Watch The Big Bet Pay Off

A couple months ago, during the height of professional nervousness about the Obama campaign, I wrote a post titled Obama's Big Bet: The Power of The Ground Game. I sought to give some perspective to the immense volunteer effort that Obama started putting together back in 2007, never taking a break between the primary election and the general election, that would simply overwhelm the vaunted Republican "72-hour" effort on Election Day. This was quite clear if you dug into the numbers a bit and gathered what little information was out there in the traditional media.

Since that time, Sean Quinn at Five Thirty Eight and a few others have chronicled this effort, which really represents a new paradigm in American politics. Tomorrow you're going to see a volunteer operation that numbers in the millions, that is focused and ready to turn its attentions on a dime to whatever corner of the country needs assistance, that has already made its mark in the record numbers of early voters who have already reached the polls. My thoughts on Obama's ground game back in August were not met with total enthusiasm - many said that the ground game doesn't matter, that it only succeeds on the margins, that a media and message strategy was more powerful and effective. Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, and the media/message content has improved for the Obama campaign as time went on, as has the favorable terrain for a Democrat in the midst of brand new Bush-era failures on the economy.

But the ground game, and the way it has been put together, is an exact mirror for the type of government a President Obama will run, and its importance cannot be overstated. I say that as a veteran of these efforts. In California we have provided the muscle, mainly through phone calls, that allowed states across the country to focus their effort on neighborhood canvasses and person-to-person efforts. The quality and strength of the organization, from one Congressional district to the next, has been simply astonishing. It may go unnoticed after November 5, but California has made maybe 5 MILLION calls since October 23 in support of the Democratic ticket, in practically every battleground state, using methods as simple as a paper list and a cell phone, all the way up to alternative dialing systems that reach voters 10 times as fast (yes, Karl Rove, we have them too) and real-time data entry back into the VAN to update to practically the minute every calling action, providing a blueprint for field efforts.

But more than the organization, it's the dedication. On a campaign this large you're going to get a few glitches. At the local phonebank I help run yesterday we had a perfect storm of events. At precisely the same time, we experienced a system calling failure, the loss of Internet access, and the arrival of 20 new volunteers. Fortunately, the pizza dropped on us by a generous benefactor arrived at the same time, so we could hold everyone at bay for a minute. We went a few doors down, found a working connection at a sympathetic neighbor, moved our data team over there, printed out needed call sheets and kept the whole thing running in a matter of minutes. There is a spirit of teamwork and improvisation, working together to meet any challenge, that is impressive.

For anyone who thinks that the ground game is a myth or of minimal importance, it's time to become a believer. As Marcy Wheeler notes today, the Obama campaign, through enthusiasm and voter registration and pure force of will, has bent the likely voter model to what they hoped to see, changing the race fundamentally:

Not all pollsters are even adjusting their likely voter models to account for the huge number of people--significantly weighted to Democratic turnout in every swing state but Colorado--who have already voted. One that has, though, is Gallup; it's two likely voter models have converged, partly because of the large number of African-American voters who have already voted. It's worth noting, then, that Gallup has the most optimistic numbers for Obama of all of Pollster's recent polls: 53% to 42% [...]

Now, I'm not suggesting that Obama's going to improve his turnout tomorrow over what they've already done in early voting, except perhaps among youth voters. But I think likely voter models that presume Republicans will reliably turn out may turn out to be wrong, particularly since McCain's rallies today are attracting one tenth of the crowd they expected, since Republicans are underperforming Dems in early voting (though still voting early at higher rates than in 2004), and since McCain has cannibalized his GOTV funds to dump into advertising.

In other words, though Gallup's likely voter models converged, its model(s) still assume healthy GOP turnout. But there are lots of reasons to think fewer people who say they're support McCain will show up than Gallup and other pollsters think.

We're going to see the impact of all of this on Election Day. But having lived and breathed these ground game efforts from just one sunny corner on the Left Coast, I am very confident that it was this energy and this organization that has put the Obama campaign in the position to succeed wildly. The spirit of volunteerism in the Obama campaign is the spirit of a nation engaged politically once again. A movement that understands the value of talking to friends and neighbors, of having the information and knowledge ready to pass on to skeptics, is a movement that cannot be derailed by smears or false equivalencies. I watched a young African-American woman on the phone with a 90 year-old from central Indiana who just couldn't envision a black President, and I watched the young woman use a calm demeanor and logic and reason to move this Indianan into Obama's column. It was a fitting metaphor for the power of speech, the power of action, the power of engagement. And it won't end with the end of this election tomorrow.

Obama made this bet almost two years ago, and with one more solid day of action, I have no doubts it will pay off.

Before you go, you should really take a look at this video from the campaign - it shows you how much THEY value the ground game, and why an Obama Administration is going to enlist this same unity of effort and purpose to bring about the change they seek. (Of course, it's going to be up to those of us in the progressive movement to ensure that such change is real, thorough and precise - that's the second half of our duty, to encourage the agenda but hold accountable elements of it that are too weak or Congressional members that seek to fight it.)