The Republicans are trying to match the Labor Union organizers. They won't, but they need to try. This grassroots is what almost beat them last election. Get out there and go to work, John!
December 20, 2003 - New York Times
G.O.P. Building Army of Volunteers to Get Out the Vote
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
DREXEL HILL, Pa. — They streamed into a ballroom here one recent night — young men in investment-banker suits eager for a taste of big-time politics, married couples looking to make a difference, retirees for whom precinct organizing is an avocation — and signed on as foot soldiers in a vast army of volunteers that President Bush is mobilizing for his re-election campaign.
There were about 150 of them, and the evening amounted to their basic training. Sign up five other people as Bush "team leaders" willing to do the campaign's grunt work, they were told, and ask those five each to sign up five more. Get e-mail addresses from 10 friends. Write letters to the editor, be host at a block party. Most of all, help register voters and then make sure they go to the polls in November to wrest Pennsylvania, a crucial state for both parties, away from the Democrats.
"The bottom line is, this campaign is about neighbors talking to neighbors," Michael DuHaime, a 30-year-old regional political director for the campaign, told the crowd. "There are over 9,400 precincts in Pennsylvania, and we will have you organized in every single one."
Presidential politics has been dominated for decades by television advertising, the fund-raising necessary to pay for the commercial time and flying the candidate into strategically selected cities where he can get free exposure for his message on the local news.
But the session here on Dec. 8 — one of four held so far in Pennsylvania by the Bush campaign and one of scores scheduled nationwide — was one manifestation of how both parties are turning their attention back to the distinctly unglamorous business of knocking on doors and turning out the vote.
Democrats are going about the job through a variety of organizations, like labor unions, independently financed advocacy groups, the Democratic National Committee and the individual presidential campaigns.
Mr. Bush's team, taking full advantage of its control of the Republican Party apparatus, has a more audacious goal: creating a seamless national political machine that subsumes existing state and local party operations and infuses them with new recruits, money, technology and discipline.
Bush campaign officials say they envision tens of thousands of volunteers, many armed with palmtop computers with access to a database of voters' names and the issues that move them, fanning out through just about every neighborhood in the country in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
In a nation split politically almost right down the middle and with the memory of the Florida recount in 2000 still fresh, they say they want to scour the streets for every last vote, especially in the states like Pennsylvania where a close election might well be decided.
"In an evenly divided electorate in which there's a premium on every single vote, you're seeing both sides make the greatest grass-roots efforts they've ever made," said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Republican Party in Georgia and one of the strongest advocates of a more aggressive ground game. "The biggest change is a movement away from impersonal contact by media or mail to highly personalized, customized contact that is face to face, person to person."
In Pennsylvania, Mr. Bush lost to Al Gore in 2000 by around 200,000 votes out of nearly 5 million cast. As Leslie Gromis Baker, the Bush campaign's regional chairwoman for the Middle Atlantic States, was quick to point out, that margin amounted to a little over 20 votes per precinct, a figure that she said would help make clear to the volunteers that the gap could be closed through their neighborhood-by-neighborhood efforts.
"Those people in there have to believe they can make a difference," Ms. Baker said.
If the session here lacked some of the passion of a gathering of, say, Howard Dean volunteers, it nonetheless seemed to capture the imagination of many of the Republicans, young and old, who turned out on a cold, slushy night. William Gallo, 25, who works in information technology, said he had always been interested in presidential politics but had not known how to get involved until hearing about the Bush campaign's need for volunteers through the local Republican organization in his hometown of Clifton Heights.
"It's all about people to people and getting more people involved who normally wouldn't be," he said.
Both parties and their allied groups, including labor unions for the Democrats and independent groups set up by liberals and conservatives alike, have increasingly focused on get-out-the-vote efforts since the mid-1990's, when the A.F.L.-C.I.O. undertook a concerted effort to get more union members to the polls.
In 2001, in a variety of off-year races, the Republican Party tested techniques for communicating with potential voters and motivating them to go to the polls. In one precinct it used paid callers to contact voters; in another it used local volunteers. It tried knocking on doors in one neighborhood and just leaving literature on doorsteps in another. It provided people in one area with absentee ballots to make it easier for them to vote.
The most compelling lessons, Republican officials said, were that it pays to start early and that personal contact by local volunteers carries far more weight with voters than any of the other options. Done right, the Republican studies concluded, the grass-roots operation could result in a difference of three or four percentage points in the outcome, enough to determine a winner in a close race.
Those conclusions were put to use by Republicans with some success in the 2002 midterm Congressional elections, in which the party regained control of the Senate and expanded its majority in the House. And they are the basis of the plan the Bush campaign, working hand in hand with the Republican National Committee, is putting into effect for the 2004 elections.
But Democrats and their allies said they were not yet convinced that the Republican effort would be as successful as the Bush campaign hopes it will be. Karen Ackerman, political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. said: "The strength of our program is that the way voters get their information, through their union, is from an institution they trust. That's the foundation of why we were so successful. Whether that can be duplicated by the Republicans, we'll have to wait and see."
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