If my hunches are correct, most of you blog readers are keeping up feverishly with the latest swings in the Gallup daily tracker, Rasmussen and Time/CNN polls.
If you're a little more savvy, you're looking carefully at the state-by-state battleground polls to see if McCain really is getting a bounce outside of states with heavy concentrations of evangelical voters.
But I suspect that ten times as many people know about the latest polls than know about the Obama campaign's Neighbor to Neighbor program. And, I further suspect, there are many more who are aware of the program than are actually using it. And that's freaking irresponsible. The Obama campaign is our campaign. It's our baby. After the RNC and the evangelical Palin bump, we have a small flu with undecided voters: and now we can either get heartburn as we fret over our sick baby and scream incantations into the ether in the hopes of an exorcism, or we can get off our butts and get that baby some medicine. It's all up to you.
Jack and Jill Politics has a great summary of the program:
his campaign is built on the belief that everyday Americans, when organized and focused, can change their country.
Now you can have an even greater impact on your community. Start today by logging in to our new voter contact tool to find voters near you to reach out to. You can go door to door or make calls at any time that’s convenient for you. There’s no one who knows your community better than you do, so help us build support for Barack Obama and this movement for change by beginning in your own neighborhood.
When you log in you’ll see that we’ve prepared all the resources that you need, including:
- A list of voters in your neighborhood who we need to reach out to
- A script you can use in your conversations
- A customized flyer you can distribute
- Easy interfaces to report back the results of your efforts to the campaign
It's extraordinarily well-organized, and very easy to use. The messaging and outreach is also tailored to your specific area, focusing on outreach efforts that can best help the campaign at this time.
For instance, I live in coastal Southern California. It doesn't do a lot of good for me to be engaged in voter persuasion or drafting local volunteers; besides, the organizations to take care of those things are already in place.
So the program gives me an electronic list of Obama supporters in my area who have indicated they may have an interest in volunteering for the campaign. I make calls asking if they would be willing to travel to swing states (presumably Nevada in my case, one of the states where the election will be won or lost); whether they would be willing to phonebank for voters out-of-state; and whether they would be willing to be a part of a national data entry network for the campaign. The site automatically provides me a script for each volunteer contact, and radio button selections for each response. When I'm done with that volunteer, I click "Save and Next" to move on to the next contact. I can also walk door-to-door by printing out walk lists.
That way, when it comes time to organize the nuts-and-bolts campaign efforts to win Nevada (and, perhaps, Arizona depending on the polling), the campaign will know whom it can count on and whom it cannot. And this works exponentially, of course: every volunteer you draft to knock on doors or make calls in a battleground state means tens if not hundreds of extra voter contacts the campaign can make via just that one person.
Of course, if you live in a battleground state, your options with the Neighbor-to-Neighbor program multiply and your efforts become all that much more important.
As anyone who's been involved in politics knows, turnout decides elections. A well-mobilized campaign can overwhelm "real" polling numbers by as much as 5 points.
If you're ranting and raving and worrying about the latest polls, but not getting involved in the neighbor-to-neighbor program, you're wasting bandwidth and potentially productive energy to help this campaign win.
So stop worrying, and get to work.