Must Read Series on the Ground Game

I wrote a diary last night on the rise of fivethirtyeight.com the site created by Kossack Nate Silver aka Poblano. That site has done excellent work in a series of posts entitled On the Road where Sean Quinn aka PocketNines have visited six (6) different states and reported on the ground game he found there. If you have not read those posts do so now.

In my own opinion this series should win some type of writing award and not just for blogs either. If you have ever been interested in how the ground game works, what the campaigns are thinking this is must read material. It is an excellent look into the minds of the community level workers around this country dedicated to electing both Obama and McCain. Yes, i said Obama and McCain. It is one of the things i like most about this series of blog articles is that it delves into not only what Obama is doing and how he is organizing but also how mccain is organizing. It gives a complete picture. Here is the introduction explaining the series,

The story of the organizer and volunteer effort is one that needs to be told. It was much underreported in 2004 just how potently the Bush ground campaign organized. Say what you want about his governance – and we all have – but his competitive fire was lit for the election race. Republicans turned their voters out. Who’s got more heart this time? Missouri boys say: Show-Me.

This year, all available evidence suggests the Obama campaign is doing something unprecedented with its organizing efforts. Is it this: 29’2.5”? Is it Mexico City, 1968? The story seems to be hiding in plain sight. The effort is more reported than the Bush 2004 effort, but it is still underreported. More significantly, it is under-contextualized. Pollsters have to guess about turnout, and often they revert to more conservative estimates because their past modeling of likely voters suggests that’s correct. Besides, if ground games are equally effective, they should cancel each other out. There's an understandable bias against believing something and modeling it until it is proven. It's why big enthusiasm and GOTV can make up ground against a fully accurate poll of voter preference.

Just what is organizing? How does it work? What are the nuts and bolts? And why is it something a site primarily (but not exclusively) known for its polling analysis would want to cover as closely as possible?

And is the McCain campaign being given short shrift? Is it being taken too lightly? And what kind of galvanizing effect did the Palin addition offer the Republican base? This is not a one-sided story.

And it all deserves to be told in real time. We're tempted to do a photo series of the floors of organizers’ rooms, but we think organizer moms and dads would freak out. There ain’t no lipstick on that pig, we can assure you (and once had our own crazy-stupid organizer floor mess).

Since that first post the cities visited include carson, mindon, reno, and las vegas Nevada, Gallup, Espanola, and Albuquerque/Santa Fe New Mexico. In colorado they visited Boulder, Colorado Springs, Grand Junction and Durango/Cortez. They have hit up Omaha Nebraska, Des Moines Iowa and most recently St. Louis Missouri.

The articles discuss every aspect of the campaigns organizing efforts including the efforts on vote protection,

Many people have been asking about issues around the purging of voters from the rolls in various states, Colorado being a prime example. We hope to bring you more in-depth discussion of voter protection issues as we travel, and we’ve had several off-the-record conversations with campaign staff about those potential problems. We can report that Obama’s Voter Protection program, which has been actively soliciting local attorneys with civil rights experience, is fully on the case, much earlier than previous campaigns. In many instances, there are still negotiations going on with election officials where agreements in writing are being hammered out. Those party and campaign-negotiated agreements are much preferred to the injunction route to making sure voters have enough access, enough ballots, enough voting machines so that lines are as short as possible.

One post has dealt with the impact of early voting and why it is so important to the campaigns,

Consider a situation with no early voting. A campaign simply has to monitor the turnout throughout the day in targeted precincts to model what they expect to happen. The numbers get pipelined up to the boiler room and campaign staff makes decisions about where to throw ground troops to knock the final doors. But that is an extremely compressed period -- one day.

Now add in a multiday early voting period. When Executive Director Zach Moyle told us that the Republican Party will know several days in advance of November 4 whether they're going to win or lose Nevada, he wasn't kidding. That's what early voting/mail-in ballots do for a campaign. They can't actually see the tabulated vote, but they know if Joe Smith is a supporter of John McCain and Joe Smith has voted already, they don't have too much guessing what the score is.

The ground game is extraordinarily numbers-based. For both campaigns, every single precinct in every state has a vote goal -- a specific number of votes the campaign has determined it needs to stay on pace with its overall path to victory in the state. By voting early, a supporter of a given candidate are giving his or her candidate a kind of donation. The sacrifice is the feeling of having participated in a vote on Election Day -- it feels like giving up a little bit of tradition. But campaigns are less concerned with tradition than with winning.

I cant go post by post to give you all of the amazing detail, information and stories that are contained in the articles. I can tell you that every single one is worth reading, if not for the information about how the ground level operations work then for the stories revealed in Sean's travels like this one from Iowa,

What's a precinct captain? A year ago, Jane Brower didn't know. Now she captains her West Des Moines precinct like an veteran. She's built her own pyramid.

As both Republican and Democratic field organizers know, effective precinct captains are the single-most important volunteers a campaign can have. They are responsible for maintaining their own stable of volunteers that they participate in recruiting.

But when Jane first walked into an Obama field office during the pre-caucus period last September, she came to help address envelopes or generally help in what way she could. Slowly but surely, a skilled organizer named Caroline turned her into a precinct captain. Jane now manages 10 "block captains" who are responsible for their own slice of the precinct...

The story is worth reading in full. So after reading all of these articles detailing the stories, strategies, and stats related to the ground game i think that the latest post may be the most important. The latest post from St. Louis paints a very bleak picture for candidate McCain. If this comes down to the effects of the ground game and the street level activity and organization McCain is in a rough spot.

Let’s be clear. We've observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn't like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director.

Only for the first time the other day did we see a McCain organizer make a single phone call. So we've now seen that once. The McCain organizers seem to operate as maître Ds. Let me escort you to your phone, sir. Pick any one of this sea of empty chairs. I'll be sitting over here if you need any assistance.

Given a choice between taking embarrassing photos of empty phone banks, we give McCain’s people the chance to pose for photos to show us the action for what they continually claim we “just missed.” No more. We stop into offices at all open hours of the day, but generally more in the afternoon and evening. “Call time,” for both campaigns, is all day, but the time when folks over 65 are generally targeted begins in late afternoon and goes til 8 or 9pm. Universally, McCain’s people stop earlier. Even when we show up at 6:15pm, we’re told we just missed the big phone bank, or to come back in 30 minutes. If we show up an hour later, we “just missed it” again.

The McCain offices are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it's a whirlwind. People move. It's a dynamic bustle. You can feel it in our photos.
...
You could take every McCain volunteer we’ve seen doing actual work in the entire trip, over six states, and it would add up to the same as Obama’s single Thornton, CO office. Or his single Durango, CO office. These ground campaigns bear no relationship to each other.

I assume that Nate's model is taking the potential imbalance of turn out generated by ground level organizing into account for his model just as he is taking cell phone effects into account. After all that is what makes 538 so much better than the other sites.

One thing i particularly like is the exploration in the competing strategies of the McCain and Obama campaigns in how they are approaching the ground game. Obama is employing the principles of the 50 state strategy and the strategy he used in the primary where you keep it close in the places you lose and try to run up the score in the areas you win. Essentially caucus states versus california sized primaries. McCain in contrast is not opening offices to play offense. He is not trying to lessen the democratic margins in deep blue areas. This is probably due to the lack of funds he has.

Part of the justification for Picking Sarah Palin was supposed to be her ability to jump start the base. McCain needs those people to get out and hit the streets for him. I am not sure that we can generalize to all of the battle ground states but the effect does not appear to have been as great as advertised. If Palin has not been helping in states where McCain is battling with Obama but is instead confining her appeal to deeper red states that might not be such a great thing for McCain.

Beyond the amazing stories and the numbers that Sean has gone on the road to bring us, this series is a testament to journalism. This is something we are seeing less and less of, reporters not taking second hand stories, rumor and innuendo as given but instead hitting the ground and checking on things for themselves. It is real journalism. This diary might seem a little obsequious but i was really blown away after reading these articles. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Oh and they have lots of pictures.

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The Rise of 538 as a political force.

Remember back in the primaries when this guy named pablano was writing top class diaries that dealt with polling and demographics and the race? His regression and numbers based analysis really deserved some type of award. His writing were frequently the best source of election night predictions. Then we discovered that he was contemplating a new site dedicated to that type of work. That site, 538.com went live and we ultimately found out this amazing authors identity, Nate Silver. 53 has since exploded into one of, if not the, premier poll information sights on the net.

Every one knows about the work Nate has done with the polls. For example he has helped to publicize the impact of cell phones on polling data estimating a 1-3 point boos for obama due to the effect. One of the lesser known but just as important things he has done is his work on the general election ground game.

I guess it should not be surprising to see someone who is interested in polls looking for a way to understand the possible impact of one thing not found there, the ground level efforts. Nate and his partner Sean Quinn have been traveling around different states in a series entitled On the Road examining exactly what is going on on the ground in those states. For the most part they have been able to travel and observe unmolested. They have given some insight into the feel of each campaigns respective ground games in important cities and counties. They were able to discuss the effect, widely speculated about, that sarah palin was having on the republican base who volunteers for McCain. It has been very interesting and enlightening reading. today's post though revealed something interesting. They encountered resistance to their attempts to report on the McCain ground game.

Something interesting is happening with John McCain’s campaign. Up until now, we’ve had no trouble gaining access to field offices and volunteers. Here in St. Louis, we were told by Tina Hervey, Missouri Republican State Party Press Secretary, that she had never heard of FiveThirtyEight, and while they trusted Politico, we were people who they had to decide whether we “shouldn’t or don’t need to be talking to.” (McCain’s Missouri press secretary actually works out of Iowa, and did not return calls or email.) I told Tina that’s not a story we wanted to write, that this was our first Republican resistance, and that while she may not have heard of us, we’d probably go over 2.5 million site visits this week, now that we’re regularly past 400,000 per weekday. I told her I’d hold off writing her flat refusal and give her the opportunity to change her mind.

No budging. We were told that we’d be asked to leave public field offices we now attempted to visit. We did not get any promised follow-up helping get access to the post-debate Palin rally last night, and we were locked out. Hmm.

What is going on here is very clear. McCain does not want to validate or promote 538 as a site. This may seem like an extraordinary claim but i have some reasoning. The first point is that 538 is a numbers based sight that includes every poll. They do not pick and choose who to include, though they do decide who to weight based on their track record. This means that they give the clearest unfiltered picture of what is going on at any one time. This picture is currently very bad for McCain. 538, as of the time of this writing, has obama listed at 84.4% chance of victory. No amount of McCain campaign spin can change this. There is no narrative to move here. This migth gain some support depending on your interpretation of the recent spat with RCP over the methodology they use to select polls. The assertion was that they were intentionally picking polls to boost mccains numbers. If true McCain would be inclined to take the rcp side of this debate against 538. Think about it in the way McCain thinks about negotiating with an enemy, sitting down with them gives them increased status. Giving increased status to a site that predicts your loss may not be what they want to do.

McCain may know his ground game is not where it needs to be. The stories that 538 is doing on it seem to be the only constant source of information on the ground game. By excluding 538 from reporting on the problems they hope to keep it covered up. This is not a shock reading what was written today.

Let’s be clear. We've observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn't like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director.

Only for the first time the other day did we see a McCain organizer make a single phone call. So we've now seen that once. The McCain organizers seem to operate as maître Ds. Let me escort you to your phone, sir. Pick any one of this sea of empty chairs. I'll be sitting over here if you need any assistance.

[...]You could take every McCain volunteer we’ve seen doing actual work in the entire trip, over six states, and it would add up to the same as Obama’s single Thornton, CO office. Or his single Durango, CO office. These ground campaigns bear no relationship to each other. (emphasis mine)

Clearly not allowing Nate and Co access to cover the story has prompted a negative reaction. That should not have been a surprise. However the McCain campaign has a history of treating the press as if the damage they can do because they are pissed off and dont have access is less than they would do if they actually had the access, think Palin.

There is no way the McCain campaign does not know what 538 is. It would be political malpractice to be ignorant of the hottest growing political site on the net. There is also the possibility that they see 538 as a democratic blog or site and do not want to play ball with them. It is true that many of Nate and Seans posts that deal strictly with political opinion have a left slant. However the numbers are not tainted. Again that is the problem, the numbers.

No one wants to vote for a loser. That is one of the big lessons of the early primaries. If people think you are a loser it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If everyone started looking at 538 and saw the reality of the race, a significant Obama lead they might be less inclined to vote for McCain the sinking ship. McCain might see fund raising slow down as people question whether he is such a great investment. It would also undercut any of the media story lines he really wants to promote. Numbers tend to undercut rather than enforce the media and McCain relies on the media, or at least he used to, to get his point across. McCain probably figures that nothing good can come of 538 getting highly publicized exposure reporting how bad his campaign is. At this point at least he can deny they have the basis to make claims about his efforts.

did anyone think last november that one dkos diarist would create such a political force? 538 is that force. Here is Nate with Dan Rather

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