How to Light a Grassroots Fire: A year ago I wrote to the Republican Party of Kentucky expressing a desire to participate at any level needed. I decided that it was time to become a little more involved than just reading about what was going on and to actually get involved. I received a really nice automated reply saying that someone would contact me. No one ever did.

This is the problem with politics at the state level, especially the Republican Party. Don’t get me wrong, I love the values that they espouse, I am just not thrilled at their ability to organize. About 10 years ago I approached the local county chairman with the same request and the same results.

But compare that with the national level and you will see something totally opposite. I joined one candidate’s Facebook group and was besieged with daily updates telling me where he was campaigning and what I could do to help the party. Maybe a little over the top – but it got me watching him. But something interesting happened when he later dropped out, another candidate started sending me updates. I now get at least one e-mail every day from Senator McCain. It is clear that a members list was sold or given to McCain and now they are operating with the same level of passion.

A grassroots organization doesn’t have to be expensive, it just has to be organized. A 2005 report said that 75% of American’s use a computer and spend an average of three hours a day online. So let’s do some Kentucky math. The population of the state was recently estimated at 4,206,074. Census figures show that 36.55% of those are registered as Republican’s. That means 1,537,320 Republican’s are available. Now 75% of those on average are using their computers, so we now have 1,152,990 sets of eyes that can become active, if they want to. Surely not all of them will, most people don’t really care. But why don’t they care? They don’t feel their vote counts, they don’t have faith in the system or the politicians we elect, their lives are too busy with other things. There are a lot of reasons. So let’s say that just 10% of those people pay attention to what is going on, that is still 150,000 people that could be active, we the state Republican Party would just get organized.

Getting organized is easy. Let’s start with our 120 county chair-people. Let’s get them the templates to organize their counties and send out regular correspondence. Why not a few quarterly e-mails to everyone state wide from a few of our state and national Republican leaders (Mitch?). Let’s get some folks to light some fires and get our state back on track, then maybe our country.