The Field Operation
(Broward County Florida Campaign Staff and Volunteers)
The Obama campaign served as a blueprint for how political candidates should organize and implement a new-aged form of campaigning. Although the candidate himself was once a community organizer, he left his own campaign’s organizing to a new group of hungry individuals, ready to create change in their own backyards as well as across the nation. This type of community organizing began in places like Chicago and Iowa. That grass would soon grow and bear ripe fruit, a mobilization of thousands of volunteers and staff that would orchestrate the most politically savvy ground game in modern history.
Generating the ground swell of a campaign can be looked at similarly to the mobilization of military. Think America right after Pearl Harbor. At first, you don’t have much but in a short amount of time, you have people from around the country willing to give their time, energy and effort to a common cause. In the case of Obama’s campaign, this first happened at “Camp Obama” which was held in Chicago, Illinois in May of 2007. The camp was held in a high rise in the city with approximately fifty people who came in four-day sessions. There were five weeks of sessions of volunteers and staff. During these sessions, the Obama faithful learned the rules of elections, they strategized the campaign they hoped to implement in the field and then planned to proceed come the primaries. (34) This was the beginning of the field operation; the Obama team had commenced mobilization.
During the Obama training sessions, they saw that there would be five organizing practices that served as the fundamentals that would lead the field campaign: Narrative; Relationship; Structure; Strategy; and Action. (35). Time Magazine explains that the job of the campaign staff is to shape the limited time and activity of both of the candidates and his or her supporters into a unified effort that drives a win. (36) Each member of the team would be trained in the importance of these practices and what they meant to the overall campaign’s end goal. In terms of the personal narrative, the campaign wanted to focus on how the values of the candidate aligned with their own values. Staff and volunteers were able to make connections with the candidate’s values which they took door-to-door and communicated those similar values to those that listened. That shared experience had energy and a genuine enthusiasm. By making the connection between the candidate’s personal narrative, their own, and the potential voter’s narrative, canvassers were able to find common ground that was more authentic than just analyzing the issues. (37)
Second, the campaign trained their volunteers to prioritize relationships. Instead of only having large rallies, organizers “learned the craft of the one-on-one meeting and the house meetings that laid the foundation for local organization, rooted in the commitments people made to each other, not simply an idea, task, or issue.” (38) The campaign couldn’t take all the credit for this approach. They had taken it from the Howard Dean playbook. He used it in his 2003 New Hampshire campaign and it served the candidate well. As Obama pushed forward in the primaries in his campaign in South Carolina, this strategy was implemented throughout the state. “Organizers had some 400 house meetings attended by 4000 people.” What’s important to remember is these same networks would be called on again after the primaries. Even if they couldn’t win their state, they could make things tougher for McCain, stretching his resources while making calls to other battleground states. (39)
One of the most important parts of an efficiently run campaign is its structure, how it’s organized. “The Dean campaign was a wake-up call about the importance of disciplined organization in our political process. It didn’t lack energy or enthusiasm, it lacked a sound foundation, which made it hard to build upon.” The ‘08 campaign learned from those mistakes. (40) While there was indeed leadership at the highest levels, when it came to the field, volunteers were broken into leadership teams. This served as the fundamental organizational unit that was responsible for a certain area identified as turf, usually within their own communities. Each neighborhood team had captains: data captain, phone bank captain and neighborhood team leader. (41) These teams organized phone banks, community canvases, fundraisers etc. Because they were familiar with their own communities, they got more people to open doors and listen to their pitches. These types of authentic relationships, outsiders or paid staffers often don’t have and cannot duplicate.
Next, the strategy must come from a central location and that strategy is then disseminated to each state, local office, staffer and volunteer. Everyone is one the same page. The national effort and the local effort are one in the same. That said, people had the autonomy to build their own local coalitions as long as they kept the big ideas in mind. Every one-one-one meeting looked different but the overall goal was for that meeting to encourage a house meeting where more supporters would hear about how they could help the campaign. This was followed by a training and an action plan for their designated turf. Most of this would be facilitated by the volunteers. This happened over and over again in big cities and small towns, building capacity for the overall field operation. (42)
After the infrastructure of the campaign teams had been built from a national and local level during the primaries, the next step was to make sure that it created a successful GOTV effort. GOTV means “Get Out the Vote,” what some would call the campaign equivalent to D-Day. By the time the general election came around, the Obama team had created a massive “network of campaign volunteers who helped him establish over 700 field offices across the country, compared to less than 400 for Senator John McCain.” (43)
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