Very very good article on the role Californians played in the Obama win — much more than you’d think for a state that was never in play, and got little initial attention from the campaign. Here are a few excerpts but read the whole thing.

“…it may come as a surprise that the California team actually pulled off what can only be called a field operation coup: on election day, California volunteers got on their own phones and managed to make an astonishing 2 million calls into battleground states – a number that outstripped the calls made by all other Obama phone banks in all other states, combined. They called from coffee shops, from houses, from parks. They called from baby groups, from pajama parties, from book clubs. In the end, the state logged a total of 10 million calls between Obama’s nomination speech and his victory speech. It was a milestone achieved with very little drama, and one that is noteworthy not only because it is unprecedented, but because it nearly took the national campaign by surprise. How it was done may also provide some insight into what lies on the horizon, on the grassroots front, going forward.

“… Stevenson’s involvement in the Obama campaign began in July of 2007 when she had a bit of free time and decided to volunteer. She drove to Burbank to attend something called “Camp Obama”, the campaign’s then newly-minted community organizing boot-camp. Still in beta form, it was led by legendary community organizer, Marshall Ganz, himself. Three days later, Stevenson and a few hundred other trainees walked out of the session in organized groups, each with a volunteer title and a full-time volunteer job, primed to help organize for the California primary. Despite eventually losing in California, the strong network of volunteers, aided by the now-famous Obama web site, stayed alive, sending volunteers to later primary states, generating phone calls and waiting for the nominating process to be over.

“Fast-forward to a few weeks before the Democratic National Convention, when Stevenson, now a respected organizer within the campaign, was tapped to run the California field operation, with Mitchell Schwartz, a former Clinton staffer with a field background, already in place as State Director. Assigned by Chicago to adopt Nevada as a sister state, it wasn’t, perhaps, the highest priority mission, but it was treated with urgency: California was to call lists of Nevada voters as well as to send massive numbers of volunteers there to help with voter registration and canvassing.

“Despite the time crunch, one of Stevenson’s first decisions was to replicate her own formative Obama training experience. Starting on September 9th, her team brought back Camp Obama to California with a commitment that no other state would come close to duplicating — scheduling a series of 30 sessions all over the state, even in unfriendly, rural areas. It was a gut-decision, and a controversial one, but it proved to have immeasurable impact. In the weeks leading up to the election, thousands of Californians attended the two-day, sixteen hour session, Trainees broke into mini-groups to learn such things as the art of talking to voters effectively, and the finer points of how to record voter responses. Interestingly, it was here that California solved the enormous data processing hurdle which has dogged campaigns forever: how to effectively capture the information volunteers gathered in the field each day from voters. The answer: decentralize. Each mini-group had volunteers who were taught to handle voter files directly, with unprecedented access, and to update the new information daily….

Read it all

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