A Cog’s-Eye View of “The Best Ground Game in History”

Picture the scene: a bustling store-front office on Philadelphia’s South Street, walls covered with brightly colored campaign posters and murals depicting the President of the United States, a cacophony of volunteers huddled around cluttered tables, punching telephone numbers into cell phones.  My laptop displays results of a search on the campaign’s database for supporters likely to volunteer.  After punching a number into my own phone I glance to my right and see a video cameraman kneeling beside me to frame a shot of me and a man at another table.  I quickly look away.  Standing behind him is a courtly, Middle-Eastern-looking man interviewing another volunteer.  It turns out that they are from Al Jazeera and have stopped by to take a look at our operation, one of many in Philadelphia and identical to thousands throughout the United States in the waning days of October 2012.

How did I come to be here, a long way from the quiet green hillsides and snow-flecked peaks of my Swiss home? 

I have always been interested in politics, but it took the disastrous results of the 2000 Presidential election to motivate me to volunteer for a campaign.  In 2004 The Spouse and I both canvassed on behalf of John Kerry (who won Pennsylvania despite losing the national election) and I worked to get out the vote (GOTV in campaignese) in local elections in 2005 and 2006.  In 2008 I was inspired by a young African-American named Barack Obama and worked to support him in the Pennsylvania primary (where he lost to Hillary Clinton) and the general election.  But I confined myself to low-risk activities like entering voter information into the campaign’s computer database and making phone calls.

Now I find myself working every evening until 9 o’clock and facing the prospect of managing canvassing in my neighborhood on Election Day.  I take orders from Scott, a Field Organizer (FO) for the Obama campaign, who is only a few years older than my own son.  He is wiry and intense and wields a sharp ironic sense of humor.  He has been at work in Philadelphia for six months to build up a volunteer staff for GOTV;  I learn after the election that he has lost 20 pounds during this time, largely because he is always so busy he forgets to eat.

I had followed the developing campaign via the internet and sometime in the spring, appalled by the way things were going, I resolve that I will take time away from my Swiss idyll to work for Obama in Philadelphia.  Sharing my concern, The Spouse agrees that I should go, even though it will mean our longest separation in more than 30 years of marriage.  I leave for the US late in September, heading first to visit family in Wyoming.  On the 8^th of October I walk into the South Street office for the first time.

Logan Circle (for some reason, on its side)

Scott and I have previously exchanged emails about my intention to volunteer.  I ask for him at the front desk and the volunteer directs me to a back room where he is hunched over his laptop,  He introduces me to Jenn, another FO who has taken a year off from medical school to work for the campaign.  Scott is responsible for Center City Southwest, she for Center City Southeast, each of which encompasses a number of precincts in the heart of Philadelphia.  He shows me the area on a map that he has pasted together out of sections from Google Maps.  Scott and the other FOs take their orders from a Regional Field Director in Philadelphia, herself under a State Director. 

He begins by outlining the campaign’s plan.  On a piece of scrap paper he sketches a graph, whose x axis is degree of support for Obama and y is propensity to vote.  Cross-hatching the area of high support and high voting – “the kind of people who vote for dog catcher,” he says – he explains that we will all but ignore them.  Instead, we will focus our efforts on people who are believed likely to support Obama but don’t vote regularly.  It all seems elementary to me; only after the election is over do I realize how revolutionary the plan actually was.

For months Scott and a handful of local volunteers have focused on registering new voters.   They have been hugely successful but in two days voter registration in Pennsylvania closes.  After that everything shifts to the fundamentals of GOTV – identifying supporters and building a force of volunteers. 

Scott re-introduces me to VAN, the Democratic Party online database that includes millions of bits of information about registered voters (in a section entitled My Voters) and supporters (My Campaign).  In previous campaigns I did quite a bit of data entry into VAN; despite all the talk about fancy new campaign apps it seems little changed – and, truth to be told, somewhat outmoded.  In a few days I am familiar with the intricacies of My Campaign through my work to recruit volunteers.  In his position as FO, Scott is given daily quotas for how many calls he and his volunteers make and how many volunteer shifts we manage to schedule.  I quickly learn that the Obama Campaign has high expectations of its workers, paid and unpaid, and that the more you do the more will be asked of you.

I spend most of my days working alongside other volunteers, some of whom are like me more-or-less full-time.  There is Jack, a quiet young man from the New York area who has just graduated from college and has been here a month.  He sleeps in a spare room in a home provided by campaign supporters and eats mostly peanut butter sandwiches because he doesn’t have much money.   I recognize Mike, a brash Australian in his fifties, from 2008; a self-professed “political junkie,” he loves to work on American campaigns.  Howard, a soft-spoken retired union organizer from Washington, D.C., helped run Cincinnati’s GOTV organization four years ago. 

At the end of the normal work day we are joined by other volunteers who come to “phone bank” – the name anachronistically evokes images of long lines of landline telephones, but these days it is only volunteers using their own cell phones or cheap pre-paid cells purchased by the campaign.  Prime hours for phoning are 6 to 9, when people generally are home from work.  Even then, however, we are lucky if one in ten of our calls is answered.  In a busy city like Philadelphia people aren’t often home and moreover most have caller ID and don’t answer if they don’t recognize the number.

We print out dense sheets of names and numbers for volunteers to call.  At the beginning of each phone bank session one of us hands out a detailed script that the campaign has composed (and often focus-group tested), and that changes according to the stages of the election cycle.  We do a brief training – but the more experienced volunteers generally revert to their own routines.  If the targeted person answers, the volunteer is supposed to find out if he or she is an Obama supporter and if so would be interested in volunteering.  They tick off appropriate boxes on the form -- “NH” (Not Home), “DIS” in the frequent case that the phone is no longer active, a number from 1 to 5 reflecting Obama supporter (1), undecided (3), or Romney supporter (5).  Because these are targeted voters there are few of the latter, but occasionally someone who supported Obama in 2008 has switched.  If a person is undecided we might offer our own stories why we support the President, but we don’t spend a lot of time in persuasion.  There are so many Democrats in Philadelphia that it is a better use of our time to identify supporters and make sure they vote.  Before each phone bank is over we are responsible for entering the all results into the database – unlike four years ago, the campaign has decreed that all data must be entered by midnight. 

After settling into a routine in the first few days I attend trainings on Friday afternoon and Sunday evening.  The first, at the state headquarters in a Center City office building, provides a general introduction to the campaign’s general philosophy and organization.  It is led by several of the regional leaders, who begin by telling the stories of how they came to be there – a practice that I later realize has its roots in Obama’s experience as a community organizer.  We are encouraged to develop concise and effective versions of our own stories to use in relating to volunteers who we will be leading.  At the end we practice assembling canvassing packets, a surprisingly complicated combination of address sheets for targets, campaign literature and maps showing the most efficient way of walking the area.

The Sunday training, for all volunteers who will be taking leadership roles in GOTV, is held at a beautiful historic townhouse on Locust Street in Center City that is now a union headquarters.   Speakers bring a sense of urgency to the occasion by pointing out that of the many different ways Obama can get to 270 votes in the Electoral College, ALL of them include Pennsylvania.  In other words, he can’t win unless he wins Pennsylvania.  And as we know, he can’t win Pennsylvania unless he wins massively in Philadelphia, because most of the rest of the state is heavily Republican.  And – unlike many other states – Pennsylvania has no early voting.  We have only 13 hours, from 7 am to 8 pm, to turn out every possible Obama vote.  One campaign leader tells an admonitory tale of how he narrowly lost a Congressional race in South Carolina because his staffers failed to catch the fact that several key Democratic precincts opened an hour late.  To make sure that our GOTV organization is the best that it can be, the campaign has scheduled repeated dry runs during the weekends leading up Election Day.

Entrance to our Staging Location

Instead of using centralized offices as in the past, GOTV will be run out of many small Staging Locations located in the neighborhoods and staffed by local residents.  I have already been focusing my efforts on the Logan Circle neighborhood just north of my apartment; Scott has found us a perfect location, in offices belonging to another union right in the middle of the neighborhood.  At the training meeting I meet Stephanie, who will be Staging Location Director (SLD), and Regine and Sandi who will share duties as Phonebank Director.  Scott tells me that I will be Canvass Director.  I have never done anything remotely like this – I don’t think I’m particularly good at managing people – but there it is.

And so over the following three weeks life falls into a routine of telephone calls to recruit volunteers and on the weekends running canvasses.  There is a bit of a glitch the first dry run Saturday because we can’t use the office, so we set up a table in the little courtyard in front and work from there.  Fortunately, it is a glorious fall day.  I do my training of canvassers – at least the ones that show up on time – and then set up the phoners.  One of them, an older African-American woman, discovers that her phone list includes many residents of the subsidized apartment building where she lives.  The rest of us are delighted by her down-to-earth conversations with her neighbors.  With one woman in her late 90s: “Yes, honey, I know you are ready to go, but you can’t until after the election!”

Canvassers work not only to identify supporters but to cultivate in them mental habits that will encourage them to vote on Election Day.  For many this is no easy task, for it is a regular working day with no time off to vote.  For working people who have busy lives and families and don’t have a habit of voting, it can be easy to forget.  So, along with brochures on issues, canvassers carry colorful cards with a photograph of the President and First Lady on one side.  When they find supporters they ask them to fill out the cards and sign a commitment to vote.  We collect these; a few days before the election we will mail them back as reminders of their commitment.

As the election nears canvassers continue to reach out even to people who have been contacted before.  They make sure voters know where the polling place is and in conversation urge them to begin to make a plan.  Scott tells me, and I tell the canvassers, that research shows that people who visualize themselves through the process are more likely to vote, and our goal is to obtain that small extra percentage increase.  (It is only afterward that I learn that the campaign’s use of social science research like this is also pathbreaking.)

Those of us who manage the canvassing and phoning also have lots to learn.  At the beginning of every shift we are supposed to report to the SLD how many canvassers and how many packets are out, and the next shift we report on how many attempts were made during the previous shift.  Our SLD Stephanie reports these numbers to Scott, who reports them to his Field Director, and so on up the line.

After two weekends of dry runs, as we enter the final weekend before the Election we feel well prepared.  Even moreso because we have been joined by Lizzie, a university student from London who has flown over to volunteer for the last week of the campaign.  She is smart, funny and willing to do whatever is asked of her.  This is especially valuable because most of the Logan Circle leaders except for me have full-time jobs and can’t be there every twelve-hour day.

Monday before Election Day is important because that is when campaigns traditionally distribute door tags with the location of their polling places on them.  This is a particularly complicated and expensive part of GOTV, because tags for each precinct must be specially prepared and kept apart from others.  In our area, it is also difficult because many people live in high-rise apartment buildings that canvassers can’t access.  We have been hard at work trying to find ways around this problem, such as locating supporters who live in the buildings who are willing to distribute tags within their buildings, or at least to let canvassers into the building to do it.  By the end of the day, we are pleased that we have been able to get into a substantial majority of the buildings in our area.

The difference between this campaign and the usual approach is driven home for me when we get a visit from the local Democratic committee person.  She notes, amiably enough, that her neighbors had been complaining because they didn’t get their usual door tags.  I explain that that was because the campaign knew that these people always voted and thus didn’t need tags.  We were focusing our efforts on those who often didn’t get out to vote.  Fortunately, that seems to satisfy her but I am surprised at the lack of communication between the Party and the Obama organization.

As Election Day dawns we feel ready.  The “tick-tock,” a minute-by-minute schedule for “E-Day,” stipulates that the FO calls his/her SLD at 5:30 am; in turn she or he is supposed to call the directors of canvassing and phone-banking.  Offices are supposed to open at 6:00 am.  Because polling places don’t open until 7:00 am, Stephanie and I agree that I will open the office at 6:45, while Stephanie goes to vote.  But Scott frowns on this laxness, and so I arrive shortly after 6:00.   I turn on my computer and lay out canvassing packets for the 9:00 shift.  I read the latest blog posting from Nate Silver, whose statistical savvy has helped keep me sane during the ups and downs of the preceding month.  (That, and the fact that I was generally too busy to pay much attention to the small crises of the campaign.)  Whenever someone asks me how I think it’s going, I say “I’m cautiously hopeful.”  The race in Pennsylvania has tightened in the past week – Romney even made a campaign stop in a Philadelphia suburb – but I’m actually glad because that prevents people from getting complacent.  Nothing is more dangerous to a campaign than complacency.

Training Canvassers

There is plenty of time to vote and check out that all polling places in our area have opened on time.  After voting I finally pick up coffee and breakfast on my way back to the office.  When Lizzie arrives I give her some money and send her out to buy coffee for the volunteers – surprisingly, the campaign has given us no money for refreshments, although supporters have brought in munchies of various kinds over preceding days.  Later in the day a supporter in the neighborhood carries in a stack of cheese pizzas, thereby assuring that staple of all campaigns.

As the morning passes there is a growing hum of activity and excitement in the office.  Over the weekend we had been alarmed at a high rate of no-shows among volunteers, but today more people show up than have signed up to volunteer.  We have so many canvassers that I am able to send a group to another district with too few – the height of success for a field organization.  Each of our areas have been canvassed three times when the polls close at 8:00 pm.  Scott calls repeatedly to ask about lines at the polling places.  If there are long lines we are supposed to dispatch volunteers – or go ourselves – to talk to people in line and make sure they stay there.  If they are in line by 8:00 pm they must be allowed to vote, but they have to be willing to wait.  Strangely, all of our runners say that there are no lines, everything is going smoothly.  Even so, turnout is good.  Could it be that our educational project succeeded in getting many people to show up early?

At the end of a long Election Day

As the polls close the office slowly empties out.  Stephanie, Regine, Lizzie and I are too nervous to think of leaving.  We begin picking up the place, laughing rather giddily at odd events of the day.  Scott calls to heap abundant praise upon us for our work.  By nine o’clock, Pennsylvania has been called for Obama.  Stephanie and Lizzie plan to meet others at the Warwick Hotel, where the Democratic Party traditionally holds its Election Night celebration, but I am far too tired to do anything but go home.

In Switzerland, the Spouse has gone to bed early and gotten up at 2:30 am his time, 8:30 pm Philadelphia time.  At that hour even the international CNN station is running US election night coverage.  I call our internet telephone number, and settle into a chair in our apartment to “watch” the returns through him because I have no cable or internet.  Sometime after 10 pm Ohio – and hence the entire election – is called for Obama, and I decide to go to bed.  I’ve just stretched out when I receive a raucous call from my friends at the Warwick, where everyone is obviously having a very good time.

I am too wired to sleep well, but enjoy the opportunity to lie abed the next morning before heading out to my favorite coffee shop for breakfast and free wifi to catch up with the news.  Then I must return to my condo and pack, for I have a ticket to return to Switzerland that afternoon. 

Regine, Lizzie, Jack, Scott and Stephanie

The following evening I participate in a celebratory conference call with my campaign buddies, who have met for lunch at Regine’s office.  Scott points out that despite generally lower turnout this year as compared to 2008, our area has seen a 7% increase in turnout.  Philadelphia as a whole has given 85% of its votes to Obama.  We congratulate ourselves on having been part of “the best field organization in history.”