Image via CrunchBaseI very much stand by this blog post: Positivity, Excellence, Dark Matter.There are three departments - money, message, organization - and Reshma Saujani is excellent at all three. Reshma 2010 was an amazing operation. I marveled at all the details that Reshma 2010 worked on day in and day out. I marveled at the long hours the Reshma 2010 team put in and still stayed in good spirits. It was an amazing effort.
Maloney won because there is power in incumbency, there is power in raising three million dollars for a primary, there is power in getting endorsed by a former president and two sitting Senators. And a sitting president. And the entire congressional delegation in the state. Maloney is mediocre, not exactly headed for greatness, but she has consistently voted the party line. Party leaders like that. She has been reliable.
But I felt victory was possible. And getting 6,000 votes when you could have won at 16,000, I am calling it close.
Now that the race is over, I am in a small mood to do a slight post mortem. Could we have done a few things differently? I hope this does not come across as Monday morning quarterbacking, that is why I started with words of heartfelt praise.
Social Media, YouTube
I never understood why there was no prominent, direct link from the main Reshma2010.com page to the Reshma For Congress YouTube channel, and why the Reshma bio video was not prominently displayed on the front page itself. Perhaps on the sidebar. We did want TV debates and we were not too happy we got a radio debate, but we did not make enough use of YouTube in the same spirit. I put in a request. Give me YouTube versions of all of Reshma's HuffPo articles. I did not go anywhere with that request. We should have attempted to go viral on Facebook with those videos. Forget Maloney, we should have debated the voters.
Volunteers
Reshma 2010 stayed staff centric. It burned the midnight oil like a tech startup, but it also stayed staff centric like a tech startup. It might have hired perhaps two fewer people and had a much larger budget for volunteer barbecues.
The New Woman Push
Barack Obama did not talk much about race. Reshma Saujani did not talk much about gender. But perhaps she should have. There was a South Asian push, but there was not a similar New Woman push.
