Thought for Food

Can Obama win with field?

Jan Adams knows field organizing.  We worked together on the Voter TechKit, a tool for community organizers doing non-partisan voter outreach work.

Obama has one of the smartest and most committed field campaigns we’ve seen in a presidential election, as 538 explains:

While millions may be spent on advertising, so too is one campaign spending millions on ground game while the other is spending virtually nothing. Obama is investing more massively than any campaign in the history of American politics on the ground game. McCain is essentially not investing in ground. His early summer numbers of 20,000 phone calls nationwide for a whole month would be those of a single, low-budget House campaign. That’s the equivalent of one person working ten hours a day for a month. For the entire nation. It’s basically the equivalent of zero contacts.

Jan is hopeful (she cites a recruitment video from Democrats in Michigan as evidence that they are “serious about field”), but she’s not sure that this will be enough.  She writes:

I routinely teach that good field organizing can win a campaign 2-4 percent more vote than it would have otherwise. Obama is throwing money and brainpower at field in an unprecedented way. Can it give him enough in the right states to win this election? We’re all going to find out.