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In campaign ground game, GOP confident technology will trump Obama's troops By Jim Tankersley
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (MCT) WOODBRIDGE, Va. --- For most of this decade, even when polls looked gloomy, Republicans entered Election Day with a swagger from their not-so-secret weapon: a voter turnout machine powerful enough to swing close races. Democrats have matched that confidence this year, thanks to Barack Obama's massively expensive field organization. The Democratic nominee has broken his party's tradition of leaving turnout to labor unions and rolled up statistics Republicans concede they can't match: millions of new voters registered, hundreds of campaign offices in key states, an army of door-knocking volunteers. Here in battleground Virginia alone, the Obama camp has opened 49 offices and claims to have signed up more than 165,000 new voters. That's more than half President Bush's victory margin here four years ago, when Democrats barely contested the state. "I've never seen an organization like this," said Mitch Stewart, Obama's Virginia director and a veteran of Democratic campaigns. But if the presidential race comes down to the ground game, GOP leaders are betting their technology will trump Obama's troops. McCain's 20 Virginia "victory centers" are stocked with voice-over-Internet digital telephones, which volunteers use to survey voters and record detailed information about them in a central computer. It's the latest improvement on a data-driven, surgically targeted turnout operation. Democrats "have taken a page out of the Bush-Cheney 2004 playbook," said Rich Beeson, the political director for the Republican National Committee, which is partnering with John McCain's campaign on field strategy. "The problem is, we're four years ahead of that." In a pair of counties both sides call critical to Virginia this year, the differences are plain to see. It's a battle of carpet bombs against smart bombs. At 7 p.m. on a recent Thursday in Woodbridge, Atoundra Lawson strolled under faint street lamps, a stack of glossy brochures under her arm and a pink Obama hat on her head. She squinted to make out a name and address on a white sheet, spun to find the house, then climbed the porch stairs. No answer. At the next door, the man she was looking for had long since moved. She finally found a target at House No. 4 - but he told her he supports McCain. It's a routine challenge for Lawson, a lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mom who volunteers for Obama regularly here amid the starter homes and strip malls of Northern Virginia's fast-growing exurbs. She walks neighborhoods with a list of newly registered voters, Democrats who vote irregularly and anyone the campaign thinks could be open to its message. Some days she finds Obama backers behind almost every door; others, very few. She loves to share stories with them, about their lives and why they support Obama. Lawson and her fellow volunteers employed a similarly broad approach to voter registration, which closed in Virginia last week. They blanketed grocery stores, Wal-Marts, gas stations - "anywhere and everywhere," Lawson said - and signed up hundreds of new voters. (The campaign's in-house efforts are separate from those of ACORN, the nation's largest community-organizing group, which incurred allegations of registration irregularities in several states in recent weeks.) Republicans say their approach is more targeted. The McCain campaign and Republican National Committee have confined their registration efforts in Virginia to events with high concentrations of traditionally Republican voters, including church affairs, gun shows and stock car races. In a ground-floor office in the dense suburbs of Arlington County, GOP volunteers use their digital phones to pinpoint the most motivated McCain supporters for follow-up in the hours leading into the election. A red McCain messenger bag hangs on the wall, a prize for the volunteer who logs the most calls by month's end. The data from the calls goes into a growing bank of knowledge about individual voters, which the McCain campaign will use to craft narrowly tailored turnout pitches. In 2004, for example, the GOP tried to get Hispanic women with children in New Mexico to vote by citing the No Child Left Behind law. "We know who we need to talk to," said Trey Walker, McCain's regional campaign manager for Virginia and several nearby states. "We know how to talk to them, and we know we can do it in a more cost-effective manner on the phone than by deploying teams of college kids out into the suburbs like the Obama campaign." Democrats say they're hardly low-tech: The centerpiece of the Obama campaign's grass-roots push is a Web site, www.voteforchange.com, which walks visitors through registration, polling place locations and early voting instructions. The information Lawson and others collect door-to-door goes into a targeting database. Republicans, meanwhile, brag that they've already signed up 10,000 Virginia volunteers. Last week, McCain volunteers talked to 600,000 more voters nationwide than the Bush campaign did for the same week in 2004. But both operations still face questions. Democrats ask if McCain can turn out enough hard-core supporters to win in a year when polls suggest fewer voters identify with the GOP. Obama's operation paid dividends in the primary season - particularly in caucus states such as Iowa, where Stewart ran the field campaign - but Republicans ask how many voters who registered at supermarkets and gas pumps will actually go to the polls. The Obama campaign is betting on a high percentage. Lawson is even more sure. "All of them," she says. "I guarantee you that. I've spoken to these people, heard their stories. Everybody's got one." 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Kara McGuire writes about personal finance for the Star Tribune (Minneapolis). Comment by clicking here. © 2008, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
