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February 03, 2005
The Reorgs Begin: Kit Carson and Lincoln Counties
Last night, I attended the county party reorgs in Limon (Lincoln County) and Bethune (Kit Carson County). (Well, "attended" is a loose term for what I did in Kit Carson County -- I showed up just after the meeting had adjourned, and spent some time talking to the folks that remained there.)
In Lincoln County, Jim Bowen was selected as the new chair, and Mark Benner was elected Vice-Chair. For the portion of the meeting that I attended, there was a lot of discussion about ways to improve the Party's efforts in Lincoln County in 2006.
One of the concerns I heard was that the beaurocracy for obtaining surrogate speakers for our statewide and federal candidates was impossible to navigate for smaller counties. In 2006, while I hope we can fix this problem, I would ask that if anybody out there still can't find a surrogate to call or write to me -- I'll do what I can to take care of those issues.
Another topic was the fact that SD1 will be an open seat with Mark Hillman term-limited. The folks in Lincoln County don't think too much of GOP Rep. Greg Brophy, who is expected to seek the open seat for the dark side. This may be a perfect opportunity for Dems to create a foothold in the Eastern Plains, the one area where we really haven't seen much success lately. I also got a good "idea" from Bowen, which I'll share in a separate post.
In Kit Carson County, the discussion was about how to re-frame our stance on abortion. The folks out there are conservative, and Kit Carson County apparently has a pretty significant Catholic community. There was a lot of concern that we need to focus on explaining that we're not "pro-abortion," but instead "pro-choice". One of the ladies tries to explain to her conservative friends that the abortion issue is an awful lot like gun control -- you don't want the government making decisions about whether or not you should buy a gun, why do you want government making decisions for you about abortion?
In any event, both meetings were great opportunities to get another rural-based view on how this Party is doing, and how we can improve.
I'll be attending a lot more of these between now and Feb. 15, so I'll write more as I go along.
Posted by dslater at February 3, 2005 09:09 AM
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