As a Precinct Captain in Houston Texas 0711, I should let you know that we were told by the campaign that even before Barack's visit to 19,000 at the Toyota Center Tuesday, there were 2,000 Precinct Captains signed up in Houston/Harris County.... This is the system of GOTV which has worked in state after state, city after city, block after block, family after family and church after church. Word is in the first hour they started sign ups, they had 7,500 captains. Training has been happening nightly in every part of the state and over 100,000 calls have already been made in less than a week, and the GOTV is just getting started.
Respect. Empower. Include.
Welcome to Texas.... This is Obama country, allow me to explain why.
Having an aggressive, self-run, IT based GOTV effort that is effective and efficient allows the campaign to push what matters on TV. Right now, Barack Obama has 6 Ads on TV in Texas, all of which advertise Early Voting from Feb 19-29th, a step the campaign has decided to take to enable people to return to the polls to caucus on March 4th as part of the Texas Two Step. And yesterday, he made some visibible stops in Austin which should warm every Longhorn's heart
Word is Turnout in Early Voting is Extremely High, however, whose turning out? Well, in this post on BOR, a very interesting finding is explored
I've looked at the early voting numbers for the major counties. TexasWeekly.com compared 1st day voting to four years ago. It's increased across the board, as you know. But I noticed that increase was not even. I'm attaching a chart I made.
It's a basic scatter plot, with a trend line (and the regression equation, for nerdy types). The Y-Axis is the percent increase in early Democratic primaryvoting for each county over the 1st day total in 2004. The X-Axis is the % Hispanic population per county, which is a crude proxy for support for Hillary. As you can see, as the Hispanic population increases, the percent increase in voting lessens.
This should really worry any Clinton Field Agents in Texas, that is if they actually exist. This matters because:
1- Barack Obama's Voters are getting to the polls early
2- Hillary's voters are not, leaving Barack opportunity for Spanish Outreach like this and this
And if they view that as cause for concern, then take a look at this trend; i've never seen a line like this before, ever...
Organic GOTV efforts are happening in the state as well. There is this report from Praire View A&M
From the elections office in Waller County.
The day closed yesterday with:
Rep: 82 voters
Dem: 472 voters
In a county that votes for Republicans in large numbers, this number is HUGE!!!!
The march occurred after the local elections board shut down the early voting location near campus of the predominately African American School and students took to the street to march 7 miles to the nearest location to log their early votes.
GOTV efforts are also happening in the Extreme Republican Rural districts like Gillespie County, again from BOR, the Go To Blog for Texas happenings...
Gillespie County, in the good times, is 20% Democratic. It has had no Democratic candidates run for local office in decades
at the Democratic meeting- we had about 100 people come! That's about 4 times as many as usual. We had quite a few from Kerrville (even 3 African-Americans) who came for the Obama get together.
After the meet, we broke up into Obama and Hillary groups, about 6 for Hillary, about 80 for Obama (including those from Kerrville).
So that is how Gill County shapes up for the candidates!
We had two really good Obama people there from the Austin office. The signs and bumper stickers got snapped up, I have a sign in the yard now!
It was a good meet up, people are very excited. I have yet to see a McCain or Hillary bumper sticker anywhere, but there are several Obama ones out!
Welcome to the Ground Game in Texas...
All of this GOTV has one focus, the Texas Two Step, the State Wide Marketing Campaign to win both the primary and the precinct conventions... the process Hillary's People just discovered recently...
So when you hear Markos declare that Obama can count on +10 that the polls aren't seeing, maybe you understand where that's coming from....
if the Texas election were today, Obama would likely win it by 10 points, regardless what the polls say. His ground operation is that good.
Thanks Markos. The Pundits have no clue, it'll take alot more than this to stop our Ground Game...
Your Obama Texas Ground Game
Precinct Co-Captain 0711 Harris Country
Houston, Texas a.k.a. "The Finish Line"
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