As America awaits the start of the second presidential debate, it occurs to me that we are missing the real story of this presidential campaign. To be sure, it’s about the economy, stupid, and the temperament of the candidates, and taxes, health care and the war. But it’s also about organization. If Sen. Barack Obama wins, the reason--as much as any other--will be a superb ground game.
Obama was not very successful as a “community organizer” in the Chicago housing projects, but he adapted whatever he learned--and whatever knack he was born with--to build an innovative, lavishly financed and meticulously run outreach machine.
From text-message signups to e-mail-based organizing--to the hordes of young staffers deployed in force to swing states--Obama has focused to an unusual degree in modern campaigning not on broadcast TV advertising but on real-life, person-to-person contact.
He is hoping not only that his medium is his message--personal testimony to his ability to bring the country together--but also that his voter-identification work will yield results on Election Day.
The central (but by no means only) target of all of this organization: turning out younger voters, that is, those between the ages of 18 and 30.
According to several polls, that group favors Obama over Sen. John McCain by an astounding 61-32 percent margin. In 2004, that slice of the electorate accounted for 18 percent of the votes cast. If Obama can raise that percentage to, say, 21 percent of the total, he could turn a close election into a landslide.
He did so in Iowa, where young voters were 22 percent of the total. But that was a caucus state, and Obama had a year to put it all together. Now he is trying to replicate those results on a national level.
It’s Iowa writ large, or so he hopes.
How is he going about it? It’s a mix of old and new.
Among the ingredients:
- The person-to-person “vote hauling” techniques pioneered in New Orleans in the 1970s by Ernest (Dutch) Morial, who offered free rides to the polls and free meals on the way to generate minority turnout.
- The big-city precinct block-captain techniques Obama watched in operation in his adopted hometown of Chicago, where they had been perfected over the decades by the Daley family
- The playbook of foundation-funded community-building crusades, which have avoided traditional structures (such as city halls) and focused on street-level contacts with liberal groups such as ACORN.
- New digital-communications channels, from Web-based fund-raising appeals to text-message deployment of volunteers.
- New sources of money beyond the colossal donor base, including parallel ground-game efforts funded by fat billionaires such as George Soros and the Sandlers and groups such as the Democracy Alliance.
The man who runs this machine from his high-rise office in the Chicago Loop is David Plouffe. Not surprisingly, he is a trim and meticulous person, and not one given to appearing in public all that much. But his name is familiar to the millions of Obama supporters who frequent the Web site or receive text messages from the campaign.
You’ll know on election night if his work has paid off. Just look at the 18-30 turnout.
