This is what we are all about. A primer for next year. Winning or losing it in the trenches.
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A Rush to Rally Grass Roots for Recall Election
Partisans Hit the Streets, Man Phones
By Rene Sanchez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 6, 2003; Page A06
OCEANSIDE, Calif., Oct. 5 -- Ron Nehring looked around the crowded campaign room with satisfaction, even glee. The faithful kept coming.
He had folders for them filled with the names of local voters who had to be found. He had meticulous maps of precincts and stacks of fliers to hang on doorknobs. There was nothing left for him to do -- except watch as his fervent volunteers took to the streets to promote their cause one last time.
"People are in the mood for a little revolution," said Nehring, chairman of San Diego County's Republican Party. "And we're going to make sure they get it."
It was Saturday morning, and yet another extraordinary spectacle in California's riotous recall election had just begun.
By phone and on foot, at record expense and a fevered pace, partisan armies across the state spent the weekend going to new extremes to get out their vote in Tuesday's historic election that will decide whether Gov. Gray Davis (D) gets thrown out of office.
The recall, which has stirred politicians' passions in California like no election in memory, is so rare and remains so volatile in the final days before the vote that all the political forces with a stake in its outcome have no clear idea which voting bloc could prove pivotal. So, they are targeting nearly all of them with relentless, sophisticated, and often desperate, last-minute appeals.
Davis, Republican front-runner Arnold Schwarzenegger and other major candidates in the race continued to scramble across the state today, and political advertising deluged television and radio from morning to midnight. But all sides in the fight say the election may be decided by the huge, furious grass-roots campaign underway -- especially because polls suggest that the race is tightening in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations that have engulfed Schwarzenegger.
Democrats desperate to save Davis unleashed an onslaught of new phone messages to hundreds of thousands of voters featuring taped pleas from former president Bill Clinton, civil rights leader Jesse L. Jackson and entertainer Barbra Streisand.
Labor groups manned hundreds of phone banks and swarmed minority neighborhoods to beg traditionally Democratic voters intrigued by Schwarzenegger's candidacy to think twice. They also sent a half-million union members 115 different sample versions of the mind-boggling recall ballot, which includes 135 candidates whose names will appear in a different order in every county.
"We've never had to undertake anything like that before," said Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for the California Labor Federation. "It was a gargantuan effort."
Republican leaders dispatched thousands of volunteers across the state to go door-to-door in their strongholds to stoke widespread frustration with Davis -- and to urge unified support for Schwarzenegger, not his GOP rival state Sen. Tom McClintock. One GOP group backing the recall targeted a mailing at 100,000 voters who have just received their bill for the car tax that Davis tripled earlier this year.
Here in San Diego County, the seeding ground of the political revolt that created the recall election, Republican grass-roots activists were aspiring to make face-to-face contact this weekend with 150,000 voters, a goal so ambitious that it once would have seemed laughable. But the party had no trouble finding recruits: In the past six weeks, it has enlisted and trained more than 1,500 volunteers for the job.
"We're usually concerned about having enough people show up to help," said George "Duf" Sundheim, the chairman of the California Republican Party, which was planning to call 750,000 voters statewide this weekend. "Not this time."
California's electoral math also made the struggle at the grass roots this weekend urgent. Democratic activists know they are in the difficult position of trying to save a governor loathed by most voters. In some recent polls, about 25 percent of Democrats said they favor ousting him. But because there are about 1.3 million more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, some Davis allies believe they can defeat the recall simply by turning out a large vote Tuesday. The GOP, meanwhile, knows it may need an extraordinary turnout of its voters precisely because its ranks in the electorate are smaller than those of the Democrats.
"We think the shot that Gray Davis still has to win is for us to make sure we get our people to the polls," said Miguel Contreras, executive secretary and treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which represents 800,000 union members. "We've been struggling a bit, but now because what's going on with Schwarzenegger, I think people are taking a second look. This is our big push to get Democrats back, and it's not going to stop until 8 p.m. Tuesday."
At times, that effort resembled a last stand. In the largely Latino Los Angeles suburb of El Monte, about 150 volunteers assembled today inside a union hall to make1,000 calls to voters or to grab water bottles before they set off on long marches through key Democratic precincts in the smog and heat. They worked amid signs attacking Schwarzenegger and a top adviser to his campaign, former California governor Pete Wilson (R). One wall bore a doctored image of Wilson wearing military gear and holding an assault rifle as he said, "I'm back. Hasta La Vista, Democracy."
"People are tired of all the TV ads at this point," Amy Exelby, 34, said as she prepared to embark on a precinct walk. "The election is going to hinge on our ability to get voters out, and this is the only way to do it at this point. You can definitely change people's minds by doing this."
Others worried that it may be too late to change the minds of many voters, but they pressed on. "At the very least, maybe we can get people who are iffy about going out to vote," said Laura Osuna-Saucedo, 29, "or the people who think this is ridiculous."
At one of Schwarzenegger's campaign offices in Santa Monica on Saturday afternoon, scores of volunteers worked beneath large posters of the film star and courted Democratic and independent voters with phone calls. Outside, as some of his supporters chanted, "He rules!" to passing cars and pedestrians, protesters across the street shouted back, "Arnold disrespects women!"
In San Diego County, Republican activists were relying exclusively on precinct walks and making no organized phone calls to voters. "The phones stink," said Alex Holstein, a director of the GOP's county operation. "We've got to get in the neighborhoods."
That's what Jim Gibson and his wife, Cathy, were doing. For hours, they went door-to-door lugging a binder full of voter lists and campaign fliers advocating the recall. Gibson, a Republican small-business owner and local school board member, said that Tuesday's election has inspired him like nothing else in politics -- even though months ago he doubted it could succeed.
"I love California, but it's in big trouble," he said. "People I know in business in Arizona keep telling me how profitable it is there and saying, 'Why don't you come over, Jim?' Some of my employees keep asking me to move, too. But I don't want to leave."
Not when ousting Davis, his symbol of all that's wrong in the state, could be so close. Gibson walked up the driveway of another home here and knocked. Tamara Winterberg, a businesswoman, answered.
"We need your vote on the recall," Gibson said.
"You have it," she said. "We'll be there, for sure."
Gibson's wife checked her name on the long list. "This is how this election is going to be won," he said, and off they went, searching for more voters.
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