So, how'd we do?

The candidate filing period for the February 2008 primary election has ended. Now's a good time to step back and see how successful our party's candidate recruitment efforts have been compared to previous years.

Our Congressional Representative races are well-stocked with candidates, as they have been in previous years. So let's move down to the state level.

Out of sixteen state senator/representative seats up this time around, not including ones which are less than ten percent in DuPage, we filled six slots on the ballot. This is a notable improvement from both 2004 and 2006 in which we only filled four of these slots, but we still have a long way to go.

At the county level, improvement is marginal if even that. Seven out of twelve county board seats will have Democratic candidates on the ballot, compared with five out of twelve in 2006 and five out of six in 2004. We only managed to fill one out of three forest preserve slots on the ballot this time around, compared to none in 2006 and two in 2004. And we filled slots for zero out of five county-wide officer positions, compared with zero in 2006 and two in 2004.

Obviously the quality of candidates also matters, but there's no real way to quantify that until we see how they do against the Republicans. In terms of numbers alone, we're not seeing much progress except for the State Senate.

Where we have seen great improvement is in precinct committeebeing recruitment. Here are some numbers:

Township	Total precincts	PCs on ballot 2006	PCs on ballot 2008
Wayne	39	3	4
Bloomingdale	72	10	26
Addison	64	9	20
Winfield	35	9	13
Milton	109	28	49
York	130	23	35
Naperville	60	6	25
Lisle	95	9	22
Downers Grove	128	26	43

That's a total of 237 precincts with Democratic PCs on the ballot, compared with 123 last time around. With well over seven hundred precincts in DuPage, there's still a long way to go with this too, but an increase of nearly 100% is something we should all be proud of.

Update: Edited for formatting fix.