The next project: The Next Right

Well, a lot has happened since the last time I posted here. I joined John McCain’s campaign. I left John McCain’s campaign. I joined my friend Jon Henke at New Media Strategies, a great New Media PR firm.

Jon and I will be joining Patrick Ruffini on a new project, The Next Right. I think that all of us have slightly different views of the project. But here’s where I am coming from.

My sense is that our politics, the conservative movement, and the Republican Party is at a transitional point. Mike Huckabee’s campaign was basically correct that the Reagan coalition was over. Patrick had noticed that Bush had run in 2000 on a somewhat different agenda than Reagan’s, so this is not that surprising a statement … unless you are operating in the intellectually atrophied confines of the Beltway. Conservative interest groups have become profoundly transactional and trivial in scope. In any case, the Republican Party needs to change. Some of these demands are generational. Some of it is the catastrophe of the old business model. Some of it is demographic, although Barack Obama and his version of liberalism seem determined to give us an assist in the fall.

The upshot is that Patrick, Jon, and I will be exploring these ideas and where we go from here. I think that we have somewhat different views of what exactly this means. There will be some focus on technology. Some of this is inevitable because of who we are and what we do. Some of this is because when you organize a new movement, you use the tools that you have. The urban machines did it with the precinct structure. We did it with direct mail. And the RNC has found efficiencies in the GOTV process that are hard to comprehend.

I hope that you join us at The Next Right as we work out some of the questions and hopefully shape the next Republican majority. I also have some other political projects that are in the ideas stage. Expect to hear more about these.

I will also continue blogging at Redstate for more activist-oriented political things and a variety of things of personal interest at sorendayton.com, where this is crossposted. Please read them all and stay in touch!