To our fellow Democratic PCOs, officers, and supporters:
Thank you for a great electoral year! King County is among the largest counties in the United States, and we are deep blue.
I’m Shasti Conrad and hoping for your support for our team — the Vision 2020 Leadership Slate — to build an inclusive, accountable organization that develops leaders and capacity for the 2019 and 2020 elections.
We believe the King County Democrats must lead by example.
We are committed to building a party that is strong and effective, focused primarily on electing Democrats to the county level who share our values, supporting our legislative district organizations, and developing new Democratic leaders.
We envision a county party that is a helpful partner to our state party, neighboring county parties, legislative district organizations, and our Democratic allies, especially organized labor.
To support our legislative district partner organizations, we're proposing to create a suite of tools and infrastructure that all Democratic legislative districts can use.
We want to create training programs for legislative district leaders, for our precinct committee officers (PCOs), and very importantly to Democrats thinking about running for office.
If elected, we'll work to make our county party more inclusive by reaching out to constituencies and communities that the Democratic Party has not always had a strong relationship with. As part of this outreach, we will translate as many of our documents into languages other than English, so people can understand our values, priorities, and electoral programs.
We also believe now is the time to make the county party more accessible. We'll explore using technologies like livestreaming and videoconferencing to make it easier for people who can't attend meetings to plug in and get involved.
To realize this vision, we will pursue a collaborative development strategy in partnership with legislative districts. Rather than asking the districts to pay dues, we'll aim to build a county party that is fiscally strong enough to provide resources to those organizations that are working to advance Democratic causes in purple areas. We'll work to cultivate strong donor relationships with our union locals, with our Democratic elected officials, and with the grassroots of our party.
To ensure the King County Democrats are a strong partner and able to provide the support Democratic candidates deserve in their campaigns for county-level office, we support revising the bylaws of the King County Democrats to create an organization that is more transparent, accountable, and responsive. The proposed bylaws changes we support are designed to:
increase financial accountability;
provide the county party with a robust, enforceable, fair Code of Conduct;
reduce the amount of time spent haggling over endorsements;
direct resources to contests for positions that often receive little attention and money.
What’s Next
The re-organization meeting is just a few days away on December 1st. We hope to see you there and hope you can view the proposed bylaws changes. We’ll be sending out a detailed plan and budget for next year in the next few days.
We welcome your ideas. Together, we can build a better, more inclusive King County Democratic Party.
In solidarity.