10:45 am
More Thoughts on the Ground Game
Over the weekend, a friend sent me the link to a picture taken at a party celebrating Obama’s Super Tuesday win in Delaware:
I had a blast working with these guys. We were operating out of a Longshoreman’s Union hall in South Wilmington. My job was to get canvassers out the door and make sure that they knew what to do and where to go. If I remember correctly, we sent out over 800 volunteers that day.
Going into the weekend before Super Tuesday, Obama was behind in Delaware. That Sunday, over five thousand people came out to see him at a rally in Wilmington. That helped narrow the margin, but going into Tuesday, most polls had Obama and Clinton tied or within a point or two of one another.
Obama won Delaware by nine points. Although some of that was momentum, a big part of it was the ground game. I remember hearing on the radio that turnout in Wilmington was double what people had expected. I also remember an interview with Hillary’s Delaware campaign manager, who said that her candidate had lost because of extraordinary turnout in the Second Congressional District.
Here is what The New York Times had to say about that race:
Obama won in Delaware, capturing two of the state’s three counties after recruiting large numbers of volunteers in recent days. His widest margin of victory was in the north of the state, in New Castle County, which includes Wilmington, where candidates fought for 4 of the 15 delegates Delaware was set to award on Tuesday.
Now I recognize that Delaware is not representative — it’s a lot easier to generate that kind of turnout in a small, densely populated state. But what I saw in Wilmington — intensive canvassing in the days leading up to Super Tuesday, precisely targeted GOTV in high density neighborhoods, and a strong phone bank — is the kind of operation that the Obama campaign will have on the ground in every battleground state come election day.
During the primaries, I volunteered in five states: South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. With the exception of Pennsylvania (where I was assigned to the Hillary stronghold of Scranton), Obama had similar operations everywhere I worked. In Virginia, for example, I helped manage a phone bank where 400 volunteers made over 35,000 calls in seven days.
Most analysts think the Obama campaign’s organizing efforts will net him two or three points in key states. I don’t disagree. But I think there’s also a very real chance that the margin it provides be even greater than that.
Come election day, watch the turnout in places like Gary, Indianapolis, Bloomington, and Evansville, Indiana; Columbus, Cleveland, Akron, and Toledo, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, State College and Scranton, Pennsylvania; and Detroit, Ann Arbor, Lansing, Saginaw, Flint, and Pontiac, Michigan. The Obama campaign will try to win these cities by margins of at least 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1.
Somewhere on election day — perhaps Indiana, North Carolina, or Virginia — that approach will help Obama pull off an upset. And that might end up being the difference between Obama becoming President or an also-ran.