on the cover / By Judy Hodgson

Ground Game

Getting out the Obama vote in a Western swing state

(Oct. 30, 2008) Oct. 7, 2008. The white-erase board on the wall says 29 days until the election. This is my first day volunteering for Obama’s Campaign for Change in Steamboat Springs, Colo. The newest polls for this state show it’s 44-44, Obama v. McCain. According to those who spend a lot of time studying the way states are leaning, there are 15 different combinations for Obama to reach 264 of the 270 electoral votes needed. If that happens, Colorado’s nine can push him over the top.

Dylan, 19, Obama’s field organizer for Northwest Colorado and apparently my boss, is in Denver today for training along with Kati, the volunteer coordinator, and Topher, whose job title is a mystery. All three are college students taking a leave of absence. I was greeted by Eric, another young volunteer who arrived a few days earlier. Eric is an attorney from Salt Lake City, an independent who confessed he may have previously registered Republican. We laughed when we realized we were both here in Colorado for the same reason — that we were Obama supporters and our own home states were a done deal, his red and mine blue.

GALLERY >

In the first two hours I realized I have a lot to learn. There are Obama specifics. I was pretty familiar with his health care proposals and some economic stimulus stuff. But I had to bone up on his voting record on guns so I could answer questions. The right to bear arms is a big deal in rural Colorado, just like Humboldt.

Today I learned how to answer the phones (“Colorado Campaign for Change”) and that we are completely out of bumper stickers, buttons and lawn signs. We’ve had five requests this morning from people walking in, including a pretty grimy-looking guy who just got off a six-day shift on an oil rig. He was “from McCain country,” he told us, which is basically everywhere except Steamboat here on the Western Slope of the Rockies.

The office is lively, with phones ringing and people wandering in and out. Sue came in to make reminder phone calls to those working the phone banks the next two nights starting at 4. Eric and I joined them on the phones for a few hours then we all quit early to watch the second Obama-McCain debate from Tennessee.

The computer systems are pretty sophisticated. The data is not just voter registration info like party affiliation, age and gender. If it were, it would be out of date already anyway. The furious push up until Monday, the day I arrived, was registering new voters. Another 500 names were turned in by the deadline here in Routt County.

The database is massive and “turf” can be “cut” in many different ways. If we make calls during the day, we use an “over 60” cut since retirees may be home. (What we found was that many of those “over 60” were still in the workforce in these economic times.) When we are calling strictly for volunteers to work a few phone banks per week, we call identified strong Obama supporters only, an easy job even if they say no. Then there are intermittent voters of all stripes, including Republicans and many, many Undeclared. We’re after them. We learn some of them have moved. Some are committed McCain backers, which they let you know about pretty quickly. When we find Obama voters we ask them to volunteer, too. We’re going to need lots of help. The purpose of all this calling is to clean up the database so the big list in the sky can be cut and used more efficiently without extraneous names, especially in the last critical weekend before the election. The list grows smaller and better every day.

In addition to phoning and data entry, I started to canvass. It’s like phone work except door-to-door, face-to-face. Before I left Humboldt I got a few tips from my Jehovah Witness friends about not getting discouraged and making a little noise, like whistling, before approaching a house. You don’t want to startle anyone.

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