(Community Matters) The barista in our hotel’s Starbucks this morning, “Don’t worry he’s going to win. My girlfriend is in Indiana and they worked until 3am last night. It’s all about the ground game, and McCain doesn’t have one.” He was responding to my Obama tshirt.
BOR stories about the Austin McCain office open only a couple of hours yesterday and staffed by only two volunteers. Sean Quinn stories about McCain offices around the country only open between 9 and 5, and even when he arrives, very little activity. After several states, he quit believing the excuses that he’d just missed the volunteers or that they’d all just left for the field.
All this in large part why I’m predicting such a surge during tomorrow’s vote. I expect the Obama surge on election day to be larger than in early voting – election day is when we’ll see the youth vote peak.
The ground game by Sean Quinn:
The busiest McCain office we saw was in Arlington, at the national HQ, but tight security prevented us from getting any pictures. Ironically, that was our first full office, in our 11th battleground state.
Offices in Troy, Ohio were closed on Saturday October 11. With perfect coincidental timing, two elderly women dropped by to volunteer but found the office shut. At Republican state headquarters in Columbus later the same day, one lonely dialer sat in a sea of unoccupied chairs. In Des Moines on September 25, another empty office. In Santa Fe on September 17, one dialer made calls while six chatted amongst themselves about how they didn’t like Obama. In Raleigh this past Saturday, ten days before the election with early voting already open, two women dialed and a male staffer watched the Georgia-LSU game. In Durango, Colorado on September 20, the Republican office was locked and closed. Indiana didn’t have McCain Victory offices when we were there in early October.
When the offices are open, they have reduced hours. We can confidently plan to get evening good-light photographs of a town after we visit the local McCain office, because we know it will be closing by 5 pm, as the office in Wilmington, North Carolina was this past Sunday. The plan is, get to inevitably closed/closing McCain office, get an hour of photos near sunset, then visit the bustling local Obama office.
In Cortez, CO, we had Republican volunteers pose for action-shot photos. The same in Española, New Mexico. Posed. For some time at the outset, we were willing to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. They convinced us they were really working, and that we had just had unfortunate timing. It wasn’t until the pattern of “just missed it” started to sound like a drumbeat in our ears that we began to grow skeptical. We never “just missed” any of the Obama volunteer work, because it goes on nonstop, every day, in every office, in every corner of America.
We found scattered nuggets of activity. Colorado Springs, Colorado held eight dialers and two front office volunteers. Albemarle County, Virginia had a busy office of 15 volunteers, and we reported that. Last night in Tampa, nine phonebankers were busy dialing at the Republican Party of Florida Hillsborough County HQ when we arrived at 8:00 pm. Seven dialers sat in McCain’s Hickory, North Carolina office this past Saturday afternoon.
Those offices seemed busy to us, naturally, because they were explosively full relative to other offices we’ve stopped in on. But even the Colorado Springs office was dwarfed by the Obama Colorado Springs operation.
These ground campaigns do not bear any relationship to one another. One side has something in the neighborhood of five million volunteers all assigned to very clear and specific pieces of the operation, and the other seems to have something like a thousand volunteers scattered throughout the country. Jon Tester’s 2006 Senate race in Montana had more volunteers — by a mile — than John McCain’s 2006 presidential campaign.
Community Matters 