Below are a few lessons learned by an Obama foot soldier in the Virginia Primary, part of Obama's Potomac Trifecta last Tuesday.
Bottom line: coming only one week after Super Tuesday, the Obama campaign in the Potomac Primary had to depend heavily on local volunteers and locally produced campaign materials. The professional staffers arrived in time for a solid weekend of directing phone banking, canvassing, and visibility efforts. In contrast, there was virtually no sign of a Hillary ground game or advertising presence.
The result was an encouraging 64-36 Obama win in Virginia.
A few specific links and suggestions below the break may be of some use to local volunteer efforts for Obama in Texas and Oklahoma.
My.BarackObama.com for Nearby Campaign Activities
Three weeks before the February 12th Potomac Primary, I checked My.BarackObama.com for campaign activities in my area, Northern Virginia (NOVA). I found one that I had enjoyed in a previous campaign--passing out flyers at the Metro, and I e-mailed the "Metro Visibility Coordinator," who promptly responded. Throughout NOVA we had volunteers at most Metro stops during rush hours for two weeks before the primary.
Getting the Obama Campaign Stuff
Our main problem was getting signs/posters and producing the handouts. We had a few Obama signs to wave, but many volunteers ended up reproducing their own flyers on their home printers or at Kinkos or Staples at a few cents a copy. Obviously, it is better to have a nice, glossy brochure than to hand out a black-and-white printed sheet, but one could also argue that there is certain compelling spontaneous quality about the locally produced, cheap handout. Just $50 or $100 can buy many hundreds of copies. The "Store" at Obama's website is back-ordered on many items. There may simply not be time for the campaign materials to be produced and delivered in time for the March 4th primaries.
For downloadable .pdf files of some of Obama's policy positions, you can go to: Resource Flyers.
For .pdf signs, etc, you can go to: Obama Posters, Signs and Stickers. You can then glue or tape the printouts to cardboard or poster board. Alternatively, you can have a local printing firm produce them for you.
Many in NOVA bought their own poster board and markers and made their own window signs and yard signs. I even saw one man and his sons walking down the street in Falls Church with a huge home-made "Obama '08" banner on the Saturday before the primary.
In NOVA we had a minimal number of yard signs, buttons, and bumper stickers to pass out, though there was an extremely heavy demand for them. Washington, D.C., on the other hand, seemed to have a good number of Obama signs spread throughout the city. With more lead time before the primaries in Texas and Ohio, the campaign may have more success in supplying such items--as well as brochures and signs--to volunteers in those states. But if there are any supply bottlenecks, the download links above should help.
Enough glossy brochures arrived by the weekend before the primary to enable me to leaflet my neighborhood and hand out the remainder at a Metro stop.
Local (Dis)organization
At first glance, the whole effort--which was especially intense only for the week following Super Tuesday and particularly for the weekend before the primary--seemed amorphous, almost unstructured. The national staffers were fully functioning in NOVA only by the weekend before the primary.
The NOVA office for Obama opened only on February 4th, a mere week before the primary. Nonetheless, there was a flood of volunteers throughout the week. A second office opened in NOVA later in the week, and both offices had a creative chaos of high numbers of volunteers for phone banking, canvassing, and driving materials and volunteers to wherever they had to go. One afternoon while I was trying to cadge a few campaign materials from one of the headquarters, I heard someone say to a volunteer: "We've run out of call lists to hand out." There surely was no shortage of volunteers. We had a fair number of out-of-state students on the weekend before the primary. Their efforts were certainly welcome, but the most effective GOTV efforts are probably those of local volunteers.
The campaign set up an activities websites for counties in Virginia and sought volunteers to serve as District Coordinators. The District Coordinators generally served as the depots for whatever small numbers of signs and handouts were available from the national campaign. They also sought to encourage a presence outside as many polling stations as possible for primary day and to help with arranging rides to the polls. With so many "late deciders" in this campaign, it seems worthwhile to provide voters with one last nudge of encouragement as they walk into the polling station.
The campaign did not become so granular as to seek out precinct captains for canvassing and leafleting efforts. Doing so would likely be a good idea. Perhaps there will be time to do so in Texas and Ohio. The national campaign staffers and those running the local campaign tended to send out flurries of mass e-mails. A more coherent command structure down to the precinct probably would have helped. There is a reason, after all, that the Romans employed decurions to lead groups of eight foot soldiers or thirty cavalrymen. Low-level coordination among town/township/neighborhood/precinct volunteers needs to be linked to the county or city campaign leadership, but such "decurions" could serve as bottom-up and top-down filters and activity coordinators in their locales. They would be able to coordinate campaign activities with short, precise, e-mails addressed to the appropriate members of their group and to the "centurions" above them.
No particular union efforts crossed my screen in NOVA (unions are not especially strong in Virginia). Unions will presumably provide many effective foot soldiers at least in Ohio.
The Clinton ground game was virtually invisible in NOVA and Washington, DC (just a very modest Metro presence one or two days before the primary). As short as we were in Obama yard signs for distribution, I saw not a single Hillary yard sign anywhere in NOVA before February 12th. The Clinton forces will surely work to deploy a more respectable ground game in Texas and Ohio. They showed, after all, that they were capable of conducting an effective ground game in New Hampshire.
The Four Major Lessons Learned
(1) If the national campaign cannot provide all the signs and handouts that volunteers need, they can download .pdf files from the two sites listed above and get them copied/printed locally at Kinkos, Staples, or a local printing company.
(2) Go to Obama's Campaign Website and search on your zip code to find campaign activities near you. You can also form a group to generate your own activity with friends and neighbors.
(3) Then coordinate vertically with your nearest Obama county or regional headquarters and locally with like-minded volunteers to canvass, phone bank, arrange campaign visibility efforts, and, most importantly, GOTV on March 4th. Try to avoid mass e-mailings. Send precise, action-oriented, coordinating e-mails to individuals and small groups instead.
(4) Oh, and remember to remind friends, colleagues, and all voters that you encounter that the primaries in Texas and Ohio are open--Republicans and Independents can vote for Obama if they wish.
*Footnote #1: Yes, Obama had one of his famous rallies in NOVA at T.C. Williams High School. I understand that rallies generate enthusiasm. When I was watching the TV news coverage of the huge Obama rallies in New Hampshire, though, I couldn't help but think how much better the attendees' time would be spent canvassing or passing out flyers in public visibility efforts. If the attendees in New Hampshire had spent as much time in GOTV efforts as in traveling to and attending campaign rallies, perhaps they could have eked out a victory there, instead of suffering a narrow loss.
**Footnote #2: When someone coming out of a Metro stop would ask me why I thought he/she should vote for Obama instead of Hillary, my most persuasive response was probably:
I think that Hillary would be a competent President, if she could win. But she is going to have a tough time defeating McCain in what would likely be a very close election. Obama has the potential to crush McCain by 57-43 or even 60-40, and Obama likely would have the kind of coattails that could give the Democrats a real working majority in the House and Senate.
Good luck to all fellow Obama foot soldiers in Texas and Ohio.