Tea Party Forums, Not As Hard As They Sound
By admin | November 17, 2009
After holding rallies, forums are the next type of activity that a Tea Party group can accumulate local support from. These most often consist of a panel of people or a specific person that is an authority on a specific topic. They will usually have prepared comments about the issue that the forum is built around and then they take questions from the audience. Now this takes a little more time to set up and participate in then a rally, but can offer some great benefits for getting your groups name into the community.
To hold a forum you will need to have a venue to hold the speakers and people, usually inside, with a stage available, and seating, so this one can cost some money, unless you can find someone to donate such a space. Different issues you can hold forums on include things such as, the health care bill, where you can have local doctors on the pannel, that are knowledgeable about the bill discuss its pros and cons, or Cap and Trade, where business owners and economists can talk about what this idea will do to our economy.
To get speakers for forums on health care, you can contact some of your local doctors organizations and find out where they stand on the issue. Then ask the ones that have the same goals on that issues as your organization if they recommend anyone to speak on the issue. You can often get local speakers to come and talk on forums such as this for free, or for just the cost of their travel expenses.
Also, you may want to have a dissenting voice on these issues on your panel, just be sure that the speakers on both sides are at about the same caliber on the issues and in speaking ability. If you put someone up their as a stick man that is easily blown over by your conservative speakers, it can look petty and vindictive for your group.
Another thing you can do with a forum, is to hold a candidate forum on issues. For this you will need a venue like for an issues based forum, that was described above. But, you invite each of the candidates for a specific political office you would like to highlight in your area. Be sure to invite all the candidates, no mater where they stand on the political spectrum. The reason you should do this is to not only try to show that your organization is being genuine about the issue, but it also stops your group from getting in trouble for breaking some campaign laws. Most of the time (or in the case of our organization, all of the time) when you invite the politicians that are liberal, they simply won’t show up for the forum anyway.
For candidate forums to work well for the conservative message and your organization, you need to be sure that the conservative candidates will show well before the public. If they don’t have a good personality, or don’t speak and relay their message well to groups, you may want to think about doing something else.
With a little imagination you can turn these into fun events. For instance, at a forum we held for our House of Representatives candidates, when our current Representative did not show up for the forum, we left a seat on stage with their name on it, and as we progressed through the forum round table we would still announce the representatives name for the question and they say “oh, yes, since your not here to talk to your constituents this question will go to…”
This became a running joke throughout the forum, mostly because at the time our representative was trying to avoid holding town hall meetings, because their view on health care and many other issues is not in line with our community. By holding 3 different forums, which had between 400-600 people at each, where we highlighted different issues and used this missing candidate tactic, we were able to shame our Rep into finally holding a live town hall. Of course, at that town hall even though over 60% of the people were against the Health Care Bill, our Rep still voted for the bill in the house. Going to be a bad call for them in 2010. But, I’m sure we’ll discuss that some more in the future…
Topics: Organizing a Tea Party | 1 Comment »
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[...] of pull anyway. But, thanks to the efforts of our Tea Party organization putting together multiple forums, rallies, and other events, we have already had success unseating an incumbent city council member [...]