Reply #9: Are you watching any indicators other than polls?

[IndyOp]

If we keep our eyes on the polls and the TV ads then we are no better than the corporate media pundits who keeping missing the stories that matter because they think they'll know the news by talking with official sources...

Obama leads better than 3:1 in field offices
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/08/obama-leads-better-than-31-in-field.html

...and the map of Obama's offices does a much better job of matching the "tipping point" map...



Context on Battleground Spending
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/08/context-on-battleground-spending.html

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.


Organizing Update
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/08/organizing-update.html

To the uninitiated, that may sound impressive. Led by Steve Hildebrand, the Obama camp has been tight-lipped about its own numbers, as Martin's piece notes. But the reality is that on Monday alone in just Ohio, without revealing my sources, the Obama campaign made 109,029 persuasion phone calls. From general experience, contact rates are about 25%, meaning that for every phone call or door knocked, about 1 in 4 voters gives you information about their support or about their party or what issues are most important to them in helping them make up their mind. In turn, this information re-loops into the voter file and flows downstream until it's the final GOTV push.

Let’s do some quick math. Martin’s reporting suggests to us based on that ratio that nationwide, in one week, the McCain campaign talked to approximately 81,000 voters. The Obama campaign talked to about 27,000 in one state in one night. If we make a reasonable guess that Ohio has something like one-fifteenth of Obama organizers and volunteers, that’d be 405,000 voters contacted in one night nationwide. In 7 days, that’s 2,835,000 voters contacted, compared to the McCain 81,000, a thirty-five-fold edge.