PDA's recent endorsement of Steve Harrison is quite significant given their recent success in MD-04 primary. PDA joined with DFA and several unions including SEIU to help Donna Edwards defeat an incumbent nine term Democrat in the primary. In a national email to their membership Donna thanks PDA for their role in the election;
I want to thank the hardworking PDA activists across the country who helped with the predictive phone bank and contributed to my campaign, as well as, those people throughout the district who worked as human billboards, distributed campaign literature, made phone calls, and performed other forms of voter outreach.
PDA could bring invaluable volunteers into this race and if I had the option of having the volunteer advantage or the fund raising advantage I would gladly take the volunteers. You can buy ads and literature all you want, but if you don't have a ground game distributing those, talking to voters and getting them to the polls they are useless. If Democracy for America (DFA) follows suit and gets involved in this race on Harrison's behalf, which would not surprise me given DFNYC's involvement, I would think Harrison would quickly have the advantage in this race. I would also give him a sizable and experienced volunteer advantage. DFNYC enthusiastically campaigned for Barbaro in 2004 so they do have some history with this district and wanting to take out Fossella.
One question I will have to follow up on is whether some of the elected officials who are backing Recchia can turn out their volunteers and GOTV on his behalf.
I am trying to find details on how much money PDA brought into the MD-04 race, but the FEC page is acting up.Labels: DFA, dfnyc, Donna Edwards, MD-04, PDA
