Organizers and the DFA Link Community: How they voted

Written by: Ilya Sheyman on Nov 6, 2007 6:04 PM EST

One of DFA's greatest strengths has always been the active community of 760 groups meeting monthly all across the country. We've had a lot of anecdotal evidence of where local groups were leaning - for example DC for Democracy recently endorsed Senator Obama and is actively volunteering in support of his campaign - but now we finally have hard numbers to see the pulse of our community.

We started by taking a look at group organizers across the country - of whom over 60% voted in this poll. These results are for all the declared Presidential candidates with write-in Gores votes distributed to their second choice. (Only a handful had to be removed for not listing a different second choice). The results are strikingly different from the overall poll.

Sen. Edwards holds a clear lead amongst organizers with 41.88% of the vote, followed by Sen. Obama at 20.16% and Rep. Kucinich rounds out the top three at 17.03. Much like the rest of the community, there's no clear consensus among DFA organizers about a candidate - although the conventional wisdom is clearly not in play and the race is far from being over.

Below the fold, we take a look at DFA-Link members as a whole.

At DFA, we have over 52,000 DFA-Link members (live numbers always updated). These are the members who have used our set of on-line tools for off-line actions - to attend a monthly link-up meeting, call-in to a DFA Night School, or RSVP for a movie night. This group includes all the organizers above along with the members who attended events.

Again, the results differ slightly from any other group as DFA Link members prefer Sen. Edwards at 31.8%, followed by Rep. Kucinich at 27.04% and Sen. Obama at 16.98% - again nowhere near a 50% or 66% majority.

These are the boots on the ground for off-line action. Not only have they attended events off the internet, but are familar with online tools and many have been trained through our training academy.

Ultimately, our community is clearly split with no clear consensus between a combination of Sen. Edwards, Rep. Kucinich, and Sen. Obama. Together, the three consistently receive more than 2/3 of the vote and clearly repudiate the narrative of a runaway front runner. Our community is going to help decide the election on the ground, and they're working to elect a progressive candidate.

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