(Tom Pilston/The Times)
Volunteer Kate Luntz canvasses for Barack Obama in Denver
Two women walk out of John McCain’s Mid-West headquarters carrying a pile of voter canvassing sheets, one sports a baseball hat declaring her a “team leader” of the Republican campaign. And both are black — an unusual sight in an election where Barack Obama’s support among African Americans is almost monolithic.
Are they volunteers? They look at each other sheepishly. “Not exactly,” replies one. “We work for an employment agency,” says the other. Who are they voting for? “I don’t want to say,” says the first woman. “Obama — of course!” whispers the braver of the pair.
They laugh, then look over their shoulders at the office behind them. “Don’t give him your name, he’ll put it in the paper,” says the cautious one, explaining that they cannot afford to lose their $10-an-hour (£6) jobs. “This is embarrassing. We’re doing this because we have to live. At least none of our friends can see us. We’re from Chicago — like Obama.”
Republicans have had to hire mercenaries for this ground war. And, if the experience outside the McCain headquarters was any guide, they may not all be shooting in the same direction.
Mr Obama, by comparison, has enough resources to spread his forces out like an invading army. In a dozen battlefield states, including Iowa, he has more than 700 offices, staffed with thousands of field organisers and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
In the breadth of its ambition and attention to detail, the campaign of Mr Obama — he talks of it as a “movement” — may surpass a Republican grassroots organisation built for President Bush in 2004 that has since fallen into disrepair. The Democratic ground operation, together with a concerted effort to register millions of new voters, may swell support upwards of 3 per cent next week.
Mr Obama has recently expressed pride, even awe, at the power of his election machine. “We’ve been designing and we’ve been engineering and we’ve been at the drawing board and we’ve been tinkering,” he said. “Now it’s time to just take it for a drive. Let’s see how this baby runs.”
But for all the fine tuning it has received over the past year it is still stamped: “Made in Iowa”. This is where it all started for Mr Obama almost ten months ago when the discipline of his volunteers and a flood of younger voters propelled him to victory in the Democratic caucuses. On that same cold January night Mr McCain skidded into fourth place after a helter-skelter last-minute vote-chase.
And Iowa is where the contrast between the two campaigns is still the starkest. Mr Obama has 50 offices compared with 16 for Mr McCain — and four times the number of staff.
At the Obama outpost in Mason City, lights are still on at 10pm while youthful organisers plough through lists of the neighbourhood teams and precinct captains. The walls are decorated with idealistic amateur art depicting Mr Obama alongside peace signs and the mantra of the 280-page Obama campaign field manual: “Respect, empower, include”. The floors are littered with the detritus of elections: half-eaten food, a Hallowe’en pumpkin, a notice showing that a refrigerator and a toaster have been received on loan.
Among the volunteers in this office is Suren Pandita, a Labour Party worker from Croydon. “The big difference is just the sheer intensity,” he says. “Here we will have teams of five or six people for every single precinct and they will work each house where we’ve identified supporters until we’re sure they have voted. Almost every day is like election day.”
Volunteers are given a four-page script setting out their “persuasion rap”, additional talking points and exhortations to make people cast ballots early — a particular obsession for this campaign. So far, only 29 per cent of early voters in Iowa have been registered Republicans.
Canvass sheets ran to four pages and are filled in with painstaking detail, assessing all voters on a scale of 1, firm supporters, to 5, which means they have pledged allegiance to Mr McCain. Time and again they return to newly registered people, as well as those wavering at “2”, “3” and “4”, to squeeze out one drop, one more vote from Iowa.
The information is sent to the campaign’s Chicago headquarters, mixed with consumer data about individual voters, then barcoded. Fresh lists are then sent to campaign offices with stringent targets for voter contact. Mr Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, has issued a characteristically precise demand for 845,252 volunteer shifts to be filled in battleground states before polling day.
Inside the McCain offices in the Des Moines suburbs of Urbandale there are huge posters of Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host, but little of the excitement or appliance-of-science of the Obama campaign.
Canvassing sheets are simple one-page affairs. A large sign at the entrance shows that it is halfway towards a recruiting target of 590 volunteers for the election.
Not all of those working for it were hired hands. Shannon Weyant, 31, explained that she had been inspired by Sarah Palin to get involved. “She’s my hero,” she says. How much work does she do for the campaign? “Maybe a couple of hours a week. I fit it in when I can,” she replies before rushing off to pick up one of her five children from school.
The Republicans, who won Iowa four years ago, have not given up yet. Mrs Palin was here for two rallies on Saturday and Mr McCain visited yesterday for the fourth time in just over a month. His strategists point out that elections are not won by how many offices you open or the length of your canvassing script. Some suggest that a system that worked for Mr Obama in caucuses — where a small increase in turnout can have a disproportionate effect — may not count for so much in a general election.
But others wonder why Iowa is getting so much attention from Mr McCain when he trails in the Hawkeye state polls by double-digit margins.
“Maybe they know something we don’t,” says Eric Woolson, who guided Mike Huckabee to victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses ten months ago. “But in a year when we really needed to step up, we have failed to match the strides being made by our opponent.”
He admits to being surprised, if not hurt, that no one asked him to advise the McCain team in Iowa. Instead he is devoting some of the final days before the election to research a business venture for selling catnip.
Clear plastic bags containing the pungent green herb fill a corner of his office. “It looks like marijuana,” he says apologetically. “I’m working on getting exactly the right blend.”
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