"The New Organizers" -- A Fascinating Take On Obama's Field Operation

It's by Netroots pioneer Zack Exley. Read the whole thing...

The Ohio campaign is attempting to build teams in 1,231 campaign-defined "neighborhoods," each covering eight to ten precincts. They are targeting virtually every inhabited square mile of the state. The campaign claimed to have teams in 65% of neighborhoods when I visited in early September. That's risen to 85% coverage at press time--and they are shooting for 100%. In contrast, the Kerry campaign effectively wrote off rural counties, and completely abandoned them in the final few weeks of the campaign in a last minute all-in shift to the cities.

It was a huge risk for the national field program to have paid staff take the time to methodically build volunteer teams instead of rushing directly to spend all their time running voter contact activities themselves. From the point of view of the conventional wisdom of much of the pre-Obama field organizing world, the campaign is actually taking two big risks: first they are risking everything on the effectiveness of masses of volunteers, then they are risking everything again by relying on volunteer teams to lead those masses. What if teams was just a bunch of hippy nonsense? What if it turned out there just weren't that many unpaid activists capable of running high-quality canvasses?

Jeremy Bird, the Ohio general election director and one of the driving forces behind making teams a national strategy, said, "We decided in terms of timeline that [our organizers] would not be measured by the amount of voter contacts they made in the summer--but instead by the number of volunteers that they were recruiting, training and testing. It was much more an infrastructure focus. So there would be no calls from Chicago saying, 'Why haven't you made more calls?!' Instead there would be calls saying, 'Where are your neighborhood team volunteers?' Or, if the numbers seemed high, 'Are they real?' It was a whole shift in mentality that was really, really good."

It is impossible to overstate how counter intuitive this slow-build approach was for Democrats. Even Regional Field Director for Southwest Ohio, Christen Linke Young--who I witnessed in 2004 pushing independently for just this strategy as an Ohio FO in Franklin County--said it was scary to take this patient approach:

"We had a whole month where, on our nightly calls with headquarters, we did not report our voter contact numbers. We only reported our leadership building. I definitely stayed on top of what our voter contact numbers looked like. But headquarters wasn't paying attention to how many voters we registered or how many doors we knocked that day--they were paying attention to how many one-on-one meetings we had, house meetings, neighborhood team leaders recruited, how many people we had convinced to come to this wonderful training in Columbus that we had. Yes, it was definitely scary to see how big our persuasion universe was and know that our first priority was not to just be tearing through that."