Nate Silver reports on fivethirtyeight.com that John McCain scaled down the much vaunted Republican 72 hour GOTV effort. As someone who has been involved in several Democratic campaigns, I can tell you that Barack Obama put together the best I ever seen. If John McCain is scaling down when he needs to ramp up, just to have parity in TV advertising, he is in deep trouble. Some of Nate Silver's report follows:
As the only reporter during this election who has actually visited upwards of 50 of John McCain's field offices around the country (13 battleground states and counting), this piece by Matthew Mosk at the Washington Post comes as no surprise:
The decision to finance a final advertising push is forcing McCain to curtail spending on Election Day ground forces to help usher his supporters to the polls, according to Republican consultants familiar with McCain's strategy.
The vaunted, 72-hour plan that President Bush used to mobilize voters in 2000 and 2004 has been scaled back for McCain. He has spent half as much as Obama on staffing and has opened far fewer field offices. This week, a number of veteran GOP operatives who orchestrate door-to-door efforts to get voters to the polls were told they should not expect to receive plane tickets, rental cars or hotel rooms from the campaign.
"The desire for parity on television comes at the expense of investment in paid boots on the ground," said one top Republican strategist who has been privy to McCain's plans. "The folks who will oversee the volunteer operation have been told to get out into the field on their own nickel."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
So, McCain is running short on dough. He can't afford both a full GOTV effort and TV advertising. That's a bad sign for him.
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.
Holy Toledo, Ohio! In 2004, this sounded like the profile of John Kerry's campaign - disorganized, understaffed and frankly out-spent by Bush.
When Republican volunteers talk to us about how much enthusiasm and participation they notice in fellow volunteers, they mention how many people have come to pick up yard signs or bumper stickers. We haven't yet seen a single Republican canvasser. (The one in Cortez, CO was staged; she said canvassing is the kind of thing she would do, and we made a decision to do the picture because we were concerned with not presenting "balance." There is no balance in the facts.)
When we attempted to visit the Republican HQ in Maryland Heights, Missouri, we saw a couple volunteers populating the office, and we were subsequently denied the opportunity to even speak to volunteers specifically selected so as to be "on message." By contrast, Obama's volunteers own such a piece of the campaign (Respect-Empower-Include) that the problem is they often have too much information, and when the campaign allows me to talk with them on the record I can ask a too-precise series of questions that result in publishing details the campaign later realizes it didn't want published.
Yeah well, John Kerry had lots of yard signs out too but the campaign was out-canvassed by Bush. The Republicans had a several month lead on us in organizing. This time the roles are reversed because of the long Democratic primary, lack of enthusiasm for John McCain and superior organizing by Barack Obama.
Barack Obama definitely has an advantage in field organizing. There are four more days to go. Please don't squander this advantage. If you have no plans this weekend, try to do something to help the campaign out.
GOTV!
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/...