Where the fight is

Mass. Democrats, sure of local win, campaign in swing states

Dorothea Jones of Boston spoke with fellow Obama campaign volunteer Damian Smith during a cookout rally in Durham, N.C. (Sara D. Davis for the Boston Globe via Associated Press)

Kathleen Shepard, 59, a real estate agent from Weston, started waking up at 3 a.m., worrying about the direction of the country - the economy, the dependence on foreign oil. She wanted to influence the election, but living in liberal Massachusetts, she knows her vote is unlikely to change the electoral math on Election Day. Last week, she said goodbye to her husband, her dog, and her Coldwell Banker office, and flew to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to campaign for Barack Obama.

Across town in the Back Bay, Carter Gaffney got in his Ford Explorer and drove to rural Cadiz, Ohio, to spend his nights in a farmhouse spare bedroom and his days in a two-person Obama campaign office. Kimberly Grose, 50, a healthcare consultant from the South End, called her clients, told them she was taking time off, and flew to Florida. She has been volunteering 15 hours a day for Obama in West Miami.

Scores of voters in Massachusetts, fearing they can have little influence over the course of the election in a home state all but certain to vote Democratic next week, are flocking to distant battleground states hoping to make a difference there. A smattering volunteered for the campaign of the Republican nominee, John McCain, but the vast majority is signing on with Obama, whose campaign is training hundreds of volunteers at a "Camp Obama" seminar in Massachusetts and exporting them to 20 swing states across the country.

Such political nomads have appeared in previous presidential campaigns, flowing from solidly red or blue states to contested ones. But political observers and campaign strategists say the phenomenon has exploded this year. More are volunteering and traveling farther, and more are political neophytes who are interrupting careers to do it.

"I think we're likely to see more people involved in an organized effort in this campaign between now and Election Day than we've ever seen in the nation's history," said Tad Devine, a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns who was Senator John F. Kerry's senior strategist in 2004 and is not involved in this campaign.

The McCain campaign would not supply numbers of volunteers traveling from Massachusetts to other states except to say that it has "strong, enthusiastic support from grass-roots volunteers" in the state. But such volunteers have clearly become key for both camps, especially in the closing days before the election as both sides try to marshal forces in states that could go either way, for McCain or Obama.

For the fight in New Hampshire, the Obama campaign is sending e-mail blasts to local Democrats. "Volunteering in a battleground state is the most important thing you can do right now to make sure Barack is elected president," said one recent e-mail to supporters in the state.

The campaign said it recruited some 2,000 volunteers from Massachusetts to descend on the state in recent weekends, and plans to raise the number to 5,000 for the final weekend before Election Day. Stefani Koorey, a humanities professor who lives in Fall River, has been one of them, campaigning in Nashua.

"I can't give them money," she said, "I can give them time. And that's my gift to the campaign because I know if he doesn't win and I didn't do everything I could, it's my fault."

At least 300 Massachusetts volunteers are at work in 19 swing states other than New Hampshire, and some 400 people recently packed a Dorchester union hall for campaign training from Obama organizers in preparation for heading to key states like Ohio and Florida. The campaign said such sessions have enlisted at least 15 percent more volunteers willing to head to distant battlegrounds than the campaign for Kerry had at this point in the 2004 election.

Many of the volunteers are like Shepard, a self-described political junkie who reads the Drudge Report and Huffington Post. When she signed up for "Camp Obama" last month, she told the campaign she would go wherever it needed her most. The campaign told her to pack "lots of sunscreen and comfortable shoes."

"Those sleepless nights led me down here," Shepard said in an interview from Florida. "You can't just sit there in Massachusetts and look at the headlines and talk about it and not do something about it."

While the outpouring is a blessing for the Obama campaign, it has also presented it with a quandary: what to do with volunteers who come from liberal bastions like Boston with no shortage of enthusiasm but little knowledge of the local culture. In many cases, the campaign has kept them out of positions where they would have direct contact with voters, preferring to keep them in behind-the-scenes jobs recruiting local volunteers or organizing phone banks.

"From the beginning, our voter outreach in Ohio has focused on a neighbor-to-neighbor approach to organizing, and our out-of-state volunteers help support that," said Olivia Alair, an Obama spokeswoman in Ohio.

Still, some clashes are inevitable. In Cadiz, a farm town that once proclaimed itself the "Proudest Small Town in America," Gaffney tried not to mention his Massachusetts roots and Harvard Business School degree, while playing up his service as a Navy SEAL. But sometimes he has to come clean. When a voter found out last week that he is from Boston, she pointed to a large Doberman on her lawn and said: "That dog doesn't like Massachusetts Democrats."

Dorothea Jones of Roxbury has been campaigning for Barack Obama in Durham, N.C.

"I believe fully in the political process, I try to do what I feel is most helpful, and North Carolina is one of those states that is a swing state and I felt I could be very helpful."

The Obama campaign said about 120 of the 400 people who attended the "Camp Obama" session in Dorchester had never worked on a campaign.

That was the case for Grose. She said a litany of issues, such as healthcare and the economy, had been gnawing at her for years. "You've got to get active and do something instead of complaining about it," she said.

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.