places to replace conservatives with liberals.

Each legislative districts should create a skill bank which contains all the liberal members of the various districts and organizations cited above and political activists. Both liberals and conservatives should be described. For example, the 47^th LD would include their King County Councilpersons, the mayors and council persons of Auburn, Covington and Kent and numerous others associated with their school, water, fire and sewer districts, PSTA and other leaders, and more. Besides political leadership, people with other competencies (such as computers) should be listed. The result is a skills bank of people with liberal values and competencies and others to be defeated.

The legislative district should then reach out to recruit competent liberals to all of these various positions and to state offices. A legislative district recruitment committee and chair should be created to take responsibility for implementing the inventory of positions, the skill bank and the recruitment effort. Like any personnel department, some of their information should be closely held.