" One side has something in the neighborhood of five million volunteers"

[LSK]

"These ground campaigns do not bear any relationship to one another. One side has something in the neighborhood of five million volunteers all assigned to very clear and specific pieces of the operation, and the other seems to have something like a thousand volunteers scattered throughout the country. Jon Tester's 2006 Senate race in Montana had more volunteers -- by a mile -- than John McCain's 2006 presidential campaign.

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.

snip

When the final chapters are written in this election about the ground game, many thousands of words will recognize that the Obama campaign truly was this:

"


http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/big-empty.html