Experiences Working for the Obama Campaign – part 1
It has been quite some time since I’ve contributed to this fine publication. I suppose I needed an intellectual cooldown after the madness that was the last six weeks of the Obama campaign.
It was my intent to return from working as a Field Organizer in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, recap the most interesting moments of the campaign and share them here. Luckily, my good friend and oustanding out of state volunteer Frank decided to compile his thoughts at the end of each day during those weeks. His recollections are probably more accurate and certainly more immediate than anything I could recount now. That is not to say that I will not be sharing my experiences, but to start with I would like to direct you all to some of Frank’s comments on our time community organizing in rural Pennsylvania.
Frank came to our little out of the way office in Sharpsville, PA as a full time, out of state volunteer. At the point he arrived, I had fallen into the role of the go-to guy in our office. This was only because I ended up being the staffer with the longest tenure in the office (4 weeks!), and so allegedly, I was the most familiar with the county. I got a call one day from this fellow Frank, and he told me he would be coming in to volunteer. Always glad to hear a volunteer confirm a shift, I was a bit caught off guard when he noted that he would be leaving Baltimore soon and should arrive sometime that night. He spent the next two weeks working alongside three barely tolerable recent-grads and was an immense help. I would argue his work in Greenville helped us clinch our narrow victory in Mercer County. In short, we were very glad he came.
He wrote his entries more or less at the end of each day during the last two weeks of the campaign, and has since published them on his blog, Caffinated Ideas. I will only share a few of his stories here, so I encourage you to check out the full blog for great coverage of what went on during that wild time.
Before I share some of Frank’s writings, I should set the stage a bit. For the last six weeks of the campaign I worked in Mercer County, Pennsylvania as a Field Organizer. This primarily entailed contacting, organizing and training volunteers to do phonebanking, canvassing and voter registration on behalf of Sen. Obama. I quickly found out that the situation in Mercer County would prove to be slightly more challenging than the typical assignment, as previous tenants of the office had overseen what was described to me as a brewing “three way civil war” between the Obama campaign, the county party and the various grassroots organizations that had formed. Therefore, my job description came to include public relations, political management and high level diplomacy. I enjoyed it all.
Here, I will refer to Frank’s initial impression of the county:
The drive from Baltimore to Sharpsville, PA was quite a bit longer than I’d expected. On the far Western edge of Pennsylvania – literally bordering on Ohio, and a bit closer to Erie and the northern border of Pennsylvania than to Pittsburgh and the southern border of the state – Mercer County is certainly off the beaten track. It has many of the characteristics of typical suburbs, and is sprinkled with a number of small cities that appear to have had their heyday in the late 19th century and early 20th century. And, like most suburbs I’d seen in VA and PA, it was loaded with McCain signs!
Cities like Farrell, Greenville, and Sharon suffer from some of the same problems as bigger cities – including the loss of manufacturing jobs – but haven’t seen the new economy jobs that have funded a renaissance in New York, Baltimore, or Pittsburgh.
Over the past week, race had emerged as an issue in Western Pennsylvania. In an interview with editorial writers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the long-serving local Congressman, John Murtha, spoke candidly of race issue. “There’s no question Western Pennsylvania is a racist area. The older population is more hesitant.” In a separate interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Murtha suggested that Obama’s race would knock off about 4 points from his total in Western PA. He was roundly criticized for his comments, and apologized the following day; but, Murtha succeeded in bringing this discussion to the fore.
In the midst of an election campaign, the statement quickly made the national news – and presented the McCain campaign with an opportunity to raise the race issue under the cover of Murtha’s blunder. Issues like this one are often Red Herrings, and further examination underscores the fact that these issues exist only because they’re repeated by political leaders and the media. I quickly learned that wasn’t the case here.
One of our volunteer callers this evening was told, in no uncertain terms, “I’m voting for the White guy.”
Race, in both surprising and unsurprising terms, came to define a lot of what went on in Mercer County. I will provide a good number more examples later on, but it is important, difficult though it may be for some, to keep race in the back of your mind at all times when reading about this campaign at the community organizing level.
In terms of the day-to-day operations of our office, Frank again says exactly what I’d like to say on the matter:
This is a fact-based campaign. It seems that everything that happens has been scripted – and is based upon facts. Just as a salesman knows that his success is a numbers game, so too does the Obama campaign. The more prospects that the salesman touches, the more successful he’ll be; the more prospective voters this campaign touches, the more likely these people will be to turn out for Barack Obama.
Incredible automation: the big success of this campaign is VoteBuilder, a web-based software tool that facilitates this campaign’s focus on metrics. VoteBuilder’s development has been supported by the DNC, and in 2008 it’s been adopted by the vast majority of state parties. Like all software tools in a digital world, VoteBuilder is scary smart – not because of what it is today, but because of where it’s going. Limited only by the budget to purchase commercial databases, it’s likely that the convergence of data sources will offer powerful new insights into every voter’s interests, passions, and hot buttons.
Voter tally sheets are barcoded to make data entry reasonably fast. At this point, the goal of this campaign is to touch as many positively inclined voters as possible in the weeks before the election. Earlier, the campaign effectively identified undecided voters for ‘persuasion calls,’ empowering volunteers to make the case for Obama. In fact, I encourage every volunteer to ‘speak from the heart’ about why they’re supporting Obama: it may be unscripted, but it’s sincere!
Like a snowball rolling down a hill, we seek to enlarge the number of volunteers with each phone call. If our volunteers become disaffected when twenty calls in a row don’t yield a volunteer, it’s valuable to point out that they’ve doubled their contribution to the campaign if they recruit just 2 volunteers during a 3 hour shift: no only is it a compelling argument, it kept me going on multiple occasions!
In all of our calls, we take the opportunity to invite anyone expressing support for Obama to volunteer, and it is a remarkably effective approach. It’s surprising, but a large number of folks agree to come by – perhaps 3-4%! The campaign keeps track of volunteer shifts, and the day before you’ve committed to come by, you’re given a reminder call. Part of the daily reporting also captures volunteers who failed to make their shifts: called ‘flakes’.
Most importantly, the technology and performance measures that have been put in place to target likely Obama voters produce data that allows the campaign to fine-tune its outreach on a daily basis. It’s not uncommon for companies to develop sophisticated point-of-sale or sales lead tracking systems, for example, and collect extensive metrics on performance; however, it’s unusual for these analytical systems to be used to their fullest potential. There are strikingly few examples of companies that dynamically adjust their supply chain based upon real-time knowledge of sales leads. In effect, this is precisely what the Obama campaign has achieved!
Reporting daily achievements is part of the operational routine for the field campaign. The morning call is about goals, and the mechanics of running the campaign. At 10pm each night, the Pennsylvania campaign holds a conference call, the bulk of which is devoted to a recitation of the day’s numbers vs. the day’s target on a region-by-region basis (Pennsylvania is divided into four regions: Philadelphia, Philadelphia suburbs and Eastern PA, Central PA, and Western PA; in turn, each region is divided into a smaller geographic area with multiple counties). It’s an approach that could only be accomplished with a large, well-trained field staff.
The gathering, processing and reporting of data came to be definitional of my day to day experience. From the time I was in the shower in the morning to the time I was pulling up the covers in bed at night, the metrics Frank describes were what was on my mind. It was not so much of an obsession with the numbers themselves, I do not think. I think I can speak for most of the organizers I know when I say it was more that we had a keen understanding that achieving the high goals set for us was critical to success on November 4th. I, for one, was unconcerned with our daily numbers so long as I felt that we were on track for sucess on election day. Of course, I did not always feel that way, and that is when things became stressful.
Lucky for us, we had a great grassroots movement to build on that was established well before the Obama campaign was even on the ground in the primaries. At the forefront of this effort was Mercer County PA for Obama. Frank again describes one of their meetings better than I could:
I joined Mike at the weekly meeting of the Mercer County for Obama group. For over a year, this grassroots group has been meeting on Thursday nights at Tully’s, a very large restaurant and bar in Sharon, PA.
It’s ironic that they chose Sharon as their meeting location, because the local Democratic party has been anything but kind to Obama. It’s leader was a devout supporter of Hillary Clinton’s, and upon Clinton’s withdrawal from the race, reportedly said publicly that she would not vote for Obama — but would write in Clinton. And, from what I’ve seen, there’s been little engagement of the Sharon Democratic regulars in the Obama campaign.
Quaker Steak has a number of great features for such a meeting: it’s a casual environment with an enormous meeting room that’s freely available. Of course, living in Maryland and New York, I’ve become accustomed to smoke-free environments, and that’s not one of Quaker Steak’s amenities! In fact, like most bars in Western PA, it’s teeming with cigarette smoke.
On this evening, the grassroots Obama group turned out about 50 volunteers to discuss the remaining 12 days of the campaign. It’s significantly less than the 150 who turned out last week for GOTV training by the Obama campaign, but still an impressive showing. Perhaps most impressive is the composition: it’s evenly split between black and white, and there are people ranging from about 30 to 80 years old. Mark Prokay and Don Christoff are the group’s organizers, and unlike the local Democratic Party there’s little hierarchy to their effort. They welcome anyone who works on the campaign, and always roll up their own sleeves.
While Mark and Don are both deeply committed to Senator Obama’s election, they’re both disappointed by the campaign’s false starts in Mercer County — and by the lack of attention that Mercer County has gotten despite its early grassroots effort. In many ways, Mark and Don are both middle-aged white guys, but they couldn’t be more different from one another: Mark is a determined and organized person who is a good listener. Don has a booming voice and uses it to great effect to express emotion; when he enters a room, it’s as if someone has left the door open while there’s a blustery storm outside. Don’s presence never goes unnoticed. But, in one way, they’re cut from the same cloth: they are determined to do the right thing, and they’ll buck authority to make their case.
Their relative success at grassroots organizing for Obama is just the beginning; they plan to keep their group going after the election, hopefully bringing grassroots support to President Obama when he takes on difficult challenges, and for bringing about progressive policy changes in Western Pennsylvania.
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We had quite a hole to dig ourselves out of in Mercer County, and it took a lot of hard work from the four of us in that office and the small army of amazingly dedicated volunteers we found ourselves lucky enough to work with to pull it off. But we did, and in the coming days I will share some great stories from that process. I only hope the retelling of these moments will inform your view of the political process as much as they did mine.
Be sure to check out Frank’s blog at Caffeinated Ideas, and check back here for more campaign stories and day to day commentary on everything from stupid teen vampire movies to analysis of American soft power. It is all good stuff, I promise.
-Mike
might I just say, Quaker Steak and Lube is the bomb!