Big Media Catches On To The Ground Game

Nice of the New York Times and the Washington Post to figure out the key story of the election three weeks before voters go to the polls. The worst part of this is that just today, Clark Hoyt released a study showing that less than 10% of campaign coverage this general election season has been devoted to substance, with the bulk of them focusing on "horse race, political tactics, polls and the like." But if you're going to write about hose race politics, there's no bigger story than the ground game. They trivialize the election and then do the trivial coverage wrong. Pathetic.

The stories have some good tidbits. Here's NYT:

What started out organically — campaign officials saw organizational promise in Virginia last year, when 20,000 signatures were gathered to make Mr. Obama the first candidate to qualify for the primary ballot — has come full circle. Now, people driving by the storefront offices are drawn in by their visibility and put to work.

The Obama campaign has broken the country into a collection of battleground states, which are dissected into precincts that are parceled one more time into neighborhood teams. (Ohio, for example, is divided into 1,231 neighborhoods.) And each of these teams, if the recruiting is up to speed, has a leader who, ideally, lives just down the block from all those doors that need to be knocked on.

This puts the lie to the talk from the right of out-of-state volunteers parachuting in like Howard Dean's Iowa "Perfect Storm" and annoying the locals. Every effort is being made for local people to canvass local neighborhoods. In California we're focusing on making all the phone calls into Nevada, but inside Nevada they're doing all canvassing.

Here's a bit about voter registration.

The first piece of the ground game plan began with voter registration.

In Virginia, the voting rolls saw a net gain of more than 300,000 people from January through Oct. 1, with even more believed to have registered in the days leading up to the deadline last Monday. And while voters in Virginia are not allowed to identify their political party, 76 percent of the new voters are 44 or younger, a figure that even Republicans concede favors Mr. Obama.

“We’re going to have to make sure they turn out, or we probably won’t win,” said Steve Hildebrand, a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Obama. “They’ll get extra waves of mail. They’ll get extra phone calls. They will be given a lot of love.”

The targeting has been really sharp. Sporadic voters are getting the attention they need. Habitual voters are being checked as supporters but then not bombarded.

Here's something from the Washington Post:

But in scale and ambition, the Obama organization goes beyond even what Rove built. The campaign has used its record-breaking fundraising to open more than 700 offices in more than a dozen battleground states, pay several thousand organizers and manage tens of thousands more volunteers.

In many states, the Democratic candidate is hewing more closely to the Rove organizational model than is rival Sen. John McCain, whose emphasis on ground operations has been less intensive and clinical than that of his Republican predecessor.

"They've invested in a civic infrastructure on a scale that has never happened," said Marshall Ganz, a labor organizer who worked with César Chávez's farmworker movement and has led training sessions for Obama staff members and volunteers. "It's been an investment in the development of thousands of young people equipped with the skills and leadership ability to mobilize people and in the development of leadership at the local level. It's profound."

This is probably the first time Marshall Ganz has been mentioned in a major newspaper, but he's the architect of Obama's entire volunteer effort.

I'm glad that people are seeing the value of all this. I'm sure the Obama campaign would rather it stayed a secret, because they don't want the Republicans knowing what a big hole they're in.