Comparing the Ground Games

The most unreported story of this campaign has been the ground games of the Barack Obama and John McCain. I think that if Barack Obama is fortunate to win, there will be a lot of stories about the incredible operation that Barack Obama has put together.

If you are a political junkie, you are probably already aware of a little site that has posted and analyzed much of the competing polling data that has abounded this campaign season - - FiveThirtyEight.com.

While FiveThirtyEight.com has been busy crunching all the numbers from multiple polls, they have also had a reporting team of reporter Sean Quinn and photographer Brett Marty travelling the country to look at the ground games of the two campaigns. In their pursuit of the ground game story, they've been dropping by field offices for both candidates to take pictures and chronicle the activity. And if there's one thing that's been revealed, nearly consistently, in comparing the two operations, is that there seems to be no comparison. Here is some of what Sean and Brett have reported in a blog post called "The Big Empty":

The busiest McCain office we saw was in Arlington, at the national HQ, but tight security prevented us from getting any pictures. Ironically, that was our first full office, in our 11th battleground state.

Offices in Troy, Ohio were closed on Saturday October 11. With perfect coincidental timing, two elderly women dropped by to volunteer but found the office shut. At Republican state headquarters in Columbus later the same day, one lonely dialer sat in a sea of unoccupied chairs. In Des Moines on September 25, another empty office. In Santa Fe on September 17, one dialer made calls while six chatted amongst themselves about how they didn't like Obama. In Raleigh this past Saturday, ten days before the election with early voting already open, two women dialed and a male staffer watched the Georgia-LSU game. In Durango, Colorado on September 20, the
Republican office was locked and closed. Indiana didn't have McCain Victory offices when we were there in early October.

When the offices are open, they have reduced hours. We can confidently plan to get evening good-light photographs of a town after we visit the local McCain office, because we know it will be closing by 5 pm, as the office in Wilmington, North Carolina was this past Sunday. The plan is, get to inevitably closed/closing McCain office, get an hour of photos near sunset, then visit the bustling local Obama office.

In Cortez, CO, we had Republican volunteers pose for action-shot photos. The same in Española, New Mexico. Posed. For some time at the outset, we were willing to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. They convinced us they were really working, and that we had just had unfortunate timing. It wasn't until the pattern of "just missed it" started to sound like a drumbeat in our ears that we began to grow skeptical. We never "just missed" any of the Obama volunteer work, because it goes on nonstop, every day, in every office, in every corner of America.

We found scattered nuggets of activity. Colorado Springs, Colorado held eight dialers and two front office volunteers. Albemarle County, Virginia had a busy office of 15 volunteers, and we reported that. Last night in Tampa, nine phonebankers were busy dialing at the Republican Party of Florida Hillsborough County HQ when we arrived at 8:00 pm. Seven dialers sat in McCain's Hickory, North Carolina office this past Saturday afternoon.

Those offices seemed busy to us, naturally, because they were explosively full relative to other offices we've stopped in on. But even the Colorado Springs office was dwarfed by the Obama Colorado Springs operation.

These ground campaigns do not bear any relationship to one another. One side has something in the neighborhood of five million volunteers all assigned to very clear and specific pieces of the operation, and the other seems to have something like a thousand volunteers scattered throughout the country. Jon Tester's 2006 Senate race in Montana had more volunteers -- by a mile -- than John McCain's 2006 presidential campaign.

This post, "The Big Empty," is accompanyed by a photo essay which has the sorts of pictures that haunt the McCain campaign in a few days. See some of the photos below.

Of course, even with all this specific reporting, attesting to the fact that the balance of response, activity and enthusiasm appears to be on the Democratic side, the big unknown is whether it will all end up being remembered as a spirited, failed attempt or the ingredients of bona fide electoral success. Still, I'm terribly impressed by the way FiveThirtyEight.com is working this balance between raw data and anecdotal reportage, doing each as fully and as fairly as possible, and putting themselves out there by making predictions with conviction. Silver's taken the site to acclaim behind the strength of his statistical analysis, but the site deserves kudoes to their commitment to following the election on the road. Both on the balance sheet and on the trail, FiveThirtyEight.com has done a superlative job at making sense of this election, in ways that have far surpassed the traditional media.