Page 182 - The Resilient Organization

Postcard No. 2 from Hanover, New Hampshire 169

electoral victory came a few weeks later after his campaign had ended,
when he won the primary in his home state of Vermont.
A second distinguishing, more resilient feature in the evolution of Dean’s
campaign was that many organized activities of its supporters persisted well
past the campaign’s end. When Howard Dean ended his presidential bid, he
expressed an intention to launch a new organization that would offer conti-
nuity to the supporters who participated in his campaign. Within months, he
had founded Democracy for America, relying on the remaining list of sup-
porters from his campaign. The purpose of the new organization was to
encourage ordinary citizens to run for elected office, while endorsing and sup-
porting candidates who were “socially progressive and fiscally responsible.”
Meanwhile, a number of Dean’s supporters persisted in volunteering
within the grassroots organizations that they had founded or participated
in during the campaign. By 2005, one year after exiting the presidential
race, Howard Dean was elected chairman of his party. His new organiza-
tion had grown its list of supporters to approximately 600,000 people, the
level seen at the peak of his presidential campaign in January 2004. Also, a
number of organizations founded by the campaign’s grassroots volunteers
had started formulating and executing their own initiatives, maintaining
various degrees of contact with Democracy for America and operating
independently. For instance, two state-based organizations founded by
Dean volunteers—California for Democracy and Democracy for Texas—
each had participant lists of tens of thousands of people, had developed its
own governance, and had designed political actions within its state that
were independent of Democracy for America’s plans and initiatives. Many
additional grassroots groups from Dean’s campaign were acting similarly,
in various degrees and at different levels of scale.

THE DEAN FOR AMERICA CAMPAIGN:
ORIGINS AND GROWTH

My coauthor Quintus Jett and I studied the design and evolution of
Howard Dean’s presidential campaign from two perspectives: the capacity
of the campaign goals to accommodate a lot of different political aspira-
tions (as in, “We want out country back”) and the capacity of the evolving