When I started this whole Election Volunteer Coordination thing with the NRA, one of my chief concerns was how few endorsed races we had in Bucks County. We were literally down to two state reps in the whole county who carried endorsements, Paul Clymer and Gene DiGirolamo. This election I’m happy to note that we have five endorsed races for state representative, Paul Clymer, Gene DiGirolamo, Frank Farry, Rob Ciervo, and Marguerite Quinn. I should note that four of these are incumbents. I think that’s a pretty good improvement.
There are probably a number of factors that have lead to this, but I’d like to think our efforts to raise the profile of this issue among the County’s political establishment has been a contributing factor. To do that we’ve really just made our presence known, both in the new media space but also by showing up to traditional political events, donating, and volunteering to help out. The big problem with more endorsed candidates is I have to stretch my volunteer resources thinner. Because I don’t want to short change any of our endorsed candidate, this translates into me having to work harder to make up the short fall. I’ll be phone banking both Saturday and Sunday on behalf of some of these endorsed candidates. We’re recruiting volunteers for the final push as we speak.
If you want to help out this election, give your local NRA EVC a call or e-mail. You can find out who they are on NRA’s web site. If your EVC is active, he or she should be thrilled to hear from you. If not, let me know and I can try to find out their status. Most EVCs are chronically short of volunteers to help out with things. Being able to send a few volunteers to an endorsed campaign, even for a few hours in an election cycle, makes a huge impression on the campaign and the candidate. Good volunteers are hard to come by, and given the other things NRA brings to the table, it’s a very powerful incentive to get them and keep them voting the right way. Once word gets out in the political circles that the gun issue brings money and volunteers, you’ll have other campaigns wondering what they can do to get that too. Answer? Vote the right way. At least one of these endorsed candidates above got that message loud and clear, and we’re going to try to help out their campaign this year as much as we can. The more people I have to send, the more incentive they have to improve. This program has the potential to work very well, but is entirely dependent on NRA members being willing to help out. This is the part where I beg you to help out.
Is Paul Clymer actually facing a credible challenger? I lived in his district from birth (after he was already in office) until I moved to MA in 2005, and I don’t recall him ever having a chance of losing.
No. He hasn’t for the past few elections. DiGirolamo is pretty safe too. He’s been in that seat forever, and has beat everyone they’ve thrown at him handily. That’s good for us, because it’s two races we don’t have to spend resources on. Certainly we still appreciate them being pro-gun, but that helps us get other pro-gun people elected and stay elected. In this area that’s pretty much always GOP candidates.
And hopefully Clymer and DiGirolamo realize that if they ever too face a tough challenger, we’ll be there for them. The real problem for us will come when they decide to retire and that seat becomes open. That goes anti we’ll probably never get it back.
DiGirolamo doesn’t have a challenger at all this year, and Clymer should be good since he was planning to retire, but public outcry convinced him to go for another term.
If you still know folks back in the district, just make sure they know to vote for Fitzpatrick & Toomey – those are the biggest struggles we’re dealing with right now in Bucks. We really need heavy turnout from the more conservative parts of the county.