California's Sleeping Giant - The Enormous Organizing Opportunity

Here's a great article about how California's field operation helped Barack Obama win the Presidency. It hasn't been much remarked-upon in the traditional media, but I was fairly involved in this operation and I've mentioned some of the details before.

The Obama campaign's directive to the California operation was simple: keep up a presence but don't spend money. Fewer than 20 paid staff members were hired in September (compared with 100s in battleground states), a handful of offices opened and a minuscule budget approved. So it may come as a surprise that the California team actually pulled off what can only be called a field operation coup: on election day, California volunteers got on their own phones and managed to make an astonishing 2 million calls into battleground states -- a number that outstripped the calls made by all other Obama phone banks in all other states, combined. They called from coffee shops, from houses, from parks. They called from baby groups, from pajama parties, from book clubs. In the end, the state logged a total of 10 million calls between Obama's nomination speech and his victory speech. It was a milestone achieved with very little drama, and one that is noteworthy not only because it is unprecedented, but because it nearly took the national campaign by surprise. How it was done may also provide some insight into what lies on the horizon, on the grassroots front, going forward.

10 MILLION calls. Consider also that 4 million of them were in the last week of the campaign, as Chicago realized what a gold mine of volunteering and activism they had in California. In addition, in the last couple weeks the campaign was using predictive dialers that increase the contact rate from 15-20% to around 90%. And that, of course, only includes the volunteers inside the state; hundreds if not thousands went out into the swing states to canvass and organize there.

Read the whole article for a real inside look at the process. There is no question that this could be scaled up to use inside California. The tools are already in the hands of the organizers. And what's more, they were trained to be self-starters:

I have seen it reported that the campaign's field success can be attributed to its vaunted email database of volunteers and donors. My experience tells me that would be inaccurate. While the campaign certainly generated heat by sending out mass emails, the real magic lay in the staff's ability to carry out one of the earliest promises of Barack Obama himself -- individual empowerment. Tapping key volunteers and asking them to reach out to their friends requires personal contact. Yes, that job was made infinitely easier by the advent of Facebook and email, and the campaigns remarkable use of its web site. However the real structure was not created by, nor can be reflected in, a database of names housed by a centralized campaign.

Yesterday, I heard that phone banks are forming in California to call voters in Georgia on behalf of Jim Martin, the Senate candidate who is in a tight run-off race there. I checked around, curious to see if the campaign was officially involved. The answer came back, no. Yet voter files are being sorted, lists are being cut, call sheets printed, data entered. Calls are being made. The idea that a muscle once flexed, can take on a life of its own has intriguing, almost science-fiction-like possibilities. Whether it signals something remarkable in the annals of grassroots politics, or is another false start, like my mother's idea of 'Home Headquarters' in 1970, remains to be seen.

I'm part of one of these weekend phone banks for Jim Martin, tomorrow, in Venice. The details for that one are here. In addition, there are phone banks in Santa Monica all weekend. Contact Deirdre Lightfoot at dlightfulwon-at-gmail-dot-com for more information.

There is really no limit to how these organizers can be used in California - to gain a 2/3 majority, to push progressive ballot measures, to elect a new Democratic governor. It could change the face of California politics for a generation.