Gov. Dean, I'm still sold.

Dear Fellow Democrat,

Monday I wrote to you about our progress growing the party from the ground up, and put the timetable in your hands. Democrats everywhere overwhelmingly responded to the challenge. The goal was $250,000 by Friday to add another state to the program — you hit it in only 48 hours.

That means organizers and other resources can be immediately put on the ground in one more state: Kansas. It's a so-called red state where we know we can win. We have won state-wide before — and building an organized, permanent grassroots base will help elect Democrats up and down the ballot.

Your response made it clear that you want to move fast. So I spoke yesterday with the staff leading this unprecedented national organizing effort. I asked them to speed up the process, and they told me that if we have the resources we could have four more states ready to announce as early as next week.

This means a bigger commitment to fund the program. But if we can raise half a million dollars through next week we can start hiring and training organizers in four new states:

http://www.democrats.org/challenge

I get grief sometimes that this kind of thing might not help us with the narrow goal to win elections. I don't care. I don't want to win 51-49. I want to win 85-15. And we'll only do that if we've got people working every day on the ground to convert people into Democrats.