Coming into this election, I had never been really involved in any campaign, beyond writing a handful of letters to Iowa voters for Dean in 2004. I wanted to get involved this year, but being in California, didn't think working for Obama was the best use of my time. I decided that the struggle for the civil rights issue of our time was the way to go. So over the past 3 months I spent about 120 hrs volunteering to defeat prop 8, first as a regular phone banker, then a phone bank trainer, and finally yesterday as a 'hub captain', dispatching volunteers to polling places to stand outside of the 100' limit (as scouted by me), hand out flyers, etc. I'd like to share my personal observations over those months regarding why we lost.
I expect that some folks I worked with might recognize me if they read this, and I hope that any of my comments aren't taken as a criticism of the field-level staff in the county I worked in. These people voiced some of the same concerns I am going to note. All complaints are against the upper-level decision makers who made some KEY mistakes.
Key Failure 1: Failure to Target Absentee Ballots
In early October, I was beginning to act as a trainer in my county at phone banks. We were regularly getting 30-40 phone bankers twice a week to the location I was at. At the county headquarters building, which I visited to pick up materials, there was a prominent count-down to the mailing of absentee ballots. Surely I thought, we would be calling these absentee ballot voters and helping them vote "No" and asking them to mail back the ballots. Well, the first week of absentee ballot voting, we did this. But the script was very awkward and inaccurate: it guided the voter to a certain page to vote on Prop 8. If the voter happened to be in the C & C of San Francisco that worked great, but if you were calling a voter somewhere else in the state, you were not getting them to the right page. My phone bank adapted quickly and tried to notify up the chain, I expected the problem resolved by the following week.
Well the next week came - and all efforts to target absentee-ballot holders, and get them to vote, were dropped. The script called for us to ask them if they have voted, but no pressure to do so now, on the phone, or anything. I think this was a key mistake.
Key Failure 2: Failure to Target Early Voting
On the Saturday before the election, I got an email sent to all the higher-level volunteers and lower-level staff - volunteers were needed at early voting places at three spots throughout the county. Volunteers would be meeting voters near the 100' mark and asking them if they had questions, etc.
In the back of my mind a huge alarm went off. I knew a friend had voted early, at a polling place, and I remembered thinking that was odd, I didn't realize California did this. I kind of assumed that the campaign was targeting these voters. I blame myself for this now: I assumed I was doing enough, and assumed the campaign had things together, I did not ask anyone if these early voters were being targeted.
So the morning I am out there, meeting early voters, I ask a companion, a paid staffer, why so few volunteers are out here - and are we the first group doing this. I am told yes - the campaign DID NOT KNOW EARLY VOTING EXISTED. I could NOT BELIEVE this. There were a TON of people voting early, and with limited locations, it would have been easy for a relatively small number of volunteers to have an outsized impact.
Key Failure 3: Election Day
Election Day was really a collection of SNAFU's caused by the failure to steer volunteers towards earlier voting, failure to anticipate the lower turnout, and failure of GOTV.
A few other diarists have discussed their volunteering at a specific polling location. I was a hub captain, which meant I dispatched volunteers to numerous polling locations, got reports back, forwarded those reports up the chain, and decided where to allocate what were ASSUMED to be precious resources. The day did NOT go that way at all. Ahead of time, we were given about 100 handouts per volunteer - hopefully they would all go through these handouts, and the fear was that we'd run out. It wasn't even close. Every single one of my polling places were nearly deserted. We may have gone through 200 of the 2500 cards we were given.
I do not know if they were chosen poorly, or if voters had all voted early. What I do know is that a huge group of volunteers were totally misused. I called HQ and asked about the other Hubs in my county, and the next county, and they were all slow. I was called to see if I need MORE volunteers - I had more than I could use already. Partway through the day HQ distributed 'backup' polling site lists so we could scout for some better spots. I had asked for this days earlier, already suspecting that some of my sites would be failures, but been denied it. Even with the backups I was sending 4 volunteers to a polling place getting only one voter every 10 minutes.
On the GOTV front, the campaign should have been prepared to use volunteers differently if the vote was slow. It would have been great for a robo-call to go out informing people previously identified as supporters of No that there were NO LINES and that even if they already knew that their chosen Pres candidate had won or lost, that they could vote No on 8 within a couple of minutes and get back out. Simply put, far fewer people voted on the issue than expected - we were told all along that 6.4 M votes would be required to win, and both sides fell well short of that.
Conclusion
I truly think that this was a campaign we could have won, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I actually enjoyed working on it, despite the long hours on top of my day job. But I am pretty upset at these pretty key failures in campaign strategy that are leaving some of my friends and coworkers so in the lurch today.