Obama team pours money, manpower into battle for Fla.
ORLANDO, Fla. - Seeking a knockout punch against Republican John McCain, Democrat Barack Obama's campaign has poured people and money into Florida in building the largest field organization ever assembled in the Sunshine State.
Obama's campaign says it has deployed 500 paid staff members and boasts 160,000 volunteers in Florida, an unprecedented network that is hunting for votes via telephone, e-mail, and old-fashioned, door-to-door personal contact. Combined with a barrage of advertising, the Florida blitz will cost much more than the $39 million the campaign initially budgeted.
McCain has fought back in Florida with his own formidable ground operation, and he held a solid lead in the state until last month, when Obama surged ahead in most polls. Surveys this week show the race for Florida, whose economy is being ravaged by the home foreclosure crisis, to be a dead heat.
Four years ago, President Bush ran a massive get-out-the-vote operation and easily bagged Florida's 27 electoral votes on his way to reelection. This year, a Democratic win in Florida would be a huge blow to McCain. Everyone on both sides understands what is at stake here.
"If we win Florida, it's over," said Steven Schale, director of the Obama campaign in Florida.
"There's no formula to win without Florida," said Lew Oliver, chairman of the McCain campaign and Republican Party in Orange County. "We know Florida is it," he said during a break in phoning voters at the GOP's county headquarters in an Orlando strip mall. "It's a big motivating factor."
Orange County, with its fast-changing demographics, is a major battleground within the battleground state. In 2004, John Kerry beat George Bush by 815 votes out of 388,000 cast in Orange County, near the center of the so-called I-4 corridor, the interstate highway between Tampa and Daytona Beach that connects the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. More than 40 percent of the state's voters reside in the Tampa and Orlando media markets, and the region helps decide every close election in Florida.
The Florida operation raises the Obama campaign's commitment to strong field organization to a new level. Schale, a veteran of Florida politics, presides over a network of Obama regional offices that buzz with young staffers and volunteers armed with wireless laptops.
The McCain campaign and Republican National Committee do not disclose staffing figures, but one RNC staff member said the Obama campaign "probably has more [staff] people on the ground in Florida than the RNC has in the whole country."
The Obama campaign has also heavily outspent McCain and the RNC on advertising. This week, the Obama campaign increased its purchase of TV air time in most of the state's 10 media markets to about triple the volume of a typical campaign. The Democrat's campaign is also running extensive radio ads all over the state, including in rural areas.
The operation is especially evident on the ground, beginning with its vast voter registration drive. The campaign boosted the Democrats' registration advantage over the Republicans to almost 658,000 voters out of 11.2 million in the state. That edge is nearly double the Democratic margin four years ago.
The Democratic ground operation now is working to get Obama supporters to take advantage of Florida's early voting, which ends two days before the Nov. 4 election. There were long lines at early polling stations this week, with delays of up to three hours.
The Obama campaign is trying to capitalize on demographic trends that favor Democrats - growing populations of young people and Hispanic immigrants from the Caribbean and Central and South America who are not part of the Cuban community, which has been loyal to the GOP. The ground forces are also targeting the 400,000 African-Americans who were registered but did not vote in 2004, Schale said. What's more, they are aggressively seeking out Republicans, particularly transplanted Midwesterners on the Gulf Coast, who are angered by the budget deficits and interventionist foreign policy of the Bush administration.
Lifelong Republican Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, is an increasingly visible Obama surrogate. She stumped for the Democrat earlier this week in Sarasota and Fort Myers, traditional GOP strongholds.
As part of the effort, the Obama campaign has opened offices in areas the Democrats have neglected in the past - among them Sun City, a traditionally Republican retirement community near Tampa; Pahokee, a rural, largely African-American community on Lake Okeechobee; and Lake City, an agricultural community in North Florida.
"You take your opponent's winning playbook from the last election, you learn from it and you try to improve it," said Susan A. MacManus, a professor of political science at the University of South Florida. "That's what the Obama campaign has done so far."
MacManus recently issued a study titled "Generational Politics in Florida - Some Surprises!" She found that, contrary to the public perception of Florida as a state dominated by retirees and the elderly, there are now more voting-age residents under the age of 35 than there are residents 65 or older.
"Florida is a microcosm of the country," MacManus said in an interview. "It's a place where there is just so much change and churning in the demographics that if you base your campaign on the demographics of the last election, you might lose."
Oliver, the GOP chairman in Orange County, said campaigns may have trouble finding some voters because many have moved as a result of the housing market crash and foreclosure epidemic. In knocking on doors, , he said he often finds homes once occupied by reliable Republican voters empty, even in upscale areas, with for sale signs on the lawn and lock boxes on the doors.
"If this is impacting Republicans at this rate, I think it will impact the Democrats a little more," Oliver said.
Republicans' early ground game efforts have focused on absentee ballots cast by reliably Republican voters. Tallies early this week showed Republicans with an advantage of nearly 100,000 in ballots already returned, and double that in requested absentee ballots. Canvassers hand out absentee ballot applications in packets of campaign literature.
"We depend mostly on volunteers for vigorous phone banking, neighbor-to-neighbor contacts and targeted precinct walks," said Greg Truax, chairman of the McCain campaign in Hillsborough County, a Republican-leaning area anchored by Tampa. "They say Obama has the largest organization, but is it the most effective? I would say no."
"We're running virtually the same program we ran in '04 except the technology is vastly improved," said Mike Grissom, an RNC operative from Florida who was in charge of the RNC-McCain operation in Michigan until the McCain campaign pulled out of that state earlier in the month and brought him home.
The Tampa office has 32 Internet phones that connect directly to the rich voter database the party has built in recent years.
Clint Reed, the RNC-McCain campaign's political director for Southeastern states, acknowledged the Democrats' large presence in Florida this time around but cautioned: "Never confuse motion for progress."
He said the McCain campaign is 25 percent ahead of the 2004 voter-contact rate. "And that was arguably the best ground campaign put together in Florida politics," he said. "We have a big organization. Obama has a big organization. It's going to be close and fun to watch in the last 72 hours." 