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Unprecedented Efforts To Mobilize Voters Begin

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  • Unprecedented Efforts To Mobilize Voters Begin


    Republican campaign volunteer Kathleen Pacious of Fredericksburg, Va., speaks with Republican voters.


    President Bush and challenger John F. Kerry unleashed the biggest and most aggressive voter-mobilization drives in the history of presidential politics yesterday, tapping hundreds of thousands of volunteers and paid organizers in a final effort to tip the balance in a handful of states where the election will be decided tomorrow.

    Mixing sophisticated techniques to identify their potential supporters with old-fashioned shoe leather and face-to-face contact to woo loyal and sporadic voters, the two campaigns will contact millions of Americans -- many of them more than once -- in the final hours of the campaign and then track their movements throughout Election Day to ensure they have gone to the polls.

    The unprecedented efforts underscore the conviction of officials in both campaigns that with the race so close in so many states, the key to victory depends more than in any recent campaign on their ability to win the battle of the streets. In Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa and New Mexico, opposing armies fanned out under blazing sun or cold, drizzly skies to reach as many voters as possible.

    Both campaigns hope that no potential voter is likely to escape the net cast by them in the final days. In Green Bay, Wis., Mayor Jim Schmitt tried to take a nap on Saturday afternoon, only to be interrupted by a knock on his door from a Kerry canvasser. Just as he fell asleep again, another canvasser appeared at his door, this time from the Bush campaign.

    In the Minneapolis suburb of Plymouth on Saturday, two GOP voters reported that the Bush campaign had already contacted them three times. In Ohio, Democrats said they had 27,000 people working phone banks and on Saturday night made 399,446 calls. A Bush campaign official said they were contacting 400,000 people a day in Ohio as well. In Pennsylvania, the Bush campaign planned to contact 2 million voters between Friday and Election Day.

    The weekend blitz represented the culmination of many months of preparation by the campaigns, which along with their outside allies will spend $300 million and perhaps much more on targeting and turning out their voters. Longtime organizers say they have never seen so much money available for such an effort.

    Bush's budget for voter mobilization is about $125 million, at least triple that of four years ago, a knowledgeable official said. Kerry's field operation, run out of the Democratic National Committee, will spend nearly $60 million, more than doubling what the Democrats spent in 2000, campaign officials said.

    Supplementing the campaigns and party operations are outside groups, the biggest and potentially most important being America Coming Together, a pro-Kerry organization funded with "soft money," that is likely to spend $100 million to $125 million. Organized labor also will spend tens of millions to reach union members.

    Bush can count on help from conservative and business organizations, although none comes close to the scale of ACT. "We are going to have 45,000 paid people out on Election Day," said Harold M. Ickes, ACT's executive director.

    With passions running high, the campaigns have tapped volunteers with no previous involvement in politics to supplement campaign veterans. In Wisconsin, union foremen from Atlanta are working out of a storefront office in Appleton. In Iowa, Kathleen Jorgensen, 37, a mother of two, has spent hours of her weekends going door to door. In Florida, Wallace Klussman, one of 1,500 members of the Texas Strike Force that has fanned out to the battlegrounds, spent the weekend canvassing for Bush.

    Republicans say the battle on the ground represents a test of opposing theories of how to reach voters in an era when attention spans are limited and information sources plentiful. Both sides are using a mix of paid staff and volunteers, but the GOP is far more dependent on a volunteer corps of organizers more than 1 million strong. Democrats, with ACT's help, have a more professional operation to turn out their loyalists.

    Democrats have about 250,000 volunteers, compared with 90,000 four years ago, and contest the GOP suggestion that they mainly rely on paid professionals. But Karen Hicks, national field director for the campaign at the Democratic National Committee, said Democrats have far more experienced organizers than the Republicans, noting that one county in Florida is being managed by someone who ran the entire state of Pennsylvania for Bill Clinton in 1992. "We have a very deep bench in the Democratic Party who have done this before and know how to do it," she said.

    Both campaigns have made bold claims about the strength of their get-out-the-vote operations, and while they have produced reams of statistics to tell them how many calls have been made, how many doors knocked on and how many supporters they have state by state, neither can tell until tomorrow who has the edge in effectiveness. Four years ago, it was the Democrats; two years ago, it was the Republicans.

    Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman said yesterday that Republicans built their operation on the belief that neighbor-to-neighbor or colleague-to-colleague contact is far more persuasive than relying on paid canvassers who have no personal connections to the voters they are wooing. "Our effort will be larger, it will be more credible and it will be targeted," he said.

    Republicans built their ground operation on the successful mobilization plan of 2002 and on lessons gleaned from the party's "72-hour Project," started after the 2000 election to determine why Bush seemed to lose support the final weekend. Democrats have taken what they have done in the past and perfected it with improved voter lists and new technology.

    Democrats, who traditionally have more effective organizations, say that even with improvements by the Republicans, their operation this year is far beyond what was done on behalf of Al Gore in 2000, when they surprised Bush and his team by winning several states on the strength of the Election Day operation.

    The scope of the expansion in the campaigns' organizations can be breathtaking. Four years ago, Bush employed 22 paid staff members in Florida. This year, he has 500 on the payroll. In Ohio, Democrats had 10 field offices and 40 staff members. This year, Democrats have 57 field offices in the state and 270 paid employees. Mike Erlandson, chairman of Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said they have six times as many volunteers as in 2000.

    Democrats also have added flexibility, because of ACT's resources. In Iowa, for example, the Kerry campaign and state party are concentrating on turning out the vote in 22 cities while ACT is focused on voters in 195 small towns.

    The campaigns have produced precise precinct-by-precinct vote goals, based on their best estimates of tomorrow's turnout. At an organizing conference in Milwaukee a week ago, a young Kerry organizer recruited volunteers for the final weekend, saying they would need to knock on 120,448 doors. Campaign officials also outlined just how many more hard commitments they needed to reach their overall vote target. In Jacksonville, Fla., Kerry organizers focused on four precincts where 16,000 votes, most of them from black voters, were thrown out in 2000.

    In New Mexico, Bush received 286,418 votes and lost the state to Gore by just 366 votes. Scott Jennings, a state Bush campaign official, said they set a goal of recruiting 6,600 volunteers, one for every 50 voters they needed to meet their targets, suggesting the campaign is hoping to boost the president's total by more than 43,000 votes to 330,000 tomorrow. Jennings said they recruited 15,000 volunteers, each with the responsibility to look after 25 voters.

    The two campaigns have made a special effort to identify and encourage infrequent voters to go to the polls. Through months of canvassing and calling, the Kerry campaign rated each potential voter on two scales: strength of support for the Massachusetts senator and frequency of voting. They then identified the sporadic voters who were most likely to back Kerry and pursued them with follow-up calls and visits.

    Bush's campaign targeted its list of infrequent voters and has made an effort to get them to the polls before tomorrow in states that allow early voting. Campaign officials argue that it is a waste of money and energy to encourage reliable voters to do so early. "You want to make sure you're adding new people rather than spending resources that could be spent on something else rather than on people who would otherwise vote on Election Day," one official said.

    The campaigns will spend heavily on Election Day turnout efforts. ACT will pay its forces $75 tomorrow to get voters to the polls. The Republican National Committee is paying travel and hotel costs and $25 a day for food allowances for at least 5,000 loyalists working in battleground states. In Ohio, the state party is paying poll watchers $100 a day to challenge voters with disputed registration credentials.

    Never before have campaigns spent as much time preparing for an election. Bush's campaign ran a series of practice weekends to test its organization and, according to officials, was able to fix the flaws.

    In New Hampshire, Democrats have canvassed neighborhoods every weekend since June, with about half of their workers coming from Kerry's home state of Massachusetts. "It feels like we are right in the middle of things up here," said Vanessa Careiro, who grew up in Florida and is a freshman at Boston College.

    Turning out committed voters can be an imprecise science. On a recent swing around Appleton, Wis., ACT canvassers found working-class Democrats reporting they would vote for Bush. Even one ACT canvasser was not sure how she will vote.

    For the workers, there will be no rest until late tomorrow night, as the campaigns will monitor who has voted in key precincts throughout the day. Debbie Irwin, co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Westmoreland County outside Pittsburgh said any identified Bush voter who has not shown up by 3 p.m. will receive a reminder call. There and in other states, the calls will not stop until the polls close.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct31.html

  • #2
    Good for them. Voting is what counts, it's the only way you can rightly complain about who is in office. ;)
    No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
    I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
    even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
    He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

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