The views expressed in this article are my own and based on my own experiences and they do not in any way reflect the views of President-elect Barack Obama, the Obama campaign or any research performed by any party.
Although many may have moved past this little bit of news, we have a new president. There are several things that contributed to the success of Barack Obama’s campaign, but one stood in starker contrast to Sen. John McCain’s than almost anything else. Obama employed a veritable army of volunteers in his campaign, a grassroots movement of ground volunteers the scale of which has not been seen in generations.
For the last several weeks, I have been one of the many volunteers serving the Obama campaign. I began by phone banking in a union hall by the Long Beach airport and selling Obama merchandise at a table at the Cerritos farmer’s market.
On Halloween, I traveled from Long Beach to Las Vegas as part of the campaign’s “drive for change,” an event that brought thousands of reinforcement volunteers from reliably-blue California to the more politically fickle Nevada. The group I was with worked in Clark County, Nevada, where Las Vegas is located.
On Saturday morning, we attended a rally at Coronado High School. The senator drew about 19,000 people, and gave a speech concluding with a line that became increasingly familiar as the campaign approached its close. “And if in this last week you’ll knock on some doors for me, and make some calls for me, and talk to your neighbors and convince your friends! If you’ll stand with me, and fight with me, and give me your vote! Then I promise you we will not just win Nevada, we will win this general election!”
My cynicism told me few attending the rally would heed the senator’s call, and most were there simply to see the senator speak. I was wrong.
After the rally, the soccer field adjacent to the bleachers where the senator spoke filled up with hundreds of volunteers ready to go out and work for the campaign; so many came that the volunteers distributing walk-lists to the new volunteers ran out of lists to distribute. Obama is a talented orator, and I dismissed the enthusiasm with which people volunteered as something limited to his rallies. This was another misjudgment on my part.
When I began going door-to-door in Nevada, the extent to which the Obama campaign had outmaneuvered McCain on the ground was revealed to me. I was a fraction of a fraction of a massive organization of volunteers within the state of Nevada, and even the organization in Nevada was just a piece of a movement occurring throughout the country.
David Axelrod’s “fifty-state strategy” was working brilliantly because there were legions of supporters enthusiastic about Obama. During my time in Nevada, I saw all of three volunteers, five yard signs and two bumper stickers in support of McCain — and I covered miles in the Las Vegas suburbs.
I was not the only one walking door-to-door in Clark County. My group had swelled to twelve volunteers by the end of the week. We worked out of an office based in a house in the Las Vegas suburbs headed by three interns. This office also organized well over a dozen other volunteers from the local area, but was only a subdivision of a larger office and a larger office still above that office, continuing upward to the national level.
In addition to this already impressive mobilization of the local community, the “Drive for change” campaign strategy produced an impressive response. My group was a modest size, but the West Los Angeles Democratic Club bused more than ninety volunteers to Las Vegas in the final two days of the campaign — keep in mind that, unlike me, many of the other volunteers had been making the trip from California to Las Vegas for weeks.
The amount of volunteers that were active in Clark County is unfathomable and — because it was and may still be rather sensitive information — unknown to me, but during the victory party at the Rio, I walked down the hallway from the casino to the convention center where the Nevada State victory party was being held.
Walking for about ten minutes, I came upon nothing but Obama volunteers and supporters; they filled the hallway, the convention hall, the bars and restaurants. On the 19th floor, three suites had been rented out for the volunteers from California who aided the campaign, and they were completely full and bursting out into the hallway. This was only one of several parties occurring throughout the city.
While it is not the only factor that contributed to his victory, the way that President-elect Obama, with his campaign manager David Plouffe, mobilized an electorate as a community organizer may have mobilized a neighborhood does bring something to mind. Although a community organizer may not have “actual responsibilities” as Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Gov. Sarah Palin had suggested, after this campaign they may reconsider their assessment of the skills Obama developed as a community organizer.
In the end, Obama won and McCain lost Nevada by twelve points for various reasons, but Obama has already demonstrated that alternative fuels can work by fueling a brilliant and massive campaign machine with hope and supporters — and lots and lots of money from said hopeful supporters — rather than through fear and a lockstep party machine.
Antonio J. Mendoza is a freshman history and philosophy major.
