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The battle for the Senate has been a cliffhanger for months. Races in at least ten states that will decide the balance of power have remained too close to call, despite corporate pundits' haste to forecast a GOP victory. Now, on the eve of Election Day, it's tempting to throw up your hands, sit back and wait for the returns to come in.
That's exactly what Republicans are hoping we'll do. Give up hope and do nothing.
What's the alternative?
How can progressives channel our outrage over the possibility of the GOP ruling both houses of Congress for the remaining two years of Obama's presidency? Pushing whatever legislation they want to further their far-right agenda and keep our country from moving forward? Holding the power to control the nation's courts by blocking judicial nominations, including seats on the Supreme Court?
If you can, take tomorrow off from work. Call your local Democratic campaign office, and show up to volunteer. Don't fool yourself into thinking one more volunteer won't make a difference. It will, and they need us. Bring your cell phone. Whether it's making phone calls to voters or going out to knock on doors and flush folks out who haven't voted yet, your efforts will pay off.
If your state is true blue or red and doesn't have a close Senate or House race, it's even easier to make a difference. From the comfort of your own home, or wherever you happen to be, the number one way you can help is to call voters in other states.
Through its Voters Rising campaign, MoveOn.org has helped volunteers around the country make over five million calls to progressive voters in targeted states so far, voters who are on the fence about voting in the midterms. You can help reach even more. There are still calling shifts available that you can sign up for right now.
Calling voters is empowering for both you and the people you'll talk with. Make a little time to do it. You'll speak with good-hearted citizens in other states who share your views and may have just been waiting for the extra push you'll give them in order to vote this year.
The reality is that there's never a better time than the few days immediately before an election to call voters and remind them to go to the polls. In 2004, I worked to elect John Kerry in North Carolina. Our office was overrun with volunteers in the campaign's closing days, spread out in every room and hallway with cell phones and call sheets. But there's always more phone calls to be made than there are volunteers available to make them.
With control of the Senate hanging in the balance, the stakes are high in 2014. Spend some time between now and tomorrow night dialing for voters, and you'll go to bed on Tuesday knowing you helped make a difference in this election.
Until last week, recent events in the presidential race might have seemed too strange for fiction. A movie about a candidate battling age-related concerns, who would be the oldest president in history if elected, choosing the least experienced VP ever, and announcing the choice on his 72nd birthday? It would have been laughed off the screen. Thanks to John McCain's warped judgment, no one's laughing now.
Add in the fact that the McCain campaign rolled out Sarah Palin by focusing on her family and biography, managing to whitewash most of her extreme right-wing views, and you'd have more cause for disbelief. Yet the mass media was celebrity-struck. McCain played the Paris Hilton card against Barack Obama, accusing him of being too famous. Still, McCain wanted his own infotainment soap opera star to juice up his lackluster campaign, and in Palin he got one.
Palin has rallied the far right Republican base, drooling at the 1 in 3 actuarial chance that McCain will die in office if McCain/Palin win. Since she wants to ban abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest, what would a President Palin's Supreme Court picks look like?
But she's also got Democrats and independent voters mad as hell that McCain would gamble with the future of our country so recklessly.
So what to do? How can progressives channel our outrage over the prospect of an unqualified, dangerously far-right wing ideologue, rabidly partisan pitbull with lipstick like Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency?
Here's a simple solution. If there's an Obama campaign office near you, get down there and volunteer. Don't fool yourself into thinking one more volunteer won't make a difference. It will, and they need us. If your state is true blue or red and not in play this cycle at the presidential level, you can volunteer for a Democratic candidate for Congress. And it's not too late to donate or raise some money from friends for Obama. Log onto MyBarackObama.com to get started.
Four years ago, I worked for John Kerry in North Carolina. Based in Durham and Orange counties, the most liberal part of the state, I oversaw a voter registration effort that added more than a quarter of all the voters registered that year by the N.C. Democrats.
The most important factor was that we mobilized a huge number of local volunteers into a grassroots voter registration army. In 2004, Democrats were fired up to get rid of George W. Bush. Even folks normally detached from politics were energized by the unfolding disaster of Bush's first term in the White House, and the mess he'd gotten us into by invading Iraq.
By the voter registration deadline, more than 400 volunteers were working with us to register voters in both counties, with teams on the ground three shifts a day. From the Durham Democratic party office, we deployed volunteer voter registrars to high-traffic sites - grocery stores, bus stations, college campuses, libraries, concerts, festivals, and anywhere else we could think to register likely Democratic voters. As our volunteer ranks exploded, the number of voters we added to the rolls reached into the thousands.
The weekend before election day, U.S. Rep. David Price was on hand to watch the crowd of get-out-the-vote volunteers streaming into our headquarters, so big they filled the parking lot. "They trained 1,000 people in Durham," he was overheard saying later, in wonderment. It was the largest outpouring of support ever seen for a North Carolina election.
Yet even with all the volunteers we had, and all we accomplished in our office, we could have done a lot more. We did everything we could to get volunteers in the door, but there were still many nights in the campaign's final two months with work to be done, and not enough hands on deck to do it.
A big part of the reason Bush was able to add three million votes in 2004 to his popular vote totals from 2000 was because Karl Rove masterminded a sweeping Republican voter registration drive during those years. GOP activists all over the country signed up voters at conservative churches and events like state fairs, NASCAR races, and country music concerts.
During 2008, the Obama campaign has flipped the script. Our efforts in 2004 were funded by the N.C. Democratic Party. By contrast, Obama has directly invested in voter registration as part of his national strategy. Obama field organizers started registering voters during the primary season, and have picked up where they left off in every state being contested for the general election.
And it's working. News accounts have trickled out all year long about Democrats adding voters to the rolls since 2004, while Republican registrations have declined.
September is possibly the month in an election cycle when volunteer help is the most productive. Voter registration deadlines in most states (the ones without same-day registration) don't occur until early October. If you show up to volunteer now, you can bank votes for Obama. You can roll up your sleeves and transform your distaste for Sarah Palin and John McCain into on-the-ground activity that will help win this election.
Plus, you'll have a good time. I met my wife on the campaign trail in 2004. Campaign offices are social places. You'll meet dedicated, good-hearted people who share your views and have fun fighting for a common goal. Make time to do it. Turn the local Obama office into your hang-out spot for the next couple months.
Four years ago, after John Kerry failed to respond forcefully to a month of swiftboating attacks, we saw a marked decrease in volunteer enthusiasm in our office. The energy picked back up, but it was valuable time lost. At a moment when McCain is coming off his convention bounce in the polls, Republicans would love it if we lost hope again, sat back on our hands and did nothing.
In light of the John Edwards affair scandal, the country dodged a bullet in 2004 when Edwards was defeated for the Democratic nomination by John Kerry. Thinking about a candidate with Edwards’ stunningly bad judgement in the Oval Office is enough to make anyone shudder, unless you’re a fan of how George W. Bush has driven America into the ditch for the past eight years.
Still a first term U.S. Senator from North Carolina, Edwards was struggling to stay in the presidential race during late 2003 after his fundraising dried up. He had trouble making his payroll that December, a fact his staff kept secret. His campaign was running on fumes before his surprise second place showing in the Iowa caucuses over better known contenders like Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt gave it new life.
Kerry narrowly edged Edwards in Iowa on Jan. 19, with 37.6% of the vote to Edwards’ 31.8%. Kerry rode the momentum from his Iowa victory and steamrolled his opponents, winning all but four of the primaries and caucuses that followed. He wrapped up the nomination when Edwards dropped out in early March.
With participation in the Iowa caucuses estimated at about 124,000 that year, Edwards would have won if only a few thousand caucusgoers had chosen him over Kerry. And it could easily have happened. By caucus night, Edwards was surging on the strength of his powerful "Two Americas" closing speech, which he rolled out late in the game on Dec. 29, and his last minute endorsement by the Des Moines Register. It’s plausible that then Edwards would have been the one coasting on a wave of subsequent victories to the nomination.
According to NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd, Edwards' chief miscalculation was not devoting more of his energy to Iowa in 2003, instead of spending so much time in New Hampshire. The Edwards campaign only started rounding up Iowa precinct captains in early December, and eventually had them in place in just 75% of all precincts. In longtime USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro's book on the '04 race, One Car Caravan, he described Edwards' statewide caucus organization as "having been assembled out of tin foil and chewing gum."
In early 2004, I volunteered for Edwards’ presidential campaign at his headquarters in Raleigh, N.C. It gave me an up close glimpse at an operation that often seemed as much software start-up as national political campaign. I witnessed a weird hybrid of an organization that was chronically disorganized, struggling to adapt to the big leagues of presidential politics, and flying by the seat of its pants, but with a top-down, corporate feel.
I should have known things were a little nutty after meeting Edwards’ close pal and eventual baby daddy fall guy Andrew Young, then serving as Director of Operations. Young handed me a campaign credit card on my second day through the door as a volunteer (I’d walked in off the street, with no mention of my previous campaign experience), and sent me out to pick up supplies.
My volunteer duties started with stuffing envelopes, about as entry level as it gets, before I graduated to phonebanking, calling to put other local volunteers on the schedule, and helping answer the phones. Which afforded me a window seat to the campaign’s panic on the morning after Edwards won the South Carolina primary on Feb. 3. As luck would have it, the not-ready-for-prime-time Edwards for President website crashed due to traffic overload. Campaign staffers and volunteers spent the day taking hundreds of credit card donations over the phone.
Following South Carolina, Edwards’ only primary win that year, I e-mailed a close friend of Elizabeth Edwards and asked him to pass along some of my observations as a volunteer about how the campaign was functioning. In retrospect, this was a naïve move on my part, since things were set in stone by that point. Who knows if my e-mail was ultimately given any more attention than the myriad letters that arrived at the headquarters containing unsolicited campaign advice, and were promptly stored away in filing cabinets, unread and unanswered. Although Elizabeth’s friend did get back to me immediately, and we had a long phone conversation.
I’m not saying his 2004 effort was grossly mismanaged, because every political campaign is chaotic to a degree. But re-reading what I wrote in hindsight of Edwards’ tabloid downfall, I’m struck by how fortunate it is that the Edwards campaign wasn’t a little more organized that winter, at least based on what I saw from my admittedly limited perspective as an ordinary volunteer.
In 2004, I worked for the North Carolina Democratic Party’s Coordinated Campaign. With then-sitting U.S. Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) on the national ticket as John Kerry’s running mate, North Carolina was thought to be in play for the fall.
So for the first time in years (if not ever), the various Democratic campaigns in N.C. reached an agreement to fund voter registration efforts. In the past, this work had been left to non-profits and other, non-party groups. This time around, the state party was determined to go the extra mile to try and turn North Carolina blue for Kerry-Edwards, not to mention holding onto Edwards’ Senate seat by helping former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles beat Rep. Richard Burr (R-N.C.).
A team of voter registration organizers were brought on board, and dispersed throughout the state in areas with historically high levels of Democratic turnout. As one of the few organizers with past voter registration experience, I was placed in charge of Durham and Orange counties, the state’s Democratic strongholds. Although they account for only 2% of the 100 counties in North Carolina, Durham and Orange typically produce 25% of the statewide Democratic vote.
Our voter registration goal for the cycle was 42,000. As it turned out, the party fell short of its goal, and only registered about 34,000 new voters in all.
In Durham and Orange, however, we blew past our goals and signed up 9,200 voters, approximately 27% of the total number registered statewide. Even better, nearly two-thirds of them were Democrats, versus a very low number of Republicans, maybe 10-15 percent.
We were far from the only group in town doing voter registration. Everywhere you turned, it seemed, someone was registering voters that year. Non-profit advocacy groups like Democracy North Carolina and NC NARAL, grassroots alliances like Durham for Kerry and the local MoveOn chapter, they all launched their own voter registration drives before the Democrats even got started. The student governments at UNC-CH, NCCU and Duke registered students to vote, in official drives that were separate from the voter registration efforts we and other groups helped coordinate on the three campuses.
But even with lots of competition, we were able to produce such high numbers for several reasons. The pool of potentially unregistered, Democratic-leaning voters in both counties was deep by definition, in the state’s two most liberal counties. Even folks normally detached from politics were energized by the unfolding disaster of George W. Bush’s first term in the White House, and the mess he’d gotten us into by invading Iraq. And although North Carolina hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976, people thought this year, with John Edwards, a sitting U.S. Senator from our own state on the national ticket, North Carolina might just go blue.
The most important factor was that we mobilized a ridiculous number of local volunteers into a grassroots voter registration army. Traditionally, volunteering for a political campaign means signing up for one of three basic activities – phonebanking, canvassing voters door-to-door, or databasing. Some people are willing to do any of the three, and some prefer one activity over the others. But when we started running two training sessions a day for volunteers to learn how to register voters, people got interested fast. Soon, we had to find more and more sites to send the avalanche of volunteers who decided they liked going out into the community and registering new voters.
By the voter registration deadline in early October, more than 400 volunteers were working with us to register voters in both counties, with teams on the ground three shifts a day. From the Durham Democratic party headquarters, we deployed volunteer voter registrars to high-traffic sites all over Durham and Orange – grocery stores, bus stations, college campuses, libraries, concerts, festivals, and anywhere else where we could get permission to register voters.
Our voter registration volunteers were an amazing bunch. They were willing to go wherever we sent them, whether it was registering liberal yuppies on the lawn of Weaver Street Market in Carrboro or low-income residents of East Durham outside the Lowe’s Foods on Holloway Street. They set up shop for hours at a time to snare new voters, braving rain and cold, sometimes not returning to the office until late at night with their stacks of completed voter registration forms.
Although we were Democrats, our voter registration was non-partisan – we registered anyone who wanted to, including Republicans. During 2004, Republican parties in several battleground states hired companies to conduct shady voter registration drives. Democrats were registered, but their forms were thrown out instead of being properly delivered to local elections boards. The N.C. Democratic Party made it clear to everyone involved with its voter registration efforts that failure to turn in filled-out voter registration forms was a firing offense, or cause for a volunteer’s dismissal.
Still, there were plenty of places that wouldn’t allow even non-partisan voter registration on their premises. We couldn’t register voters, and neither could any non-profit organization that wasn’t a political party. These included places like the major malls in Durham, Wal-Mart locations, and surprisingly, all the area post offices, except the Franklin Street branch in downtown Chapel Hill, which has a long-standing tradition of allowing citizens to petition outside on its plaza.
As our volunteer ranks exploded, and the number of voters we were adding to the rolls reached into the thousands, everyone started getting giddy. We thought maybe we could drum up enough new voters in Durham and Orange alone to tip the statewide balance and win North Carolina for the Democrats.
On the last day of voter registration for the November elections, I encouraged several of my most hardcore, committed volunteers to go directly to some of these same high-traffic places where we’d been forbidden to register voters. We discussed strategies to use when they’d inevitably be asked to leave, and what might play out. It was up to them whether they wanted to commit civil disobedience for the cause of voter registration, but several folks were willing that day, and they did. One courageous volunteer, Susan Baylies, later wrote an account of her experience that appeared in the Independent Weekly’s Front Porch:
Guerrilla registrar
by SUSAN BAYLIES
Before this election season I didn't consider myself very political. I always vote for president, but I rarely noticed those little elections. Now my minivan carries card tables, chairs and clipboards of voter registration forms at all times. I think my desire to volunteer was bolstered by MoveOn.org and Fahrenheit 9/11.
One Saturday, I volunteered with a local nonprofit to spend all day driving around, knocking on doors where no one was home, and then leaving lame flyers on doorsteps of already registered voters. It seemed like a colossal waste of time, but the great thing they taught me was how to register voters correctly. I decided that until the Oct. 8 deadline, any time I could spare would go to helping people register.
First I tried going door to door in my own neighborhood. Most people were happy I called on them and several did need to register. Then I began volunteering with the Democrats by setting up a table at Food Lions or Kmarts. It was exciting to sign up first time voters. I made signs to go with each table and then I printed up some T-shirts that read, "Are You Registered to Vote?" I live in those shirts.
As Oct. 8 approached, I found myself going solo asking people everywhere if they were registered. I stopped at a convenience store where a bunch of men were hanging out. They had never voted before, but were glad to sign up if it meant they could help get rid of George Bush.
I saw everything through new eyes, asking myself, "How many potential Kerry voters are in this crowd? Should I speak up?" Sometimes I would be non-partisan, sometimes openly pro-Kerry, depending on whether I thought some manager might ask me to leave. At fast-food restaurants I would hang a sign at my table, "Register to Vote Here."
For the final day I thought a post office would be the best spot. I had heard that the manager at the post office on Estes Street in Chapel Hill had denied permission to the Democrats to set up there. They were covering the other post offices, so I decided to go there anyway. I set up my card table and signs at 2:30 p.m. without asking. I had forgotten my chairs, but some angel sent another self-made guerrilla voter registrar to my side. He approached me with clipboard in arm, wearing a black baseball cap topped with a goofy yellow handwritten sign saying "Register to Vote Here." He said, "I guess we're here for the same reason. Wanna work together?" I said, "Sure, but I don't have any chairs." No problem, he had four chairs in his car but no table. He also pulled out a huge homemade sign saying "LAST DAY to Register to Vote!"
Three or four people immediately flocked to our table, and then the postal manager came out. "It's against our policy for you to set up here, you will have to leave immediately." I made my best case for staying, pointing out that voter registration was allowed at other post offices, including Franklin Street; I was doing my non-partisan American duty and it was the last three hours of voter registration. He brought another employee to back him up, and she said we could move way across the parking lot right by the street, off the post office's private property. I shook my head--no, I don't think so.
By now, a woman who was registering got quite angry and said to the postal worker, "That's ridiculous! What's your name? I'm going to write a letter to the newspaper about this."
With all these supportive witnesses, I pulled out my trump card. "I'm not leaving here until 5:30 p.m. Call the police to drag me away if you don't like it." Baseball cap angel said, "Whew! Sounds like we should call the media right now!" He whipped out a cell phone and began talking to the news desk at The N&O to see if they wanted to send out a reporter. The postal employee blustered, "It's not me, my supervisor has this policy, I just have to enforce my boss' rules." I repeated, "I'm not leaving." Everyone was agitated. Baseball cap suggested he call that boss. So they retreated inside the post office and he came back five minutes later saying we could stay.
We were all elated with the Victory for the People! Baseball cap called off the media and we continued with our brisk registration service, helping 50-60 people register in the next three hours. Several people donated whole sheets of stamps. The postal teller smiled as she hand-stamped the crucial postmark on every form we ran in.
It was a good day to be assertive. I have never been arrested or stood up to authority like that before, but getting out the vote this year is worth it.
The volunteers who mobilized to register voters in Durham and Orange then became the backbone of a highly successful early vote campaign and election day GOTV operations. During two weeks of early voting, 46,000 votes were cast in Durham versus 10,600 in 2000; and 33,000 people voted in Orange compared with 9,000 in 2000.
The two biggest blue dots on this map are Orange and Durham counties.
The weekend before the elections, Rep. David Price was on hand to watch the crowd of election day volunteers streaming into our headquarters, so big they filled the parking lot. “They trained 1,000 people in Durham,” he was overheard saying later, in wonderment. It was the largest outpouring of volunteer support ever seen for a North Carolina election.
In the end, all our efforts didn’t matter, because the results in November weren’t even close. Bush took 56 percent of the vote, versus 43.5 percent for the Kerry/Edwards ticket, almost identical to his 56-43 victory in North Carolina over Gore in 2000.
But lots of people got involved in grassroots politics because of our efforts that year, and many of them stayed involved. We registered a lot of Democrats to vote in the Triangle, and helped build a more progressive North Carolina for the future. It was a remarkable election season. I’ll never forget the dedicated, good-hearted people I met and worked with that year, like Susan Baylies. It was a moment when a diverse section of the community came together in a humble office building in Durham to fight together for something we all believed in.
(Join volunteers from Triangle for Obama on Saturday, Jan. 26 in an election day caravan to South Carolina to get out the vote for Barack Obama. Take action to make change on this historic day! Volunteers will meet at Brier Creek Shopping Center, 8651 Brier Creek Pkwy, Raleigh. For more info, contact Carolyn Cameron @ (919) 321-2665 / carolyn-cameron@hotmail.com, or visit the Triangle for Obama Meetup Group. Obama's South Carolina webpage is http://www.sc.barackobama.com/.)
Temo Figueroa, national outreach director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, had one question for the crowd of nearly 4,000 who turned out at a NCCU rally for Obama in early November. “How far is South Carolina?” he asked, while warming up the audience before the candidate took the stage. “Not far enough,” hollered back one supporter. But the gameplan was clear.
The Obama campaign was already thinking ahead, and touching down in Durham was as much about rounding up volunteers for South Carolina’s Jan. 26 primary as winning votes in North Carolina. Supporters who added themselves to the Obama campaign’s text message network at the rally were soon contacted and asked to make the journey south of the border. Which is how we ended up in Columbia, S.C. one weekend in December, canvassing and phonebanking likely Obama voters.
For us, driving from Chapel Hill, the answer to Teno’s question was about four hours. This was our second trip in two weeks, having also gone down to Columbia to witness Obama’s star rally with Oprah Winfrey.
We listened to Oprah testify to the audience that “Dr. King dreamed the dream, but we don't have to just dream the dream anymore. We get to vote that dream into reality.” And watched as Obama brought the cheering, multi-racial crowd of 29,000 to its feet in a South Carolina football stadium, the first state of the old Confederacy to secede from the Union, with his stirring reminder that “The fire hoses came out, the dogs came out, but they kept on standing up. Because a few stood up, a few thousand stood up, and then a few million stood up, standing up with courage and conviction. They changed the world.” It was a historic moment.
We’ve volunteered and worked for political campaigns in the past, but this is the first time in several years we’ve both felt “fired up” about a candidate.
There were a lot of other volunteers on hand from neighboring states. A busload had driven up from Atlanta, and spent the day canvassing neighborhoods. Folks from Birmingham had come, too. And we met long-term volunteers, including a law student from UCLA who was spending his two-week Christmas break in Columbia, and a recent grad from Florida who had arrived a month earlier and was sharing an apartment with several other volunteers.
That weekend, the office was humming as volunteers struggled to process all 29,000 information cards that audience members had filled out as a condition of entry to the Oprah rally a week before.
Rally goers who had signed up as future Obama volunteers were being called and invited to organizational meetings across the state that coming week. Volunteers and staff members checked and updated each new name using the campaign’s existing database of registered voters and Obama supporters.
With every election cycle campaign technology improves, but we both felt Obama’s South Carolina operation was more organized than past campaigns we’ve worked on. And much more able to effectively harness volunteer energy, which is key for any successful campaign.
The fact that Team Obama asked for contact information from the 66,500 audience members who turned out for Oprah’s three-state endorsement tour was a smart move. In 2004, Bruce Springsteen held a concert rally for the Kerry-Edwards ticket in Madison, Wisconsin right before the November election, drawing a crowd of approximately 80,000. But no one knows for sure how many, because no tickets or personal information were collected.
“We estimated a good portion of them were new to the campaign and were hearing John Kerry for the first time,” said Stephanie Cutter, Kerry communications director. “The difference is we didn't sign those 80,000 people up to work for us in the Wisconsin general election. An endorsement is more than an endorsement when you're creating a field plan around it.”
Judging from the calls we made to volunteers who had signed on at the rally, their enthusiasm levels had cranked way up, and they were ready to work. More than a few exclaimed, “Fired up!” when they learned we were calling from Obama’s campaign. “I’ll be at the meeting, and I’m bringing my grandkids,” one woman told Erik. She was 80 years old.
“I’m coming straight from my job, but I’ll do it, and I can’t wait,” said a recent college grad. No problem getting there, every single person knew exactly how to get to the churches and other community locations where the organizational meetings were to be held.
In the afternoon, the campaign sent us out to canvass in a mostly black, core Democratic neighborhood near downtown Columbia. We visited houses with steep, crumbling, concrete steps and doors falling off their hinges. Just on one side on a short street, two of the hand-picked addresses of voters who had consistently voted for Democrats were now abandoned – one because of arson, the other just falling down.
We each took one side of the street. At first, our knocks on doors were mostly unanswered. Before we moved on to the next house on our lists, those silent doors received small brochures about why to consider voting for Obama.
Sometimes, people responded to our knocking. Suspicious faces appeared behind torn screen doors. Their first glances at us, white people carrying clipboards, must have meant nothing good to them, because their faces registered mistrust and wariness. We quickly learned to say right away, “We’re volunteers with the Barack Obama campaign.” This simple sentence allowed a conversation to begin, and literally led to doors opening. And always, the suspicion was replaced with real interest.
Walking between houses, M.L. was met by a young man coming towards her. She asked if he was registered to vote. He said he couldn’t vote because he was a convicted felon, but could get his rights restored if he paid some money, and should be able to vote in the next election. He said he would vote for Obama. Then he asked, “Do you think he’ll do anything about this?” as he pointed to the decrepit and empty houses on his street. M.L. said, “I think he’ll try,” and handed him a brochure.
With the black vote estimated to make up at least half of the Democratic primary electorate in South Carolina, it’s crucial for Obama to win by a large margin among black voters. For most of last year, he and Hillary Clinton ran roughly even. Post-Oprah, polls showed Obama pulling away. He led one CBS poll in mid-December by 52% of black voters to Clinton’s 27%, with John Edwards at 2%.
Several times, the folks we talked with said they were considering Obama, but “wanted to see how things shook out.” They hadn’t made up their minds, were leaning his way, just still didn’t know if Barack could go the distance.
This dovetails with how interviews with black voters in South Carolina have repeatedly shown they were uncertain white voters would support Obama. S.C. state senator Robert Ford is one of Hillary’s prominent African-American backers in the state. He made headlines last February by claiming that with an Obama nomination, “every Democratic candidate running on that ticket would lose because he's black and he's at the top of the ticket.”
Yet Obama’s Iowa win, and the increased turnout for the state’s Democratic caucuses (239,000 showed up, versus 125,000 in 2004) seems to show his potential for expanding the Democratic vote in November. The energy is clearly with the Democrats in 2008, hungry for change after the two-term debacle of George W. Only 108,000 dispirited Republicans voted in Iowa, less than half the numbers that turned out on the Democratic side.
With the presidential primary schedule compressed like never before, there’s little time for rivals Clinton or Edwards to play catchup. Obama’s convincing victory in Iowa gives him momentum leading up to New Hampshire’s primary, where the polls previously showed him neck and neck with Clinton. And if he wins both, the two whitest early states (91% non-Hispanic whites in Iowa, 94% in New Hampshire), the last obstacle to a tidal wave of support for Obama among black voters in South Carolina will have been swept away.
Obama reminds crowds at every stop how his energy got a boost in our neighboring state, when a Greenwood, S.C. city councilwoman named Edith Childs introduced him to the chant he now uses to get audiences “fired up and ready to go!”
If the time proves right for an Obama presidency, a win in South Carolina on Jan. 26 will have done even more to pave the way.
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.)
