SGnTN Casey Fleser / Some Geek in TN

I’ve been trying to do a better job of learning and keeping myself informed about the political process and the candidatess running for office. So it was that a day or two ago I saw that Tennessee 7th district candidate Justin Kanew tweeted out something about him, the 4th district candidate Mariah Phillips, and some other candidates having appeared in Maury county. I likely wouldn’t have gone, but it made me wonder how I might have learned of this appearance before it happened. I started by looking at Mariah’s pages since she’s a candidate in my district, but I couldn’t find any mention of it. Odd, but okay maybe they don’t have the resources to create and maintain a calendar. Next I tried the Rutherford County Democratic Party web site. This thing is a mess. There are these big scrolling title banners which are clipped and obscured by content that sits on top of them. Basically unreadable and useless. Unless you have a ginormous monitor I suppose. One reads “Bee with Democrat” another “Coffee Dem with the Second Wednesday Every Mo”. And don’t even bother viewing this site on mobile. One banner which appears to be showing information about voting only shows the letter “V” on my phone. Lovely.

But they did have a link to a calendar of events. Nice! I followed that link which has a nice calendar with various meetings listed clearly. So far so good. There were things like “Coffee with the Dems” and “Beer with the Dems”. The latter sounds great. If I don’t like what I hear I can drink enough to forget all about it. I clicked on that one to find out more info and… nothing. From what I can gather, Beer with the Dems happens on the second Thursday of each month. Where it happens is a complete mystery. I went through some of the other events and it’s the same for each. The RCDP is okay at telling you what events there are, but not where they are. Sigh.

Besides the regularly scheduled mystery meetings, there is nothing about any candidate meetings. It does mention that August 2nd was an election day, but nothing listed for November 6th. I seem to recall that being a fairly significant date. The Rutherford County GOP web site is actually worse somehow, but they do at least mention that there’s an election on November 6th. That’s nice I guess.

Alright, these are little county web sites created by volunteers so maybe I should cut them some slack. I don’t really want to, given all the talk I hear about how much trouble there is getting the message out, but fine. Surely the state level web sites are better.

The first thing I click on the TNDP web site is the Events link and… nothing. Zero events. Is there even an election coming up? Who can say!? The next thing I click on is Our Candidates which claims there are “more than 100 Democrats running” but under “Who’s Running?” there are only two people listed. Two. (insert facepalm here). Okay. Fine. Whatever. I also went to the state site to get links to all the county sites to compare to Rutherford. Clicking on County Parties takes you to a page which lists all 33 counties up to Hamilton. Wait, 33? There are apparently no county parties after Hamilton. Sweet Jesus. And by the way none of these have links to the county web sites, just their Facebook, Twitter, and email.

The TNGOP website isn’t much better. Although I don’t think it looks quite as nice, under Events, lo and behold, there are actual events listed! It has a map and everything. It only goes through September and doesn’t seem terribly comprehensive but at least it’s something. Also all 95 counties appear to be listed in the County Parties section. There are no links to any of their web sites and some appear to have no contact info, but they do at least acknowledge that each exists. While the Republican party site does list all the counties, there is no mention of candidates anywhere as near as I can tell.

So if I were to rely on the TNDP and TNGOP web sites as my sole source of information I might get an idea that there is an election coming up at some point and that it will be between more than 100 or possibly just 2 Democrats and no Republicans. It doesn’t really inspire confidence in your ability to govern if you can’t even put together a halfway decent web site. It’s exasperating, but then that seems to be the case with anything related to politics or government so maybe it’s by design just to get you comfortable with the whole experience. If I had to come up with a slogan for the TNDP web site it would be “Why even try?”. And for the TNGOP maybe “We don’t have to”.