Confessions of a John Edwards for President Volunteer

E-mail to friend of Elizabeth Edwards, 2-10-04

Get somebody, anybody to answer the Edwards campaign’s phones!

"In most ways, the day to day operations are run in an extremely professional manner. I think the campaign has adjusted remarkably well to the reversal of fortune John's surprise second showing in Iowa afforded them. However, it's a hard thing to run a national campaign for the first time, especially after the entire staff's spent a year working as hard as they could only to feel like they were running in place, and hearing pundits count their candidate out before the first votes were cast. So growing pains are still obvious.

One area that’s lacking is local volunteer recruitment and retention. The reality is that right now, there's no one person responsible for making sure there's a full regiment of local volunteers on hand AT ALL TIMES, for phonebanking, letter writing, envelope stuffing, mailings, whatever. The staff members who are responsible for volunteer coordination are amazing, but (a) they're responsible for coordinating volunteers all over the country, not just in Raleigh, and (b) they're not from here themselves, which diminishes their effectiveness when it comes to knowing where to look to find untapped sources of local folks.

The reason this is such an important issue is because volunteer efforts like phonebanking, centralized and coordinated at campaign HQ, can make the difference in a tight race. Assuming enough people are in the seats to do the dialing. For example, John narrowly lost Oklahoma by 1,300 votes on Feb. 3. We placed GOTV calls to South Carolina voters all day long that Tuesday, and switched to Oklahoma around 4 pm EST, once the exit polls showed John winning by a comfortable margin in S.C. but struggling to pull out a victory in OK. We placed over 4,000 calls in four hours. With an hour to go before the polls closed, it was chaos, we were grabbing any staff member in the office who was available and giving them numbers to dial from the phones on their desks.

Hindsight is 20/20, but that Monday, one day earlier, we didn't have enough volunteers on hand to make hardly any calls. And sure, lots of folks helping with the campaign had gone to South Carolina for the weekend, but there are plenty of volunteers in the Triangle who can't travel out of state, but who are more than willing to drive to Raleigh and make phone calls for a few hours. If the callers had been there, more calls would have been made, and at least there might have been a chance to make a difference in the race.

So for this past weekend, we set up four days of phonebanking, from Saturday through today. The result? John placed second in both Tennessee and Virginia, edging Clark, and forcing him out of the race. In the most important contest, Tennessee, he beat Clark by over 12,000 votes.

Obviously, GOTV calls were only one piece in the winning puzzle. But when I walked into the office on Friday, we'd scheduled four days of phonebanking and had virtually nobody on the schedule to come in and make the calls. So I sat down, and got commitments from nearly 30 callers before the afternoon was over. If I hadn't been there, what would have happened? Would those calls have been made? Somebody else would have done it, but when? Everyone else had other, equally pressing projects to deal with. As a further sign that we're not doing a good job of tapping into local folks, one of the people I called and asked to come in actually worked for John in the past, she served as volunteer coordinator during his '98 Senate race! She said she had been wondering if anyone was ever going to call her, and that she had just been rounding up folks to help out with two other charitable volunteer efforts that day. Why haven't we reached out to people like this and gotten them more involved with the campaign?

That's another systemic problem, the constraints that being low on funds have placed on daily operations. People have been forced to double and triple up their workload, because the dollars aren't there to hire more staff. That's probably the biggest problem the campaign faces, aside from Kerry's overwhelming momentum. Final case in point, the campaign really needs to hire a second person full time to handle inbound calls instead of what we're doing now, which is relying on one full time person supplemented by volunteers. There's six lines, when it gets busy they're stacked up with calls, callers dropping like flies, with one full time person on the job. They do the best they can, but how can you run a national campaign with only one person answering the phones? It's penny wise but pound foolish, because every call dropped is a potential financial contribution lost. Just get somebody, anybody, to help pick up those phones!"

(UPDATE 8/15/08: The full background story behind this e-mail is HERE.)