GA-Sen: The Second Test

In many ways tomorrow's runoff election in Georgia between Jim Martin and Saxby Chambliss offers a look at whether Barack Obama's organizational team can inspire voters to come to the polls if Obama himself is not on the ballot. While Obama never made it to Georgia to stump for Martin, his organization is definitely here, and working hard to get out the vote in a race which will be determined by turnout. While Chambliss has used GOP starpower like John McCain, Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin (who used the exact same stump speech from the Presidential campaign, simply using the find and replace tool to substitute "Chambliss" for "McCain"), Obama's organizers have gotten to work on the ground.

The Martin campaign has 25 field offices in the state, which is the same number of offices Chambliss has. We visited the Savannah offices Friday night and yesterday, and the organizing edge goes to Martin. On Friday night, the Chambliss office was open but empty, and a couple of dialers worked on Saturday around noon.

As Gillian Bergeron, Obama's deputy field director in Colorado and our special photographer for this trip, snapped away, the cordial Chambliss staff subtly joined the volunteers to add perception to a larger phone bank. In reality, there were three dialing volunteers while we were there. The operation was phone calls; Martin's operation in Savannah was doorknocking, following a morning rally at the ILA Hall.

The early signs are not particularly hopeful. The Secretary of State's office reports that only 22.5% of Georgia's early vote came from African-Americans, down from 34.5% in the general election. Moreover, the latest PPP poll concludes that Chambliss is winning among early voters 58-41, which would mean that Martin would need a very big victory on Election Day to win. This is the opposite of Obama's Florida strategy, where racking up gains in early and absentee voting led him to victory. Still, Martin's people are hopeful.

The feeling we've gotten as we've stopped into Martin field offices around the state these past few days is that it's been only the final week where the Obama field troops have felt like they've seen the voter contact and GOTV numbers move to where they're happy. We may have understated the Obama field presence. The Suwanee (Gwinnett County) office alone has 31 Obama organizers. While that is larger than typical for Martin offices dispersed around the state, it should give you an idea of how determined the field focus is [...]

The frustrating thing about projecting a runoff is that few know what will happen. Polling models are hard to trust, given the small number of data points and unpredictability of enthusiasm. Right now we know that the early voting black vote is great news for Saxby Chambliss, and we know from observation that the Martin ground game is far more robust, far more experienced and far more intense, which is great news for Jim Martin.

There's no way of knowing how this is going to go. A strong ground game is perfectly suited to a low-turnout runoff election, but the conservative argument that Chambliss is all that stands in the way from one-party Washington rule and forced gay marriage at abortion clinics by Muslim imams probably has some kind of pull in a red state.

What we do know is that there's still one day left to make a difference, even if you're outside the state. You can make calls through the My.BarackObama.com website to Democrats who voted for Martin in the general election. If we turn out enough voters, we win. It's that simple.