The most successful netroots primary you never heard of, and what we can learn from it

Jeff Reardon (D) One of the most remarkable primary elections you probably weren't paying attention to happened two weeks ago on May 15th. It wasn't the latest iteration of Mitt Romney's hapless yet inexorable march to his nomination; in fact, it didn't involve a federal race at all. Instead, it was a Democratic primary in Oregon's state House of Representatives, set in HD-48, a constituency of only about 60,000 people located in a slice of SE Portland and its Clackamas County suburbs, a race where only about 4,000 people voted.

What set this little race apart from the many other legislative races out there? It was a race where the netroots and their allies spotted a problem -- the need to replace an entrenched but troublesome conservaDem, Mike Schaufler, with someone more progressive -- and worked harmoniously to solve it. And solve it they did: in the end, the netroots-backed challenger, Jeff Reardon, not ony won, but did so by a crushing 66-34 margin.

After a few initial high-profile successes (like Ned Lamont's victory over Joe Lieberman or Donna Edwards' victory over Al Wynn, both in 2006), we haven't seen a lot of netroots primaries with happy endings recently. However, this one did, and there are some takeaways we might learn from it:

' Start small. State legislatures are important in their own right, as we've seen in ALEC's attempts to implement the Republican agenda state-by-state, or how much impact Republican control over legislatures had on the decennial redistricting process. And they're the main bench for developing Democratic talent for federal races later. But unlike federal races -- where netroots dollars are just a drop in the bucket -- the much smaller size of legislative districts plays into progressive strengths, where on-the-ground organizing and face-to-face persuasion can be more important than who racks up six or seven figures for TV advertising. That was the case in Oregon.

' Get focused. instead of spreading things around too many different races, in the case of the Oregon race, progressives found the weakest link and made that their sole focus. This was especially important because Oregon currently has a 30-30 split between the parties in the state House; one Democrat who occasionally sides with the Republicans can make all the difference in the balance of power. Not every other House Dem is the model of 100% progressiveness, but they found the one who was least cooperative, yet still in a district blue enough to support a more progressive alternative.

' Find friends. This wasn't a netroots race alone (though MoveOn publicized it a lot). A number of labor unions and environmental groups (like League of Conservation Voters) also got in the fight, providing financial resources, and Oregon's labor-backed Working Families Party provided much of the firepower on the ground. Also, they located a battleground with favorable terrain: Oregon has closed primaries, meaning only Democrats were participating, and it's also a relatively "clean politics" state with little in the way of traditional machine politics, where a hierarchical power structure might blunt any insurgency (as the netroots found out to its chargin in one of its bigger fails, the 2008 attempt to primary out conservaDem Dan Lipinski in Chicago's dark-blue IL-03).

We'll delve into the details of this race over the fold: