(Cross-posted at Off the Bus)

Mainstream coverage of electoral campaigns often focus on candidate speeches, advertising, and other mass-outreach efforts, for a myriad reasons. Where in all of this do average citizens fit in? In fact, volunteers play some of the most important roles in campaigns. Below I’ll detail one such campaign, Obama for South Carolina. It may be ancient history by now, but I want to provide a primer for anyone who wonders what they might be getting into if they answer “yes” to that time-honored phone bank question, “Would you like to volunteer with the campaign?”

To use a military analogy: If advertising represents a campaign’s “air war,” then volunteers are the ground troops — and just as in military affairs, it’s boots on the ground that capture territory. In the weeks and months leading up to election day, as Zack Exley details, a lot of work goes into persuading voters and identifying supporters (also largely by volunteers). But what happens on election day itself consummates all of this work. It’s called Get Out The Vote (GOTV), and it’s a popular way for new volunteers to get involved.

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WHY GOTV?

This year’s wide discrepancy between research polls and election results demonstrates that public opinion isn’t the same thing as actual votes. As anyone with a job, children, or a warm bed knows, getting to the polls isn’t always a top priority. GOTV volunteers do their best to get that guy with five errands after work to put “Vote” high up on the to-do list — that is, as long as that guy is supporting your candidate. That’s why weeks and months of work go into calling likely voters and asking them whom they plan to support. Voter IDing — another major volunteer role — provides the hit list for the GOTV crew.

South Carolina is a fraction of the size of California, but even so the task of reaching out to that many voters is enormous. The Obama campaign had settled on a total voter “universe” of over 600,000 — almost 20% of the state’s voting age population! Reaching that many people within a 12-hour window would require a massive ground operation.

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GOTV: IT TAKES AN ARMY. JUST, NO GUNS

Putting that operation into play requires a complex management structure capable of exploiting the narrow 12-hour voting window. If the Obama for South Carolina campaign were a small army, then the staff functioned much like commissioned officers; I counted at least three levels of hierarchy in those ranks, deployed at the main or satellite headquarters. Volunteers played front line roles, running local Staging Locations and deploying teams of Canvassers and Phone Bankers, the muscle behind the GOTV operation; and Runners and Poll Watchers, its eyes and ears. (Volunteer attorneys who watched for voting irregularities operated under a separate structure).

Below is a snapshot of the Obama for South Carolina field operations:

1. Statewide HQ (both field and political staff)
2. 7 Regions (staff: 7 Field Organizers, 7 Desks)
3. 26 GOTV Regions (staff: 38 Organizers)
4. 161 Staging Locations (volunteers: ~161 Staging Location Directors)
5. 1610 Polling Sites (volunteers: ~500 Runners, ~450 Poll Watchers, ~650 Canvassing Teams)

OSC was a massive operation, with several staging locations managing over 100 volunteers. How well the teams played together would point the way to election day success or failure.

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BOOTS ON THE GROUND: BLUFF PRECINCT, RICHLAND COUNTY

Election day found me in the Bluff Road neighborhood in an unincorporated region of Columbia, in Lower Richland County. The campaign considered it a belwhether for both the African-American vote and the Obama vote. By whatever stastical wizardry the campaign strategists had employed, as Bluff went, so too would the state.

There was reason to be nervous. In the week before the vote, the Wall Street Journal covered the Clinton and Obama South Carolina operations and gave me some idea of what the campaign was up against. As luck would have it, the WSJ paid special attention to the Bluff Road area of Columbia, where the Clinton campaign had won the support of a powerful state senator, Rev. Darrell Jackson, who is also pastor of an 11,000-member church just a few streets over from the precinct polling site. The Clinton strategy turned largely on Rev. Jackson, who was being paid over $16K/month to deliver the vote in his area. Four years ago Jackson had helped clinch the state for John Edwards. I had no doubt that he would be working hard again this year, this time for Hillary Clinton.

On Obama’s side was Nicole Young, the organizer for this area. She had already spent many months traveling throughout Richland County to evangelize the Obama cause and cultivate local leadership. These local leaders, in turn, built their own networks who ultimately staffed the hundreds of staging location roles. Bluff Precinct had many local volunteers, but no one willing or able to manage operations, so a woman from a nearby suburb, Vernelle Graham, volunteered. Ms. Graham, a physical therapist, got involved with the campaign in part to offer her grandchildren a role model. She had never before taken a leadership role in a political campaign. Election day would offer a test of whether a grassroots campaign staffed by volunteers could hope to beat one headed by a well-funded local elite.

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I have been a fan of Hillary Clinton for some time; as I mentioned earlier, I stayed registered in NY as a student for the 2000 election so I could cast my vote for her in the Senate race. In the past several months, I have also admired her evolution as an orator, rising quite a bit above the lamentable “Shrillary” jeers. I think that female leaders who seek a role model will find a lot to learn from her public speaking style.

That said, Hillary herself has a strange messaging problem that she needs to find a way to stop: her apparent relish for campaigning, itself.

Here I’m not referring to the perceived tweaks to the campaign messaging; being able to iterate a message until it hits the right note is a critical skill for any politician (although, as with any form of magic, it’s best done out of sight). I’m talking about what appears to be her color commentary — what, in sports, might be considered “trash talking.”

Yesterday, in Texas, Clinton commented, “From my perspective this is the exciting part of the campaign, where you really get down to saying OK what are the differences, how do we draw these distinctions and what are the respective records of each of us running.” Kicking off the Iowa campaign in December, she declared, “Well, now the fun part starts.”

Clearly, Clinton has staked her claim not just on “experience” as a leader, but very specifically on experience in dealing with the rough-and-tumble of politics. There’s a subtle but important difference between the two, and it’s unclear to me whether American voters really want someone who not only says that she’ll fight hard, but implies that she’ll fight dirty — and like it. There’s a fiction that politicians have to maintain, that the campaigning and fund-raising and all of that is the very lamentable means to the nobler ends of governance. They have to maintain this even they’re adrenaline-junkie, baby-kissing congenital glad-handers.

By this point in the campaign now, Clinton has demonstrated that she’s tough and has risen (I hope) above feminine stereotypes. Maybe she felt that it was important to convey how strongly she can fight. But drop the “fun part” stuff and the same message shines through, without the gleeful overtones. The problem is the double standard we hold — not for women, but for politicians. If our leaders fight dirty, I think we still want them to feel dirty about it. The danger Clinton courts with her message is that, as McCain might put it, she likes it.

There’s a lesson in yesterday’s Massachusetts results that, in fairness to Hillary supporters, might give Obama fans some pause. As I described, we never really expected to win Massachusetts, but I do feel that we fell a few points shy of where we could have been in the popular vote (even if we achieved exactly what we were aiming for in the delegate fight). In the absence of campaign staff on the ground for either candidate, it was left to the local machinery to carry on the battle. And all else being equal, machines generally beat movements unless the movement is disciplined, prepared, and enthusiastic.

Unfortunately in Massachusetts, the Deval Patrick movement that could have turned out a better showing for Obama had largely washed away.

Movements, as the name implies, need to keep moving to maintain their vitality. Thus they inevitably come to an end, either dying off or coalescing into a new machine that replaces the previous one. If you’re looking for change, the game is to keep the movement going for as long as possible and then convert it into a machine as late as possible.

But the first trick is to keep the people in a movement going, which initially means winning small but significant victories — enough to put on a cushion for the inevitable defeats. Unfortunately, Patrick largely failed to do this, aiming too high (and alienating the legislature that controlled his agenda’s destiny) and failing to focus adequately on whatever he was aiming at. What’s more, the Establishment gave him no quarter, magnifying symbolic rookie mistakes with the aid of a compliant media. Starting with a weak leadership team and thus inadequate understanding of how the Massachusetts legislative branch works, Patrick hit a streaks of “L”s that turned an assassination attempt by the Establishment into an assisted suicide.

Patrick subsequently chalked up a few “W”s, but those victories were too late to resurrect the energy that had surrounded Deval the Candidate. Moreover, movements are touchy things with a life and a conscience of their own. If Patrick had any chance of rallying his grassroots to push the rest of his agenda, he’s probably blown it with his casino plan, which clashes with the values of his core constituents. Even if the casinos make rational sense (which is a debatable point), they just don’t make moral sense within the value structure that undergirded the Deval campaign. Deviating from specific legislation is one thing; contradicting your core principles is quite another (as Romney should now be able to attest to). What could have been a transformative governorship now seems to destined to be, at best, a pretty good one.

So when it came time to turn on that grassroots that swept in a governor whose slogan, “Together we can” echoes Obama’s (he’d used “Yes we can” in his 2004 Senate race), there weren’t that many who were ready to answer the call. And so the Establishment, Clinton, had the upper hand on Super Tuesday.

What’s the lesson here for Obama? Run the Presidency with as much care and strategic planning as the campaign. Expect political muggings from the Establishment early and often. Set expectations initially low, exceed them, and keep jacking them up rather than aiming impossibly high and failing (see: Hillarycare I). Educate followers about the actual relationship between the President and Congress (it’s not how the media portrays it). Through wise care and feeding of the grassroots, keep supporters fired up to do battle with the Establishment when the time comes to win the big battles.

So, does Deval’s freshman year offer Hillary supporters ammunition to shoot down Obama’s “politics of hope”? Yes — but. But if you believe that our country needs profound change, and not just tweaking around the margins, an Establishment leader like Clinton just doesn’t have enough leverage standing inside the machine to break the machine open. Those of us who support Obama do so knowing that any candidate is a roll of the dice — Hillary included — but believe that this particular candidate has also loaded the dice in his favor. Unlike Patrick, Obama’s previous experience as an organizer and then as a legislator gives him a political education in both legislation and in the power and frailty of movements. When our national political system has been so thoroughly broken by the Reagan legacy, tinkering incrementally at the policy level is simply a bigger risk than trying to rewrite the game itself.