Charles Cook on the 2012 Ground Game +

[cleduc]

http://cookpolitical.com/story/4805

If you buy the theory that anyone in a swing state who is still undecided is pretty unlikely to vote, that means that this election becomes pretty much a ground game, coming down to who can get their folks out. It is absolutely impossible to gauge at this point the relative effectiveness of the Obama and Romney campaign operations and their respective party apparatus. At the suggestion of Cook Political Report House Editor David Wasserman, I counted up the state headquarters and field offices for the two campaigns, with the RNC Victory offices counted in the Romney totals. Clearly this is a crude instrument of estimating effort, but in those 11 swing states, the Obama campaign has 526 offices while the Romney campaign and RNC Victory offices total 251. In Colorado, Obama has 55 and Romney 14; it’s Obama 80 and Romney 47 in Florida. In Iowa it’s 65 for Obama and 14 for Romney. Michigan is the one state where there are more Romney than Obama offices (23 to 20). In Nevada, it’s 25 for Obama and 11 for Romney. Obama also holds the edge in New Hampshire (22 to eight), North Carolina (49 to 24), and Ohio (79 to 37). Pennsylvania has 39 Obama and 19 Romney outposts, Virginia has 40 for Obama and 30 for Romney, while in Wisconsin the advantage is for Obama is 52 to 24. This may or may not be a fair way to measure field activity, but I certainly can’t think of any other way to quantify it at this stage.

That article struck me as a fair and worthy read of the election at this point in time. There's plenty more than the above quote.

So the number of offices for the ground game looks good for Obama but it doesn't consider:

Koch Group Kicks Off Massive Voter Mobilization Effort
http://www.thenation.com/blog/170103/koch-group-kicks-massive-voter-mobilization-effort

With Voter ID laws, election hours, intimidation, questionable voting machines and various GOP shenanigans and the big money behind them, this thing is far from over and will never be in the bag until Nov 7th.

If you can help out at any of those 526 Obama offices or elsewhere, I'm sure it would be appreciated. Now wouldn't be too soon to start.

[elleng]

1. Amazing!

Repugs used to have clearly superior ground games.

[monmouth]

2. What really shocks/surprises me is that with all of the repub money, the SuperPacs, Adelson, the

Kochs, wouldn't you think this would have been a priority expenditure? I'm baffled. Is all of the money going to TV ads, bonuses for his higher echelon campaign advisers? Makes me more and more appreciative of Jim Messina. We should have a Jim Messina Appreciation thread...LOL..

[elleng]

3. Methinks ground games must be run by/through parties,

and as parties/candidates can't cooperate/consult with superpacs, they're handicapped.

[monmouth]

4. Ahh, you're right. I wonder how strictly that little rule has been followed..LOL..n/t

[cleduc]

5. I suspect what we're seeing in Iowa:

http://news.yahoo.com/democrats-far-outnumber-gop-iowa-ballot-requests-102632378--politics.html?_esi=1

With absentee and early voting set to begin next week in Iowa, a battleground state in the presidential race, Democrats have a 6-1 edge in ballot requests so far, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Democrats requested roughly 100,000 ballots, compared with 16,073 ballots requested by Republicans, the newspaper said. Absentee voting and in-person early voting begins on Sept. 27.

"I see the early vote numbers, and I grimace a little bit," said Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party and the editor of a popular blog, told The Journal. "It feels like an Obama state…. The president has been more accessible to voters than [Mitt] Romney and [Paul] Ryan."

Probably has something to do with the organization Obama set up there in 2008 and on. That has to be a chilling result to those at the GOP hoping Iowa is in play as there were only about 1.5 million votes cast in 2008. 100,000 Dem early voting ballots requested out the gate is daunting for the GOP.

The other thing that Obama did was invest in these offices last fall. My sister tells me that a few offices were never closed since 2008 though she was vague on how many or where they were.

As a community organizer who ran get out the vote campaigns in Chicago, this president would know this game as well as any candidate for that office we've ever seen.

[smorkingapple]

6. Which is why Romney not even being competitive kills the R turnout game

They can try as much as they want, if they don't think they have a legit chance at winning they will stay home.

IMO, this is why Bush won in 2004. Race was legitimately close and came down to turnout. In 2008 it was pretty obvious Obama was going to win and that the D turnout would be thru the roof. R's stayed home.

The Romney plan was always to stay close to Obama, this way R's would smell victory and turn out in droves for a guy they weren't too enthusiastic about. Once that goes, their turnout game is going to suck which not only kills Romney, it kills downballot folks as well.

This is why you see the R's crying murder this week that the media is actually reporting the true state of the race. They know voter apathy is the worst thing for them in this cycle.

[Cosmocat]

7. A couple of points

1) Bullchit on "absolutely impossible to gauge the the effectiveness" of the GOTV. Cook and all the other pundits were breathless abuot the R GOTV operations during the Bush campaigns. There was no way to know for sure, but I think everyone knew Bush had a good operation in that regard, and they were just giddy about super genius Rove and the GOTV operation. David Plouffe is Roves equal at worst, and never gets the super genius breathless treatment Rove got/gets. And, we know for a darn fact that BO had a BIG time GOTV in 2008, and it is VERY safe to say he is going to be A LOT more effective at it than Romney, who there is no other more accurate way to describe than an utter buffoon.

2) That being said. Minus formalized HQs, the Rs do have more inherently native GOTV power. They just do. The Ds have some churches in the urban and southern areas, and unions. But, unions lose their boots on the ground capacity incrementally every election, and the GOTV capacity of Evangelicals alone swamp whatever the Ds might have.

3) Agree about the prior post about how the race is being "called" by the media and the energy of the base to mobilize going into the election. The "liberal" media knows this and beyond its own self interest of having to have a race that forces people to watch them, as an extension of the republican party they know their job is to make any kind of R lead look imposing to tamp down D enthusiasm, and to temper whatever lead Ds have to tamp down D enthusiasm and keep the Rs from being totally dispirited.