California Progressive Voter Guide

I don't know if I ever reprinted this, so forgive me, but if you're headed to the polls in the Golden State, here's a voter guide for the propositions you can use. The short version, for me, is yes on 1A, 2, 5, and 12, no on everything else. 3 and 7 are toss-ups (I personally went no on both).

GOTV.

Courage Campaign
2008 California Mobile Voter Guide

PROP 1A: High Speed Rail
Vote Yes
Authorizes $10 billion in bonds to begin construction of a 220 MPH train to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles via San Jose and Fresno. Trains will be powered by renewable electricity and create 160,000 jobs over the next 10 years.
SUPPORTING: Sierra Club, CA Democratic Party, CA League of Conservation Voters, CA Labor Federation, Calitics

PROP 2: Stop Animal Cruelty
Vote Yes
Mandates that farm animals such as chickens and pigs are given enough room in their cages to spread their wings, turn and move around, stand up or sit down.
SUPPORTING: Sierra Club, CA Democratic Party, CA League of Conservation Voters, Calitics

PROP 3: Children's Hospital Bonds
Vote Yes
Provides over $900 million in bond funding to renovate and expand children's hospital facilities around the state.
SUPPORTING: CA Democratic Party, Los Angeles Times, Calitics

PROP 4: Undermines Teen Safety and Abortion Rights
Vote No
Californians have rejected this proposal twice since 2005, which would undermine a woman's right to choose. It places young women in serious jeopardy of abuse (or worse) and is part of a strategy to roll back abortion rights for all Californians.
OPPOSING: Planned Parenthood, CA Nurses Association, CA Association of School Counselors, SEIU CA, CA Medical Association, CA Democratic Party

PROP 5: Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation
Vote Yes
Saves the state over $1 billion a year by providing treatment rather than prison time for those suffering from a drug addiction.
SUPPORTING: CA Democratic Party, Cal Labor Fed, League of Women Voters, CA Nurses Association, SEIU CA, Color of Change.org, NAACP

PROP 6: Massive prison expansion
Vote No
Forces thousands of juvenile offenders into adult courts, mandates longer prison sentences, and takes billions from the state budget for more prison spending at a time of historic budget deficits.
OPPOSING: CA Democratic Party, Cal Labor Fed, Ella Baker Center, ACLU, League of Women Voters, CA Nurses Association, SEIU CA

PROP 7: Renewable Power Standard
No Recommendation
Prop 7 has been a contentious issue. Proponents believe it is a bold and necessary step toward more solar and wind projects by mandating we get 50% of our power from renewable sources by 2025. Opponents believe the measure is poorly written and may cause more harm than good. We are not convinced by either side and invite voters to make their own assessment.

PROP 8: Eliminates marriage rights
Vote No
Would revoke marriage rights for same-sex couples and enshrine discrimination in the state constitution, the first time in history that a constitutional amendment would rescind human rights.
OPPOSING: Equality California, ACLU, Cal Labor Fed, CA Democratic Party, Anti-Defamation League, California NAACP, CNA, SEIU CA

PROP 9: More prison expansion
Vote No
Like Prop 6, this would mandate huge increases in prison spending, by using "victims' rights" as a cover. California legislation on victims' rights is already among the nation's strongest making this proposition unnecessary.
OPPOSING: CA Democratic Party, Cal Labor Fed, Ella Baker Center, ACLU, League of Women Voters, SEIU CA, CA Nurses Association

PROP 10: T. Boone Bailout
Vote No
Oklahoma oil billionaire and funder of the 2004 Swift Boat ads against John Kerry, T. Boone Pickens, wants to take $5 billion from our stressed budget for his natural gas companies.
OPPOSING: Sierra Club, CA League of Conservation Voters, Cal Labor Fed, Union of Concerned Scientists, SEIU CA, CA Nurses Association

PROP 11: Biased Redistricting
Vote No
A deeply flawed effort to change how legislative districts are drawn. Though we desperately need redistricting reform, this is not it. Actually favors Republicans (who have 32% of registered voters) over Democrats (with 43%) and Independents (with 19.5%). Undermines voting rights for Californians of color.
OPPOSING: CA League of Conservation Voters, Cal Labor Fed, CA Democratic Party, Mobilize the Immigrant Vote, Legislative Black Caucus and Legislative Latino Caucus, La Opinión

PROP 12: Veterans' Homes Bond
Vote Yes
Renews a home loan program for veterans that dates back to 1922. The bond must be periodically renewed - this would be the 12th renewal. Enables veterans of current wars to get affordable loans. Bond is repaid by veterans themselves.
SUPPORTING: CA Democratic Party, Los Angeles Times, Cal Labor Fed, Calitics

Vote Grid
CLCV - League of Conservation Voters
LWV - League of Women Voters
EQCA - Equality California

Visit http://www.couragecampaign.org/2008voterguide on your PC for more information.

A project of the Courage Campaign Issues Committee

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.)

Do It For Studs

When I lived in Chicago about a decade ago, I would hear Studs Terkel often on the radio and on the local PBS station. He was a serious scholar in the way that Alan Lomax was a serious scholar; his "field recordings" offered an oral history of work, of the middle class. It was impossible to find a hint of irony or cynicism in him - he gave the working man value. As it turns out his family emigrated from the same area of Poland as my family, which may be why I found him so comfortable and familiar. And more than anything, he was a listener, allowing the opinions and life experiences of others to inform his own - in fact, just the focus on the dignity of work told you all you needed to know about the man.

Ezra Klein, who actually met Studs, had this appreciation.

A few years ago, when it was fashionable for folks on the Right to accuse liberals of lacking a canon, I used to bring Studs up in reply. His books were as authentic and fundamental texts as liberalism could ever desire. He understood that the school of thought meant little if it could not understand the struggles of life as it is lived, because then it could not ease them. He understood that to be a decent movement, we had to listen. And no one did it better than him. Read Working and Race. Read The American Dream. Hell, read Will the Circle Be Unbroken? In the introduction to that book, Terkel reveals an odd superstition: He never sleeps with his arms crossed before him, because that is how the dead are lain to rest. After I read that, I never slept with my arms crossed, either.

You hear that, Studs? I listened.

As we get out the vote this weekend and attempt to create a progressive wave, we now have someone to point to, someone who never forgot the building blocks of public service - the regular person and their challenges. This new economy that we're going to have to create must have that philosophy embedded inside it. Fortunately, I think Barack Obama is as good a listener as his fellow Chicagoan.

So this weekend, do it for Studs.

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Tools You Can Use

One of the biggest ways you can impact this election is to disseminate information to your circle of friends. A couple organizations have stepped up in a big way to make that process smooth and easy.

Google noticed that millions of people were searching through their site for voting information - where their polling place is, when the last day for early voting is, etc. Google created this great tool as a one-stop shop to answer all of those questions.

It's hard to believe that in 2008, information so important to U.S. citizens and the democratic process isn't well organized on the web. To solve this problem, we've released our US Voter Info site, an effort to simplify and centralize voting locations and registration information.

Are you registered to vote? What's the best way to obtain an absentee ballot? When people visit the site, answers to these questions appear. And anyone with a website can provide the same information. The US Voter Info gadget places a simple search box that expands to show a full set of voter information when someone enters an address.

We are also offering a simpler way to find out where to vote. By entering a home address, citizens across the country will be able to find their polling place for election day.

The tool is super-easy and effective. Tell your friends.

Another incredible tool comes from our friends at CREDO mobile. It's called TXT Out The Vote, and it enabled you to send targeted text messages in California opposing Prop. 4 (parental notification for abortion) and Prop. 8 (eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry). The messages, which you can send to any friend or family member with a cell phone, will be delivered on Election Day. This kind of "personal phone banking" is one of the best ways to get out the vote. Check it out at TXT Out The Vote. Standard text messaging rates apply.

On the Road, On the Ground

Given the attention I've been paying to the ground game, I'm really excited for this.

Five Thirty Eight is headed for the open road. We may have built a reputation for the numbers, but don’t be fooled: there is poetry in our souls. We are in the middle of an epic election, and for the final eight weeks we’ll be bringing you not only an intense daily polling menu, but also the story of the battleground states’ ground game.

You deserve that – you love this country just as much as we do, so consider it the least we could offer. At the end of this important day of remembrance, in the starry-dark Reno bare-mountain night, we’re officially posting notice of our series to come.

The story of the organizer and volunteer effort is one that needs to be told. It was much underreported in 2004 just how potently the Bush ground campaign organized. Say what you want about his governance – and we all have – but his competitive fire was lit for the election race. Republicans turned their voters out. Who’s got more heart this time? Missouri boys say: Show-Me.

538 has been dead-on in describing the ground game for everyone, so I have no doubt they'll do a great job. I hope they are also going to take a close look at the McCain campaign's ground game, the constant voter suppression efforts that we'll see between now and November. But the Obama ground game has the potential to be massive and really game-changing. In Southern California we've called over 200,000 voters in Nevada over the past two weeks alone. The goal is 4 million and it will be met.

I should also add that volunteering for the election is really energizing and makes you feel like you're making a difference, so I recommend it wholeheartedly.

CA-AD-10: Fleischman Sounds The Alarm

You do not see Flash Report's Jon Fleischman, who represents nothing if not the internal voice of the California Yacht Party (he's the Vice Chair, after all), this concerned about a Republican-held seat. Not every day.

The Democrats have moved the 10th Assembly District near the top of their wish-list, and for good reason. First, the seat is open, which always makes for a more interesting contest. Second, a once six-point Republican partisan voter registration advantage has shrunk to just two points.

The 10th District is located in the San Joaquin Valley, split over four counties -- El Dorado, Amador, Sacramento and San Joaquin.

Compounding matters for Republican strategists, not only was there a pretty brutal GOP primary contest back in June, but this seat overlaps several U.S. House seats that will likely see action -- CD 3 where Dan Lungren is seeking re-election, CD 4 where Tom McClintock is running, and, of course, CD 11 where Dean Andal is trying to take out freshman Democrat Jerry McNerney (this is a top tier seat).

What Fleischman is correctly describing is what I would call the "Carol Shea-Porter effect." In 2006, Paul Hodes got a lot of establishment and netroots support in his Congressional race in New Hampshire, while the neighboring Carol Shea-Porter got virtually none. However, the state of New Hampshire all resides in the same media market. So Hodes' ads pummeling his opponent and Republicans in general ended up resonating on Carol Shea-Porter's side of the district. In the end, both Democrats won, with Shea-Porter's victory a major upset.

The same is true for Alyson Huber in AD-10 and her race against Yacht Party member in good standing Jack Sieglock. With contested elections throughout her area - in CA-11, CA-03 and CA-04 - Huber's message of change and fighting failed conservative values and ideas will be amplified. In addition, the GOTV programs from those candidates will snag voters for AD-10 (and Joan Buchanan in AD-15) as well. With 82% of voters seeing the budget as a major problem, this is a teachable moment for Democrats, who can tie the burdensome 2/3 requirement and Republican ideological intransigence to a state falling behind, and drive home the need for fundamental change.

Sieglock's bitter primary has given Huber a head start up here. Even his consultant agrees: "Jack is a very good candidate, but he's had a tougher road through the primary than his opponent, and that puts us behind." Add that to the more sophisticated GOTV program for Democrats this cycle, and AD-10 is well within reach. With some good bounces, we can get to a 2/3 majority.

Two Ground Games

I've written a fair bit about, and I still believe in, the Obama campaign's leap forward in the ground game, and how this will eventually help them in the final analysis. The Seminal posted a long, link-heavy piece about this today, and Time did a feature as well.

For the next month, the Obama campaign's ground focus is on finishing up the stunning gains in voter registration that it and the Democratic Party have made. Since January alone more than 3.5 million new voters have been registered in 17 of the 23 states tracked closely by the Obama campaign where information is available. Three states — Florida, Michigan and North Carolina — have seen increases of more than 400,000 new voters, and 10 more states have recorded new registrations of more than 100,000. Though these numbers include registrants to all parties, in 14 of the states at least half of the new voters are under 35, a key demographic for Obama.

"We're on pace to hit goal," says Jason Green, a 27-year-old Gaithersburg, Md., native who is Obama's national voter registration director. "I would love to exceed goal." Green, not surprisingly, isn't in the mood to get specific about what that goal is, though he does say that it is "in the millions," and that the bulk of the voters will be in the 18 battleground states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado and New Mexico (though drives have been mounted in all 50 states). Green is also happy to share the news that they registered more than 100,000 people over Labor Day weekend, capitalizing on the wave of excitement coming out of the convention in Denver.

Harold Ickes, whose company essentially put together the voter list that Obama is currently using, is quoted in the article saying that "(The McCain campaign) should not pooh-pooh the ground game that Obama is mounting; it's a formidable one. I don't think in my experience in Democratic politics there's ever been anything like it." Of course it takes a lot of money and even more staff and volunteers to make sure this very new vote actually gets to the polls, but Obama has both.

All of that is great. But of course there are two ground games. I'm not talking about the Republican GOTV efforts; I frankly think they've misjudged how many new voters the Obama campaign has the potential to activate. I'm talking about the Republican ground game to suppress the vote, which is starting to take shape.

First there's the campaign to delegitimize absentee balloting, headed by our old friend Hans Von Spakovsky. This is from an article he wrote for something called "Spero News," asserting a stolen election in Alabama in the 1990s:

...The most important lesson of Greene County is that absentee ballots are extremely vulnerable to voter fraud. The case shows how absentee ballot fraud really works, and it is a reality very different from the claims of partisans and advocacy groups. More broadly, the case shows how voter fraud threatens the right to free and fair elections and how those most often harmed are poor and minorities. This directly rebuts the usual partisan conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

According to the self-appointed liberal guardians of the poor, practically every effort to legislate against or prosecute voter fraud is intended to keep minorities and the poor from voting at all. Concern over voter fraud, say some partisans, is simply Republicans' cover to intimidate voters and raise obstacles to minority voting. Indeed, groups like the NAACP argue that racism and intimidation are the motivation for voter fraud prosecutions, and some prominent Democrats dismiss voter fraud as virtually nonexistent. As a result, prosecutors are intimidated from fighting vote fraud for fear of the political consequences, and elections continue to be stolen.

He's tipping his hand here, that absentee ballots will be challenged by Republican officials wherever the vote is close.

Then there are the ongoing disputes over ballots and voter registration forms, which are occurring throughout the country right now. We learn in the article that Republicans are trying to keep Bob Barr off the ballot in Pennsylvania, trying to stop organizations like the League of Women Voters from registering voters in Florida, as well as trouble with de-certified and re-certified voting machines in Colorado. And then there's this:

Virginia: Virginia is neck and neck this year, to the surprise of Democrats and Republicans alike. At this point, Democrats appear to have an advantage, thanks to an aggressive voter registration effort by the Obama campaign, which has been especially successful in registering young voters. Republicans have responded to the surge in voter registration by raising the tried-and-true boogeyman of voter fraud. In addition, some local registrars in Virginia have been incorrectly—though perhaps innocently—telling college students who legally register to vote in their college towns that by doing so they "could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents' tax return … and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents' car and health insurance." Which candidate wins Virginia could well depend on which campaign is able to turn out its voters.

Finally, there's this major issue that I flagged a couple months ago, but now we're seeing Republicans seek to use it as a strategy - taking the foreclosure crisis and connecting it to suppression operations:

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed [...]

The Michigan Republicans’ planned use of foreclosure lists is apparently an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being “true residents.”

One expert questioned the legality of the tactic.

“You can’t challenge people without a factual basis for doing so,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a former voting rights litigator for the U.S. Justice Department who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington D.C.-based public-interest law firm. “I don’t think a foreclosure notice is sufficient basis for a challenge, because people often remain in their homes after foreclosure begins and sometimes are able to negotiate and refinance.”

As for the practice of challenging the right to vote of foreclosed property owners, Hebert called it, “mean-spirited.”

Well that'll stop them. After all, they don't want to be seen as "mean-spirited." By the way, Michigan isn't the only state talking about this; GOP officials in Ohio have the same idea. And remember, swing states like Nevada and Florida have among the highest concentration of foreclosures in the country.

I know that lots of people focus on e-voting machines and hacking, but the ground war is where votes are really stolen, through intimidation, suppression, bogus challenges and ruthlessness. And with Obama's strategy relying heavily on new voters (and now, with little room for error), the battle over the vote becomes even more pronounced. Sunshine is obviously important; in fact, it has brought about small victories, like the VA relenting and allowing voter registration at stateside veteran's facilities. But we need more than sunshine. We need an army of lawyers who are aggressive and unrelenting.

You can educate yourself about your voting rights at The Brennan Center or The Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, as well as your local registrar. Know your rights, and know the rights of your friends and relatives, to boot.

Obama's Big Bet: The Power Of The Ground Game

Over the past few days, a fair number of high-profile progressive bloggers have been, to put it mildly, flipping out about Barack Obama's campaign style and his chances in November. Josh Marshall thinks there need to be consistent lines of attack against McCain. John Aravosis thinks Team Obama is in a bubble and this is feeling like the Democratic campaigns of the past. Matt Stoller thinks it's time for message testing to find the attack that'll work on McCain.

All of these are very smart people who want Obama to win - some of them were his staunchest supporters in the primary - and see it slipping away. I think they all make points which are valid to varying degrees. But they are failing to totally account for the X factor of the election, an X factor which is going virtually unmentioned throughout the blogosphere - the historic ground effort that the Obama campaign is banking on to win. It is not without peril, but it is a very new thing, and I think we have to understand it if we want to understand the twists and turns of this election.

It's true that McCain has gained in small but measurable ways in most polls over the past month. It's true he has found a couple lines of attack against Obama and hammered them consistently. It's true that the combination of Obama's world trip and his vacation in Hawaii, along with the crisis in the Caucasus, has made McCain more present in the campaign than at virtually any other time.

This is also the way that the traditional media, particularly the cable news media, looks at the campaign. Something happens in their line of sight - a Swift Boating, a tough political ad, a bad convention - that convinces the public en masse to vote one way or another. In the historical aftermath of these elections, narratives get set up to "explain" how a candidate won or lost. But the reality is that campaigns are much more complex. They have a life that goes beyond advertising and day-to-day attacks on the stump. And I truly believe that the majority of them are won or lost on the ground.

As bloggers, we are essentially writers, and as such creative people, who tend to focus on the creative aspects of the campaign ("Obama should do an ad that says X!!!"). There is a whole other aspect, and as much as it pains me to say it, here's David Broder - gah! - capturing it:

But the Obama folks are not leaving it to chance. Plouffe said that "turnout is the big variable," and the campaign is devoting an unusually large budget to register scads of new voters and bring them to the polls. "That's how we win the Floridas and Ohios," he said, mentioning two states that went narrowly for George W. Bush. "And that's how we get competitive in the Indianas and Virginias," two of six or seven states that long have been Republican -- but are targets this year.

"That's why I pay more attention to the registration figures than to the polls I see at this time of year," Plouffe said. "The polls will change, but we know we need 200,000 new voters to be competitive in Georgia, and now is when we have to get them."

That mind-set -- take care of business and don't worry about irrelevancies -- is what struck me in talking to Obama's team in the primary states. Here, as in the states, they seem singularly devoid of turf battles or personal feuds.

Joe Rospars, who coordinates the computer files for organization, fundraising and communications, tested my limited knowledge of that world with a half-hour seminar on how these things work together. Rospars, who had a similar job in Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, said that "the big difference this year is not the technology, it's the coordination."

Mike Lux said that was the first time he's EVER heard a top Presidential campaign head say something like that about the importance of voter registration, and I agree with him.

One of the very few blogs which has charted this sea change in the importance of field is the estimate 538, where Nate and some guest-bloggers have detailed the advantage between the two campaigns at this point. Keeping in mind that we're 77 days out, some of these numbers are simply incredible. Obama has a 3:1 lead in field offices, behind in only one battleground state (Florida). His edge in voter contacts - knocking on doors and making phone calls - is maybe 35:1, and that's probably an extremely conservative estimate. Sean today gave context to this TPM report about McCain's spending advantage on television by looking at the big picture:

Readers here know that Barack Obama is dwarfing John McCain's ground operation; we've written about it repeatedly. Those thousands of paid organizers are not working for free. The field offices and the phone lines and the Blackberries and the reimbursed travel miles are not free. Moreover, Barack Obama pays his organizers out of the Campaign for Change, which is funded by Obama's own campaign; McCain's are mostly paid by the coordinated committees which in turn are funded by the RNC, RNSC and RNCC, further impacting the way spending numbers are attributed to each campaign.

While millions may be spent on advertising, so too is one campaign spending millions on ground game while the other is spending virtually nothing. Obama is investing more massively than any campaign in the history of American politics on the ground game. McCain is essentially not investing in ground. His early summer numbers of 20,000 phone calls nationwide for a whole month would be those of a single, low-budget House campaign. That's the equivalent of one person working ten hours a day for a month. For the entire nation. It's basically the equivalent of zero contacts. When Martin writes that McCain's ground campaign is revving up, it's essentially starting from nothing and is now in 1st gear [...]

As the story hits the discussion slipstream, hopefully it will not be framed as "hey, look at this surprising development, the guy with more money is being outspent because he's foolishly and riskily airing TV ads in lesser battlegrounds." Sure, Obama is spending plenty on ads, and he is spending advertising dollars more broadly (and thinly) than is McCain. But people are also failing to appreciate of dollars spent on the dramatic all-in move that Obama has made in organizing and neighbor-to-neighbor persuasion.

I have seen this first-hand over the weekend, when I talked with people who attended Camp Obama, a two-day organizing seminar held throughout the country. There were over 200 volunteers at one Los Angeles location, all of who are now empowered to be organizers with defined roles to play for the rest of the campaign. Most of the more senior organizers who ran the Camp Obama meetings and are running field operations in all 50 states were volunteers on the primary campaign who were gradually given more and more responsibility. The mantra of the weekend was that "this is a numbers-driven, people-centered campaign," and the goals of the organizers were to get more volunteers to make more contacts to reach the targets set by the campaign, which are nothing short of massive. Southern California is adopting the Las Vegas congressional district in Nevada, and the timing of calls and trips and voter contact aligns directly with deadlines on voter registration and early voting. The contacts made now are going to go into that voter file for GOTV later. The goal is nothing short of reaching every persuadable voter in all of Clark County between now and the election, and they've already had a heck of a head start.

This money for field, which is where the real cash advantage is being held, is frankly likely to pay more dividends than any 30-second ad or exchange on the stump. In fact, we're already seeing the effects in the surges in Democratic voter registration throughout the country, such as the big uptick in Miami-Dade County and elsewhere. They are learning from their mistakes in the primary (in Philadelphia, for example, there will be street money in the fall). And unlike in 2004, when the haphazard field efforts of John Kerry and outside groups like ACT fizzled and disappeared shortly after the election, this infrastructure will be sustained and enduring, built to strengthen the party for the next couple decades.

For all the talk of post-partisan "unity," Barack Obama has been proving himself the most party-focused presidential candidate in recent history--possibly ever. Paradoxically, although Obama's success has been more dependent on personal charisma than any recent nominee's has, he's been leveraging that charisma to build a broader Democratic infrastructure less dependent on the presidential nominee [...]

In the months that have followed, the Obama campaign has announced plans for training camps that will turn out thousands of new organizers dedicated to electing Democrats, and has signaled that it will spend millions in blood-red states where Democrats haven't seriously invested in building party infrastructure for decades. The campaign has constructed a fundraising machine based around small-donors that promises to end the age-old competition for dollars between different wings of the Democratic establishment, enabling the creation of a unified electoral strategy. It has argued that "real change" requires the sort of legislative successes that only a strong congressional party can produce. In short, the candidate running on his exhaustion with traditional party politics has directed his campaign to build a new kind of Democratic Party--one that may put to shame anything that came before it.

(do read that whole article.)

So that's the bet - that Obama can enlarge the core Democratic demographics' percentage of the electorate enough to just overwhelm McCain with numbers. And as Chris Bowers notes, a victory with that coalition could have a galvanizing effect. I truly believe that the coalition Obama is building is more progressive than he is, or than he chooses to be, and the infrastructure is in place to pressure him as President, leveraging all of this support from the grassroots, the millions of people that will be out on the ground on Election Day, to push for a sensible progressive agenda.

There are (mostly) positives and (a few) negatives to this. First of all, going all in on the field means that the campaign must pay attention to every single vote being counted in ways that no other Democratic nominee of recent vintage ever has before. With so many new and inexperienced voters and the continuing shrieking from the right on voter fraud, it's clear that suppression and intimidation will be the new battleground. I think the Obama campaign is at least thinking about this earlier than their predecessors by building an election protection team.

Second, while field matters, this is a big country, and message has its own importance. The problem is that it'd be a bad bet to message your way to victory because you have to deal with a traditional media that has simply stacked the deck. Well-paid conservative operatives have gamed the media system with their noise machine for years, and the chattering class is bound to typical narratives about Democrats and Republicans. That's not easily overcome - while I think that Obama has largely been ON message with his tying McCain to a third term for President Bush, something he's repeated since the day he wrapped up the nomination, it gets less traction than a mindless "celebrity" ad. We have a petty, trivial media that has institutional barriers for progressives.

While it's important to define your opponent early in a campaign, it's just as important to define your voters, to find them, capture their information and turn them out. That's how lots and lots of campaigns are won. There hasn't been a Presidential campaign that relied on turnout to this degree (although I would argue that it was Rove's use of evangelicals as a GOTV army in '04 that won the election more than the Swift Boaters) because nobody could inspire that many volunteers needed to pull it off. Obama has, and he's making the investment, which is entirely based in the community organizing he worked in decades ago, not only because it's his best opportunity to win, but his best opportunity to transform the electorate and prepare the ground for a progressive agenda.

Now, here's my greatest fear on this. Bill Scher's piece about Deval Patrick's missed moment is heartbreaking if you think that Obama is building a coalition to both win elections and govern. It offers pitfalls for both Obama and his supporters.

Deval Patrick won a massive 21-point victory for governor, after thumbing his nose at the Democratic party machine in Boston, and basing his campaign on organizing grassroots progressives. He faced typical right-wing attacks on crime and taxes and he faced them down with progressive arguments, ending 16 years of Republican governors in Massachusetts.

Patrick quickly worked to protect the state Supreme Court ruling upholding equal marriage rights for gays. But after that, his next battle was to legalize casinos, something his grassroots base was vehemently against.

Patrick's rationale was he needed more revenue to close a large budget gap that jeopardized critical government services. But as blogger Frederick Clarkson observed during the casino debate, that argument ran counter to his progressive mandate: "Patrick got it right when he argued during the campaign that rather than debating whether we should raise or lower taxes, we should first consider what we want to do and then discuss how to pay for it. In that spirit those of us who were with him from the beginning are saying that it is time to talk."

The result? Patrick lost both the casino battle and the enthusiasm of his base.

But the fault does not solely lie with Patrick. It also lies with the state's progressive movement.

Beyond protecting gay marriage, the progressive activists of Massachusetts also failed to hit the ground running with a clear issues agenda to prod the governor and state legislature into action. As the Boston Phoenix noted:

"One reason these progressives are feeling marginalized might lie in their lack of unanimity on the issues. It was easy to feel united and effective on an issue like gay marriage, says [Boston progressive politician Matt] O’Malley, because all the progressive groups were working together on it. It’s been hard to find other issues that bring the left together in the same way.

That leaves progressives often splintered, working at cross purposes, or fighting losing causes."

For us in the progressive movement to realize the potential of the "Obama Moment," we cannot be splintered. We need to have priorities and focus, while maintaining the progressive community's strong breadth and diversity. How do we learn a lesson from these moments missed?

We must realize that even with an expected "spasm of furious activity," as Borosage and vanden Heuvel envision, not every single issue can be addressed in the first 100 days. And we need to establish a level of coordination even though we are primarily a bottom-up community, not a top-down hierarchy with a single leader barking marching orders.

There is pressure on both Obama and this growing movement of supporters - for Obama, it's to define himself in a way to maximize volunteer support, and for the supporters, it's to know our principles and values and pressure from the bottom up to realize them.

It's a big bet.

The Happening

Here they come. 3,600 volunteers fanned out to 17 states this weekend and will remain there all summer long, registering voters, organizing communities, and preparing the ground for November.

In return for a promise to give the campaign at least six weeks of their lives, they were promised training in community organizing techniques.

A cover letter from Obama, who spent three years in the 1980s working in impoverished Chicago neighborhoods, spoke of lessons in the "basic organizing principles that this campaign and our movement for change are built on."

Obama urged supporters to apply and to "put progressive values to work in the real world."

More than 10,000 people applied, said Obama strategist Jon Carson.

"They didn't have to have campaign experience before," said Buffy Wicks, the director of the campaign's national volunteer program. "The best organizers are people who are passionate about what they're doing. We were looking for folks who had really compelling stories."

A look at the states where these organizing fellows landed this week shows most of the usual suspects, but also Georgia, which clearly is an effort to see how many new voters they can get out of a registration drive. With the demographics in Georgia, you could make that state awful close despite the fact that it's one of the few trending Republican nationally.

We obsess over lines of attack, and mini-scandals, and gotcha moments, but this is where the campaign will be won. The campaign alerts that play out on cable TV are easily seen and easily identified, and it's simple to create a compelling narrative after the election results roll in pointing to one or two moments. But in what remains a closely divided country, if not an evenly divided one, the campaign that outworks the other on the ground is going to be very successful. And Obama's team is absolutely going about this the right way. The organizing fellowships are the greatest innovation he's brought forward so far.

The Organization Gap

The difference between the way the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign is approaching the general election couldn't be more stark, and for once, we have the professional operation.

Obama is locking down cooperation with the DNC, moving its operations to Chicago, and involving itself in coordination with the state parties, ensuring a very smooth and cohesive message in the general election as opposed to having everybody fight with one another, the way it was in 2004:

You may recall that the DNC chair in 2004 was one Terry McAuliffe, and in his book, McAuliffe wrote about the back-stage infighting between the DNC and Kerry camps. McAuliffe said that Kerry's aides had wanted to oust him; that relations were chilly throughout the campaign; and that the Kerry camp muzzled him when he wanted to assail George W. Bush's military record.

By contrast, upon securing the nomination, Obama very quickly put out a statement showering praise on Howard Dean; is now moving to put staff in all 50-states, in concert with Dean's approach; and is quite literally moving swaths of the DNC to Chicago to create a unified organization with the sort of party-wide message discipline that has eluded Dems in the past.

This is streamlined, cost-efficient and offers massive potential for a cross-platform message, with the grassroots and the top-level campaign on the same page.

And then there's McCain's operation. Gerson's op-ed has the usual conservative crap, but I almost can't believe this part.

The style and approach of general election campaigns are often conditioned by the method of victory in the primaries. The Obama team ends the season like a battle-worn Army division -- organized, relentless and skilled at fundraising, registering voters and getting them to the polls. Members of the McCain team feel more like survivors of a near-death experience -- convinced that the virtues of their candidate and the blessings of the political gods matter more than the money, phone banks and door-knocking of traditional politics.

This worries some Republican strategists. One recently described the McCain campaign to me as the political equivalent of a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movie: Every morning a few guys get together and say, "Let's put on a show!" McCain's state campaign organizations, coalition outreach and get-out-the-vote efforts are weak or nonexistent. But McCain campaign officials are convinced that they will win -- if they win -- in a different manner from that of the methodical Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004. McCain will either catch fire, or he won't -- and traditional efforts to boost turnout, in this view, are not likely to make the difference. Given its history, the McCain campaign is understandably proud of its stripped-down, seat-of-the-pants, insurgent style. But it may eventually be useful to have a serious campaign organization in, say, Colorado.

He literally has no national campaign apparatus. It's the ultimate in arrogance, a reflection of the man who is dismissive of his opponent as unable to step on the same stage as him. He really thinks his personality and war service will just set everyone running toward him, without having to work at it whatsoever. His predecessor at least had the sense to get out of the way and let Karl Rove run the campaign operation. McCain is the C+ student who blows off the test and goes out to drink in the parking lot.

He's going to try and skate on his reputation and hope his BBQ-stained friends in the media get him into the White House. Organization is for sissies.

This guy's gonna get clobbered.

The GOTV Gap

John McCain's faults have yet to be fully exposed in this Presidential campaign. His desire to be seen as an independent maverick yet also to be acceptable to the Republican base results in him flipping and flopping and flipping again on all sorts of issues, for example now saying it's unclear whether Bush's wiretapping was illegal despite saying he would continue it (novel, a President arguing FOR breaking the law). There are other issues, not fully explored by the public, where the fig leaf of independence and moderation is completely off base, like with respect to women's health issues. And he has a history of infidelity, leaving his first wife who was disfigured in a car accident for a second wife who bankrolled his political career, that is largely unknown to the public.

However, there is one group that's very aware of McCain's deficiencies and will not be likely to lift a finger to help him get elected, and that's the evangelical community. I doubt that this is limited to Ohio:

As the architect of Ohio's ballot measure against gay marriage, Phil Burress helped draw thousands of conservative voters to the polls in 2004, most of whom also cast ballots to reelect President Bush. So Burress was not surprised when two high-level staffers from John McCain's campaign dropped by his office, asking for his help this fall.

What surprised Burress was how badly the meeting went. He says he tried but failed to make the McCain team understand how much work remained to overcome the skepticism of social conservatives. Burress ended up cutting off the campaign officials as they spoke. "He doesn't want to associate with us," Burress now says of McCain, "and we don't want to associate with him."

That meeting and other run-ins with conservatives, some Republicans say, have revealed the depth of the challenge facing McCain: mollifying Republican constituencies that have distrusted many of his policy positions, in order to build the machinery needed to push voters to the polls in November.

If McCain tried to gather his volunteers in Ohio, "you could meet in a phone booth," said radio host Bill Cunningham, who attacks the Arizona senator regularly on his talk show. "There's no sense in this part of Ohio that John McCain is a conservative or that his election would have a material benefit to conservatism."

Social conservatives are likely to vote for John McCain, if they get around to it that day. But there's unlikely to do anything else. They won't stuff an envelope, they won't walk a precinct, they won't make a phone call. On Election Day 2004, this group make up most of George Bush's ground army, the ones that implemented the 72-hour plan for victory.

By contrast, Barack Obama, who has his own problems with rural voters in Southern Ohio, isn't going to be wanting for volunteers. He's going to have activists fanning out across the country, putting the voter outreach projects already seen during the primary campaign to work in the general election. That's going to be a significant gap, and it's the kind of thing that tips elections to the side with the most ground troops doing GOTV.

Super Tuesday Two Minus One: Where We're At

Reading through the latest polls and some of the blog chatter, it looks to me like Super Tuesday Two is going to wind up a draw. Despite Obama supporters leaning on Hillary Clinton to drop out if things don't go well tomorrow, both campaigns have opened offices in Pennsylvania, so I don't think this race will be ending anytime soon.

The polls seem to be moving in Clinton's direction in Ohio. Grassroots organizers on both sides are going to be key for turnout, but Clinton had a measurable lead during early voting, and so Obama will need to seriously outperform her - and the polls - in order to take Ohio. Obama is counting on massive urban support to cancel out Clinton's strength in the rural counties. Apparently, Clinton is paying phonebankers in Southern Ohio, so that could be a sign that Obama's strength is a bit more vigorous. Jerid has a look at what to watch out for on election night:

OH-17, specifically Trumbull County. I'm almost tempted to predict the result based solely on what happens here. Tim Ryan's district has been the focus of a lot of activity by both Hillary and Barack. Most of the African Americans live in the Mahoning County portion of the district, so it's less an indicator than Trumbull for the purposes of this primary. The Trumbull County portion of the district is largely white, blue collar, and Catholic. It should be Hillary country. If Trumbull County goes Obama, that's a big sign statewide.

OH-10 (west side Cuyahoga). Again, very white, ethnic, blue collar, and Catholic. Dennis has been campaigning (shocking, I know), and his base is precisely this demographic. There is also a sizable Latino community in the 10th. Hillary needs to build a big margin here. The smaller her margin here, the more trouble for her statewide.

OH-11 (east side Cuyahoga). Stephanie's district is going to go heavy for Obama, but how big will the margin be? There is a large group of upper income white voters who are likely to go Obama, but also a strong contingent of the perfect Hillary voter - white women over 50. Another place where Obama needs a big margin.

Ross & Stark Counties - Chillicothe in Ross (site of the 60 Minutes story), and Canton in Stark County, are natural bellwhethers statewide.

This story revealing a memo from the Canadian government suggesting that an Obama advisor reassured them that his anti-NAFTA talk was just talk isn't going to help either.

In Texas, the race was generally tied up when early voting started, and that early voting has been massive, particularly in counties favorable to Obama. The "two-step" nature of the caucuses favors him as well. Clinton's organizers in that state have significant roots in the area, while Obama's campaign feels "smaller — sometimes even makeshift, despite its considerable money advantage — but it also seems remarkably self-generating, drawing hundreds of the first-time campaign volunteers that have fueled his success elsewhere."

Then there are the New England states, where Vermont looks safe for Obama and Rhode Island for Clinton, although Obama did campaign in Providence over the weekend and drew twice as many supporters as Clinton did a week earlier.

If I had to guess, I'd say this will be essentially a draw from a delegate standpoint. Though Clinton's team will call that a victory and move on, I don't see how it is. She's down around 160 pledged delegates, and the two states between tomorrow and Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Mississippi, are both favorable to Obama; one's a caucus and the other has a significant population of black Democrats. So she could be down 180 or so pledged delegates by April, and North Carolina and Indiana are currently favorable to Obama as well. She'd essentially have to run the table to even get within 50 or so pledged delegates, and then she'd have to have a lot of other things go right (superdelegates moving to her, Michigan and Florida getting seated) in order to take the lead. However, winning Ohio will have a resonance, particularly as it's such an important general election state. I don't think there's any way she gives up if Ohio yields a victory.

UPDATE: There's going to be a "devastating ice event" in northern Ohio tomorrow, with sleet and freezing rain. That's EXTREMELY significant. Think about who turns out in awful weather.