Primary perspectives

By Carter Bundy

I’ve been in 10 states over the last seven months supporting my union’s candidate for president. That candidate was Hillary Clinton, although my union has already endorsed Barack Obama because his labor record is 180 degrees from Senator McCain’s.

Having front-row seats for the longest presidential primary campaign in American history has been an incredible privilege. While our program consisted of union-member outreach, it wasn’t hard to learn something about the different campaigns along the way.

Just because I think political geeks like myself might find it interesting, here are a few of my observations about running a national campaign (primarily focusing on field work). None of this is meant to diminish the incredible achievement of Barack himself or denigrate Hillary; rather, this year merely provided a sharp contrast in how any good campaign should be run.

Event planning

Events are important both for firing up a candidate’s base and winning over undecideds. While campaigns have to be flexible and move anywhere in America at a moment’s notice, if you want a good event, you usually have to commit to a plan ahead of time.

The Obama campaign did a fabulous job with event planning. Often everyone in a city knew about an Obama rally a week in advance. I rarely saw an Obama event that wasn’t widely publicized at least three days ahead of time.

Sure, Obama generated rock star-esque enthusiasm, which helped. But his campaign also planned events for locations and times when supporters and undecideds could attend in large numbers, and made sure everyone had enough notice to re-arrange their schedules if necessary.

By contrast, it was a running joke that the Clinton campaign would rarely give more than 24 or 36 hours’ notice, even to her best supporters (because we were doing a member program, we were allowed to communicate with the campaign).

Bill’s Wisconsin wipeout

My personal favorite was a Sunday evening in Milwaukee. The staff (and remember, these young field operatives didn’t set the schedule) called fairly freaked out and asked if we could help build a crowd for a 9 a.m. Monday event in Milwaukee and an 11 a.m. event in Waukesha, a suburb of Milwaukee, both with Bill Clinton. Yes, 16 hours’ notice. For early- and mid-morning events on a Monday.

The campaign did a nice job of phone-banking Hillary supporters, but it’s unlikely that they got many undecideds to either event.

But there weren’t more than 400 people in Milwaukee, and about 150 in Waukesha. True, the local Wisconsin version of Rush Limbaugh announced on air that the Waukesha event was cancelled, and that hurt. Afterwards, rumor rapidly spread that Bill called the Waukesha event the worst one he’d been to in his entire political career.

ID programs

While Obama supporters were famous for canvassing all over the country, more often than not, Clinton staff and volunteers were calling voters on a system called “Activate.” Obama supporters were asking for specific voters at each door, which is almost always a better and more reliable form of ID contact than phones.

But in big statewide races, phones can make sense, if they’re done well. Unfortunately, Activate was not done well. It was a system where a computer, which knew the name, gender, party registration and age of voters in most states, would call to the volunteer when someone in the voter’s household picked up the phone.

But the volunteer had no idea who to ask for, and was basically forced to ID the entire household off of whatever person happened to pick up the phone. In a year with many divided Dem households (and given that the person answering the phone may not have even been a registered voter), this was a terrible ID system.

GOTV

Compounding the ID problem during the last few days in each state, Clinton supporters were going out and doing what seemed to be virtually blind pulls of voters. This happened even in strong Obama areas, so that Clinton volunteers were often going to doors of Obama supporters and guaranteeing Obama voters knew where to go vote.

While that seems to be a nice civic goal, it’s not a very good campaign activity. GOTV stands for “Get Out the Vote,” but more accurately should be called “GOOV — Get Out OUR Vote.” Turning out your opponent’s supporters, non-voters and Republicans ain’t good field.

Again, this wasn’t the fault of the field staff or volunteers; it reflected the atrocious planning and field knowledge of a highly-paid consultant or high-level staff in D.C.

The Obama campaign, by comparison, seemed to have some solid targeting, although it’s harder for me to know just how finely tuned its GOTV program was. I guarantee it was no worse than the Clinton campaign’s, though.

Dems’ under-the-radar bonus

This year’s crazy primary gave several thousand (mostly) young Democratic operatives and volunteers real-world lessons in campaigns that normally are accrued over multiple election cycles.

Not only does the Obama campaign have several thousand operatives who have run one of the best field programs ever, but they can tap into talented Hillary staff who directly observed and learned the lessons of a sometimes poorly planned field program.

The intense in-the-fire training of thousands of young Democratic activists and volunteers may be the most underrated development of the drawn-out Dem primary. Even if not all the Obama and Clinton staff are on the presidential campaign this year, many of them are going to be on congressional races this year and in down-ballot races for years to come.

Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in New Mexico. The opinions in his column are personal and do not necessarily reflect any official AFSCME position. You can learn more about him by clicking here. Contact him at carterbundy@yahoo.com.