I just read this on 538:
When local field organizer Christian Lund took the stage just prior to Joe Biden’s appearance on Tuesday night in Marietta, he asked those in the attendant crowd of about 4,000 to look at the sheets in their hands. Each sheet held four names, and each name had a phone number and a bar code for later data scanning. Lund asked the people in the crowd to make four phone calls to this targeted group, and then he demonstrated.
Lund got voicemail. Over the microphone, he left a message informing his phonee about where and when to early vote, as well as where and when the Obama volunteer office was located in town and what it’s hours were. After he was finished, it was the crowd’s turn. “We even got extra cell tower juice just for tonight” Lund told the crowd, so go ahead and make four quick calls on Barack Obama’s behalf. They did.
The other day at Obama’s rally in Toledo, the local organizer asked everyone in attendance to (1) early vote; (2) make 40 phone calls or knock 40 doors; and (3) take Election Day off to help the volunteering effort. This is routine practice at every single event the campaign holds, even at Denver’s Invesco Field acceptance night speech. The largely Democratic crowd is given concrete, practical and manageable field tasks to accomplish.
The goal is gathering a larger and larger volunteer base. A whole night’s shift of phone calls may seem intimidating to a lot of people, particularly introverts, but it’s pretty hard to say no to four calls. Cleverly, Obama’s campaign reasons that the most difficult part of volunteering is the first four calls or knocks. The first part is always the hardest, particularly for volunteers who’ve never worked for a campaign before. Once over the comfort threshold, a potential shift volunteer now feels invested in the work.
I think it’s all part of the campaigns efforts to engage as many supporters as deeply as they possibly can. Seems pretty damn brilliant to me.
In the same post they have a picture of McCain’s field office in Columbus Ohio, of one of their phone banks with 40 phones and one lonely caller staffing it, less than 3 weeks from the election.
I always thought of rallies as something only the converted would really go to anyway…like I’d go to an Obama rally if he comes back to Minnesota (I’ve had something of pressing importance every single time he’s been in town which has precluded me from attending so far). I see the McCain and Palin rallies where it’s largely an exercise in whipping up hate and derision for the opponent…a completely partisan affair which raises money, but does little else. But to turn that into an impromptu get out the vote effort…WOW!
Consider this. When talking about door to door voter contact (and I’m going to assume the numbers in phoning are similar), 1 in 4 people is home and answers the door, and of those, 1 in 12 is someone who wouldn’t have otherwise voted for your candidate who will now. So, about 1 in 50. Say that with the phones it’s only half as effective, so 1 in 100 calls makes a persuadable contact. You 4,000 people at a Biden rally, and he does 2 of these a day for about 50 days of the campaign, so 100 rallies, 400,000 people. Each of them calls 4 people, that’s 1.6 million calls. One in 100 of those calls results in another vote for Obama. The VP candidate alone brings in 16,000 new votes in swing states! Obama has probably done 300 rallies, and he draws 10,000 people at each rally. He can drum up 120,000 votes!
And if he can get even a small handfull of the probably 15 million people he’s had come to one of his or Biden’s rallies or speeches, say 5% of those people who actually come to hear him speak, or 750,000 people to see that hey, this wasn’t so bad, I can DO this, he gets 750,000 more volunteers, each of them volunteering to knock on enough doors or make enough phone calls to persuade say 5 voters. That’s almost 4 million new voters he can bring to the table just by doing these rallies, where he can raise massive funds to pay for the office space and materials so these people can be effective at what they do.
So, I think getting these emails asking you to vote early is just one more tentacle in a no stone unturned strategy. I personally have given significant money to the campaign, and I’ve tried to persuade people in a way that’s comfortable to me, I am not going to take the day off work or volunteer and I’m not going to vote early and miss out on the excitement of voting on election day. But I commend his efforts and think it will make the difference between a win and a repudiation of failed Republican policies once and for all.