Sad, Sad, Story

But the other story, the story on which we've had a running eight-week exclusive in 36 separate On the Road pieces and counting, is that John McCain's ground campaign is just not happening. It hasn't been happening, without Sarah Palin there might be four or five volunteers across the entire nation left, and now, per Mosk's piece at WaPo, it looks like it will be happening even less.

Head over to 538 and read the tragedy that is McCain's ground game at work. Look at the photo's by Brett Marty and tell me you dont feel bad for the people in the photos.

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Will the media tell the ground game story?

The under the radar story of the election as far as the traditional media outlets are concerned is the amazing effort and dedication of the obama ground game. It gets references in passing but because it is not sexy or flashy has largely been ignored. This absence of national level attention has not stopped the dedicated organizers and volunteers across the country who have worked tirelessly to elect either Sen. Obama or Sen. McCain. The Obama organization will be one of if not the best in history but because of the way the election is shaping up that story may not be

The story of the ground game is not one alien to dkos, fivethirtyeight, or The Field Readers. These sites have dedicated a great deal to reporting on the ground game and how it is shaping up as well as its possible effects. Sean Quinn at 538 has been traveling the country reporting town by town city by city on the different campaign's efforts in the battle ground states. The Field has done, imho, the best work on the ground game available in the blogosphere and Giordiono's recent post sums up why he finds it so important,

There are ten thousand potential newspaper, TV and radio news stories in those numbers, and at least as many "reporters" in need of a good report, but as during the primaries, the commercial media are leaving the real story of the 2008 United States presidential election to a few intrepid online journalists and bloggers. When on Election Night they will raise their eyebrows and go, wow, just wow, how the hell did that happen?, it will be the Field Hands here, and a very few folks like Sifrey, like Sean Quinn at 538 and Zack Exley at The Huffington Post who will have documented the answer: It was the organizing, stupid!
...
See, the story of the 2008 campaign is not some media creation and caricature like "Joe the Plumber," but those Americans that have done more than "win" the media lottery by having a chance encounter with a presidential candidate. (I put "win" in quotation marks because I have the feeling this isn't going to end well for that Joe, as media scrutiny can be a knife with two edges.) No, the story of 2008 is authentically about "Debrah the Neighborhood Team Leader" and "Glenna the Neighborhood Team Leader," and "Joe the Organizer," and "Jane the Change Crew Chief," and "Jose the Phone Banker" and "Jasmine the Canvasser." The story is that of so many Americans that didn't wait for the media to show up at their doorsteps but stepped out onto the battlefield and did the heavy lifting.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

He is absolutely correct on just about everything in there. What i think he misses is that the media will not wonder at how obama won the election. The media will look at the polls, look at the timing of some national level events and write a narrative that fits. I already wrote one that is perfectly plausible and does not rely on the hard work of the ground game.

The problem with this election is that the way it is shaping up it could be a very big win for obama. In that scenario the media will not look to the dirty and gritty work done by those on the ground. they will not give the ground game the credit it deserves for registering and turning out voters because they will make the assumption that the extra effort made no difference due to national level events. They play no part in the ground game and so it cant be important. They will simply attribute the overwhelmingly positive response for obama as the natural outgrowth of the democratic enthusiasm without making the connection that this energy means nothing without proper harnessing.

If Debrah the Neighborhood Team Leader" and "Glenna the Neighborhood Team Leader," and "Joe the Organizer," and "Jane the Change Crew Chief," and "Jose the Phone Banker" and "Jasmine the Canvasser" do not get the recognition they deserve on a national level then true difference between Obama and McCain will not be understood. Obama was able to translate excitement into work while mccain and palin were able to generate this in Columbus Ohio,



(picture by Brett Marty of BrettMarty.com)

Described by 538,

It's fair enough. We're not their biggest priority. They probably assume if they haven't heard of us, how much exposure could photos of their huge phone banks with 40 phones and one lonely caller at their state headquarters three weeks before the election really get?

As for the field offices themselves, we told you about the closed one in Troy. We were ushered out by rent-a-cops in Toledo (the second time I spoke with Levine), and there was a pencil-thin mustachioed rent-a-cop in the HQ where we got that picture.

We'll keep trying in good faith to speak to communications directors and stop into field offices, and if they're fair with us, we'll be fair with them. The problem the McCain folks have is that their offices are empty, and why would you want reporters to do a story on that, or on obviously manufactured volunteer conversations? So, we're not optimistic, but we're not quitting. They'll have to say it to our face.

One lone volunteer and 39 unused phones. That might be one of the saddest images of the campaign and it tells the story in a way words just fail to convey. It makes me feel sad for that lone volunteer, who although i disagree with her vehemently in her choice of candidates, earns my respect for sitting there all alone to make calls.

Getting people to the polls, making phone calls, getting people registered, canvassing neighborhoods, these are essential elements of campaigns that the media overlooks unless the race comes down to a few hundred votes in one state. There is reason to take heart though.

We can push this narrative. Whenever someone talks about the election and mentions the poll numbers or media coverage you should talk about the ground game. when people talk about how mccain lost it the election instead of obama winning it talk about the differences in organization and hard ground level work. the more we push the importance of the ground game in obama's victory as opposed to debates or katie curic interviews the more traction it can get.

Pat Buchanan loves to go on tv and talk about the economic disaster like it is a black swan event and but for that McCain would be right in this thing. This is simply untrue. Obama has legions more volunteers dedicated to contacting voters and making calls, getting his message than mccain does. Reading Quinn's series only seems to prove that in excruciating detail. If there were legions of mccain volunteers dedicated to getting him elected they would not have been scared off by the economy. He still has 40%+ support generally among the populace after all. The truth is that the Obama ground game will have been key no matter the outcome. The ground game can be the difference between squeaking by and a solid progressive mandate.

The story of the Obama ground game is important because, while its primary focus was on electing barack obama, the registration, canvassing and data entry it performed is invaluable to the down ticket dems. The organizing done by the obama campaign is not about just him but about the democratic party as a whole. he put infrastructure in solidly red states as an investment in the future. that's an important story. eliminating the excuses of the congress members who refuse to advance liberal or progressive legislation under threat of filibuster or defection may disappear because of the hard work done on the ground.

I expect all of this to be lost on the media at a large. Whether it is or not you can carry the story about the power and importance of the obama ground game to your community. let people know that their efforts on behalf of obama where essential. That the media is oblivious to this says more about them than the people who spend time on the ground doing this organizing.

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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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Is "Obama’s Bet" Worth It?

Barack Obama is a neighborhood organizer at heart. He knows the importance of getting boots on the ground and talking to people. He wants volunteers to contact every voter in America and personally deliver his message of hope and change. dday wrote a diary about how Obama’s strategy is not about top down messaging through national ads. He is not trying to change minds en masse but one voter at a time, one contact at a time. Obama is counting on winning through registering new voters and getting them to the polls. Now we have to ask the question, “Will these new voters show up to vote for Obama?”

First, let’s examine exactly what Obama is doing. He is pouring money into ground level operations. While McCain is spending his money on national level advertising Obama is opening up field offices. The last estimate was that Obama led McCain in field offices 3:1 and voter contacts 35-1. Obama is spending money on National level ads as his 6 million dollar Olympic buy suggests. He is also on the air in Indiana, Alaska, Montana, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Virginia as well as the 12 battleground states where McCain is on the air.

Obama is relying on the Dem registration advantage to make the difference in the closer states. This in turn relies on getting the people to the polls. So again, what gets people to the Polls?

Some research focuses on costs, such as administrative barriers, others on factors that affect the benefits of voting, including psychological influences like individual political efficacy and social connectedness, external motivation through mobilization by parties or non-partisan solicitations to vote, and the extent to which the candidates and parties offer clear alternatives. Still others cover all of these potential influences. - DANIEL STEVENS (2007). Mobilization, Demobilization and the Economy in American Elections. British Journal of Political Science, 37, pp 165-186

The research into what makes people vote has broken down into two categories. The two categories are the demographic and the political, or “mobilization-based”, models. The demographic model holds that the voters social groups, their age, their region, their education, their religion are the types of factors that most greatly impact whether a person votes or not. Mobilization based models deal with the question of campaign effects on whether a given person will vote or not. Things like direct mail, face to face contact, voter phone calls are important factors in determining whether someone votes.

Clearly, both will play a role but since this article is about Obama’s resources in ground level organization we should focus on the strength of campaign effects on voter turn out. Before talking about the specific activities Obama is engaged in and their effectiveness I would like to talk briefly about some general factors that influence turnout in elections.

The perceived closeness of elections has an effect on the turnout. In general, citizens who believe the candidate they support is doomed to defeat feel less motivated to go to the polls. This feeling may be generated in several ways and tends to have a cumulative effect were numerous messages from trusted sources exacerbate pessimism among supporters. An example of this would be the media telling voters that one candidate has no chance and cannot win. The closeness effect is more strongly felt by the non-incumbent than the incumbent. This means that the challenging party will see greater mobilization if the election is considered close.

Another factor in determining turnout is the state of the economy at the time and during the run up to the election. Depending on the incumbent party, the economy has different factors. Democrats are more interested in unemployment numbers and joblessness where Republicans are more closely tied to inflation. Bad economies have a demobilizing effect on the supporters of the incumbent party. High inflation demobilizes Republicans and mobilizes Democrats, to a limited extent, while high joblessness drives down Democratic turnout. Obama should play up the bad inflation numbers to help depress Republican turnout.

What Obama is engaged works in two parts. First, his campaign is registering voters. Then he is contacting potential voters via phones, mail, and physical volunteer contact. The registration of voters is very important as people can vote if their not registered. Being registered and identifying with a particular party is also positively associated with casting a vote for that party. However, it is also true that for irregular voters, those who do not vote in every election, the longer the time between registration and voting day the less chance that person chooses to vote. That is why the second part of Obama’s game plan is important. How important is it?

The most effective way to motivate voters is through face to face contact. Obama’s field offices and volunteers going door to door will have, potentially, the greatest impact on turnout. The two big studies regarding the effectiveness of the door-to-door canvassing were conducted by Yale’s Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber. Their findings indicated a significant increase in turnout. The first experiment was conducted on a smaller scale where,

...in the 1998 midterm elections in New Haven, Gerber and Green found that face-to-face canvassing raised turnout rates from approximately 44% in the control group to 53% among those canvassed.

Gerber and Green then repeated their GOTV experiment on a wider scale for the elections in 2006.

The results indicate that canvassing significantly increases voter turnout across a range of political and social environments. These mobilization effects are significant, both substantively and statistically, and similar in magnitude to other recent experiments

Their findings indicated that 12 successful face-to-face contacts translated into one additional vote. So for every twelve people that are contacted Obama gains a vote. That is 83 votes per 1000 face-to-face contacts. They also estimated that the canvassers working in pairs could visit eight to ten voters per hour. Their final report indicated a 7.1% increase in turnout between their contact group and the control group in 2001. Gerber and green also concluded that for direct mail it took 8 mailings per voter to boost turnout by 1%.

This experiment was conducted with registered voters. This means that in some states where they might have same day registration the impact of the canvassing could have a massive effect. 100 people working 10 hours on election day in such a state could theoretically pick up over 330 votes. Done on a wide enough scale and that could really influence an election.
Obama is also conducting phone banking operations. Experiments suggest that phone banking conducted by volunteers, as opposed to commercially operated phone banking, is able to generate a three to five percent increase in the treatment group.

Another thing to consider is the experiment conducted in 2002 Michigan gubernatorial election by Michigan Democratic Party’s Youth Coordinated Campaign (YCC) in fourteen state house districts. This study addressed three methods of contacting voters for GOTV purposes. It followed up on the Gerber and Green Studies use of face-to-face contact and it also investigated phone banking and leaving door hangers on the doors of possible voters.

They concluded that door hangers increased turnout by just 1.6%. Similarly they found that phone banking yielded the same success rate, 1.6%. That is 16 voters for every 1000 calls made. The issue with phone calls though is that the contact rate is very low. The study had a contact rate of 50% meaning that any increases in contact rate will increase the number of votes created.

The most interesting finding in the study is that door hangers may actually be the most cost effective means of increasing turnout.

The one major point of departure is that door hangers are found to be an effective means of boosting turnout. A boost in turnout of 1.3% is not enough to swing most elections, but could be a deciding factor in very close elections. At a cost of $29 a vote, door hangers are competitive with more personal tactics and can quickly blanket entire neighborhoods. Thus, we believe door hangers are useful arrows in a campaign’s quiver.

- Nickerson, David Warwick, Friedrichs, Ryan D. and King, David C.,Mobilizing the Party Faithful: Results from a Statewide Turnout Experiment in Michigan(April 22, 2004). KSG Research Paper No. RWP04-018.

Obama clearly plans to bust the turnout models in the states he targets with large scale ground games. Given that the GOP base should have a lower turn out do not only to the economic factors but also a general tepidness towards their candidate the surge in Obama turnout could be the difference in several states. McCain has not been investing heavily in his ground game and is instead focusing mostly on negative tv ads. There is some evidence that suggests negative advertising has a demobilizing effect on the casual or independent voter, though that’s a whole other diary.

It is important to consider though that most of these studies look at effects of contact immediately preceding the election. The effectiveness of the contacts this far in advance of the election may be less allowing McCain to "catch up" potentially if he gets his act together, though that seems doubtful.

After reviewing the research into voter turnout I believe that Obama’s ground game will indeed be a very important part of his election if it occurs. I am not saying that turnout alone will be enough for Obama to overcome McCain though it will certainly be an advantage. We already have the registration advantage and if Obama can max the turnout that advantage will show it importance.

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