Obama Opens the GOTV Firehose

In the past few days, details have begun to trickle about Obama's vast GOTV infrastructure. Zack Exley's "The New Organizers" is one of the must-read pieces of this election cycle as far as I'm concerned. The Washington Post popularizes the subject a little bit more in its Sunday edition.

The gist is that the Obama campaign has effectively melded top-down and bottom-up GOTV strategies, setting up a network of volunteer "Neighborhood Team Leaders" responsible for 8-12 precincts with often dozens of volunteers under them. The key is that you have volunteers in supervisory roles on the ground, not desk jockeys parceling out call sheets and walk lists. And decentralized though it may be, these are not kids in orange hats or freelancers who think it'd be fun to raise money for a blimp.

Exley describes the process of entrusting a volunteer with the big job of overseeing thousands of voter contacts:

After Glenna had proven her reliability and effectiveness, Ryan asked her for another special one-on-one meeting where he invited her to formally agree to become an NTL. He spelled out all of an NTL's responsibilities before allowing her to accept it and even gave her a binder spelling it all out in writing: She would work with him to recruit other team members such as coordinators for canvassing, phone banking and data management. Her team would be responsible for connecting with all of the Democratic and undecided voters within their "turf." Other volunteers who stepped forward in her area would not be managed by campaign staff, but by Glenna's team. As team leader, Glenna would report results to Ryan a couple times per week and would be held accountable for meeting specific goals by certain deadlines.

In many ways, this is like the pyramid volunteer structure often attributed to Bush-Cheney '04, in which a meritocratic leadership structure was built outside local Republican Parties. Except that this is happening lower down in the food chain, at the level of the individual volunteer in a precinct. Obama volunteers are expected to do more than volunteers on other campaigns, which is basically to park your butt in a headquarters and make lots of phone calls.

And the McCain campaign? They're relying on better targeting (this is useful, but you also sense it's a way to explain away a smaller operation). And lots and lots and lots of phones. From the Chicago Tribune's writeup of GOTV in NoVA:

"We know who we need to talk to," said Trey Walker, McCain's campaign manager for Virginia and nearby states. "We know how to talk to them, and we know we can do it in a more cost-effective manner on the phone than by deploying teams of college kids out into the suburbs like the Obama campaign."

Huh? Since when are phones more effective than door knocks? Virtually every study I have seen on this finds that a volunteer going door to door is more effective than a volunteer phone call, which is in turn more effective than paid knocks / calls.

The McCain campaign is also claiming better numbers than 2004, but the Palin effect already seems to have waned and the campaign's early lack of focus on field seems to have come back to haunt them:

The McCain campaign said that in many states, it has exceeded the number of calls the Bush campaign made in 2004, and that it saw a surge in volunteers after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin became the Republican vice presidential pick. But with many fewer offices, it has a lower profile, and experienced workers say the activity is more muted than in other campaigns. Mary Buestrin, who was the Bush campaign's statewide volunteer coordinator in Wisconsin in 2004, said the McCain campaign has adopted a less formal volunteer structure.

"We're not really doing all those kind of things this time around," she said. "We're all just . . . chipping in where we can."

And this, on the centrality of door-to-door:

Yale political scientist Donald Green, who co-wrote the book "Get Out the Vote," says research has shown that face-to-face talk increases a voter's chances of turning out by 7 to 10 percent. If a campaign talks to a third of its hoped-for voters, it can expect to see a 3 percent boost at the polls, he said.

GOTV is a nut we thought we had cracked in 2004 but it's clear that lessons learned don't automatically stay learned (the early McCain general election campaign didn't even have a political director). And while the increased number of contacts shows that it's possible to get more efficient with outbound calls, there seem to be too many anecdotal reports of a hollowed out local party and GOTV infrastructure to dismiss.

After the near death experience of 2000 and the unions eating our lunch on GOTV in the last 72 hours of that election, Republican GOTV is still in many ways very paint-by-numbers, and still overwhelmingly reliant on phones as opposed to door-to-door. We also haven't fully taken advantage of the Internet as vehicle for identifying new volunteers. Typically, campaigns will have a formula for how many volunteers it takes to win a state which has basically gone unchanged since pre-Internet days. But with the Internet's ability to vacuum up everyone interested in your campaign, the potential base of volunteers doubles or triples. The Obama campaign gets this, and has built an infrastructure to scale a volunteer operation borne of a 6+ million person e-mail list.

The key to this is not volunteer-to-voter contact. At the outset, it's volunteer-to-supporter, or volunteer-to-volunteer. This is hinted at in Zack's piece:

Jeremy Bird, the Ohio general election director and one of the driving forces behind making teams a national strategy, said, "We decided in terms of timeline that [our organizers] would not be measured by the amount of voter contacts they made in the summer—but instead by the number of volunteers that they were recruiting, training and testing. It was much more an infrastructure focus. So there would be no calls from Chicago saying, 'Why haven't you made more calls?!' Instead there would be calls saying, 'Where are your neighborhood team volunteers?' Or, if the numbers seemed high, 'Are they real?' It was a whole shift in mentality that was really, really good."

Instead of packing the phone banks early, the Obama campaign built out its organizational pyramid first. Instead of assigning volunteers the daunting task of contacting voters not tuned in, they sicced them on the low-hanging fruit first: other identified supporters on the email list who could volunteer. It's also clear that building lateral connections among volunteers -- deepening their sense of commitment to the cause -- is also important, as evidenced by the MyBO groups function. Nor is this some wild-eyed kumbaya idea born of Cesar Chavez or Saul Alinsky. Small groups are the core of many Evangelical congregations. They're what made Rick Warren and Saddleback.

Incidentally, the #1 form of contact I have received from the Obama campaign -- other than emails or text messages -- are phone calls urging me to volunteer. The campaign has flagged me as a casual person on the e-mail list, and they have my cell number. And I get bombarded with calls trying to upsell me to volunteer status.

In the summer when McCain didn't have many volunteers, they should have been calling through the e-mail list to get more volunteers. Instead, they were dependent on a big bang moment (the Sarah Palin selection) which seems to have fizzled out without a strong underlying infrastructure.

This election will be a clear test of whether GOTV matters. The Democrats had better GOTV in 2000, and they closed stronger. We had better GOTV in 2004, but the Democrats had a strong focus on it as well, and the election closed as expected. Now, the Democrats have better GOTV again, at probably an order of magnitude stronger than '00. If Obama wins by 8 or 9 and is going into Election Day up 6 or 7, then we can say that the focus on voter registration and strong neighborhood groups worked. And it'll be back to the drawing board again.