At about 7:45pm on Pennsylvania's primary day, at the eastern edge of Hunting Park in northern North Philadelphia, I knocked on a voter's door with a last-minute reminder to get down to the polls only three blocks over. "You mean the voting is still open?" the woman asked. Yes, I reassured her, she still had 15 minutes to cast her ballot. "Oh dang, I didn't know that!" After many fruitless door-knocks, I was excited to put a vote in the bag for Obama.
Then a girl shouted from inside the house, "Yeah go vote for Hillary!"
I had a sudden flashback to the moment in 2004 when I realized that our Boston phonebank was mobilizing Republicans in Ohio because we were working off bad lists. Somewhere along the way, Obama's famed field operations had tripped up.
The first warning for me that something was a bit off came on Monday morning at the North Philadelphia Obama for PA field office, where Black Philadelphia blends into Latino Philadelphia. Campaign organizers gave us walklists for the local neighborhood to drop doorhangers. These lists, they assured us, were confirmed Obama supporters. Looking at the number of Latino names, I rejoiced: finally we were making inroads to Clinton's core demographic. It took only a few addresses on the list sporting Hillary signs to disabuse me of that optimism. Despite the campaign being on the ground in force for six full weeks leading up to election day, we still hadn't ID'ed large swaths of voters here. I was doing cold-calls with only 18 hours before the polls opened.
Apparently, North Philly was understaffed, and had been since early on. On Primary day I did my last canvass with two locals who complained that, despite signing up to volunteer many weeks ago, they were never activated. Meanwhile, phonebank and canvass lists piled up, even as places like West Philly saw so many volunteers that they redistributed to SW Philly.
The failure to ID voters over the six weeks' reprieve between primaries had measurable impacts on turnout operations in North Philly: not only did we risk mobilizing Clinton supporters, but we were drastically less efficient when we were chasing all voters everywhere in the neighborhood. Sure, we had done something similar in South Carolina, where the campaign strategists decided with just over a week left to target all African-Americans, whether they were positively ID'ed or not. But the SC campaign had only done this after polls confirmed that such voters would break very decidedly for Obama. If that was the assumption in Philadelphia, it was a bad one, because across the doors I'd knocked, there was also strong support for Hillary among a sizable minority of black voters.
As the smallest cog in a campaign's machinery, I can't really evaluate the overall strategy, although having seen the inner workings of Obama's South Carolina operations, I have some hunches. It may well be that the statisticians and other campaign pros in the HQ "boiler room" saw patterns or gaps emerging that they needed to exploit or plug up. Indeed, sometime around the 5pm mark -- the "last call" for operational redeployment -- word apparently came down from central HQ to the North Philly office to redeploy canvassing teams out to the north North Philly satellite, where the organizer was in near-panic over the amount of turf still left to cover. That's how I ended up with the virgin walklist that put me out past Hunting Park.
Not that I saw a single Clinton volunteer covering any of the same turf, either. If Clinton had a ground campaign in Philly doing anything more effective than holding up signs, it must have been underground. Yet her supporters came out in sufficient numbers even without a solid ground push to cut meaningfully into Obama's share of Philadelphia voters.
It could well be that intense GOTV efforts are overrated in effectiveness. Indeed, after being urged by her family to go cast her ballot for Hillary, that woman I spoke with in the last few minutes of polling on Tuesday instead headed over to the local store to buy some drinks. I didn't see her at the polls later.
(Cross-posted at Anderkoo)