This has nothing to do with race, god, guns, abortion, or anything Wright said, that's a list of excuses. It's about strategy. It was the predominately Black urban areas Obama didn't do well enough in that killed him. Another diarist pointed out he did better in rural areas than he expected to. Democrats win PA with a proportionally larger turnout in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia than in rural areas. Obama didn't get the proportionally larger turnout in urban areas he needed; that cost him the primary and will cost him the general.
Only Pennsylvanians can win Pennsylvania. We were fighting a 3 way battle here; Obama's people, his supporters in PA who are used to running things, and Hillary's lead. We've won this state by fighting the Republicans with everything we have; we know how to win here, it takes 110%, and we can't do it without autonomy and unconditional support from National. Applying a bit of cultural relativism here would go a long way; we already know how to win here. Don't tell us to do something else and be surprised whey you lose. You can never win PA doing things your way, but we can win it for you if you let us do things right, and play by our rules.
Elections in Pennsylvania aren't won in Levitown, they're won in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. There are people on the ground in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia who know how to win elections there; that's Obama's base, and elections are won or lost in Pennsylvania based on how many people in those area's get to the polls. We know how to do this, we do it twice a year, every year. The mayoral elections and primaries where nothing is contested serve as practice for the big ones.
We know what we need from national or state wide campaigns to win — mainly money and materials, and those are the things Obama's campaign didn't provide. We don't need more volunteers, there are already tons of people in the community like me, who do this every year and know how to get it done right; of course extra hands never hurt, but out-of-state leadership does. The ward leaders know what they need to do, veteran volunteers know what we need to do, and we help the newbies, whose first time it is working on an election, figure out what they need to do. Everybody, from the ward leaders in their cars, to the people behind the doors we knock on, knows it's the people going door to door, the people standing out side of polling places, who are doing the real work, and nobody questions these people being entitled to certain perks. Nobody except the Obama campaign.
My opinion of his campaign comes from what I've seen in Pittsburgh and what I've read about what happened in Philadelphia. He did unexpectedly well in central PA, but still lost by 10 points; so something went horribly wrong in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. If anyone saw my last diary, where I asked people to bring yard signs to polling places in Pittsburgh, that was more than a simple mistake on the campaign's part.
One mistake Obama's campaign made was not having people stationed at polling places, as they should have. When I asked them about that, and volunteered to take that position if they needed me to, they said they didn't think it's important, but it is important. It was a beautiful day, people weren't home, so going door to door wasn't a particularly effective way of contacting people. The last chance you have to change someones mind is as they enter their polling place, and everyone who goes to vote enters the polling place, so if the people outside polling places are working effectively, you can ensure contact with all voters. A secondary function of the people outside polling places is to serve as poll watchers and a contact point should someone lose communication with their group while canvassing. In cities many volunteers rely on public transit, so they can't just go back to their cars and drive to base if they get lost or separated. If people are stationed at polling places, any volunteer who loses communication can easily get back in contact with the campaign by going to the nearest polling place. Should any kind of problem occur at the polling place, that person can advise the person to get a provisional ballot, and should have a cell phone (theirs or the campaign's) to alert their superiors of the problem immediately, as opposed to finding out about it much latter by meeting a person who ran into such a problem at their polling place while going door to door. Standing at a polling place is easier than going door to door and you can make contact with more people from there. This is a critical function their campaign completely neglected, and it showed up in the numbers.
Campaign headquarters and satellites in cities should be placed on major public transit lines allowing people to be efficiently moved back and forth while freeing up cars for more important uses. Many volunteers are students or lower income people who don't have a car, so the cars available should be put to the most efficient use possible, and to do that headquarters and satellites should be placed where they are easily accessible without a car. The people working at these headquarters should know directions there via public transit, or at least what public transit routes come closest.
Placing signs at polling places is important, the signs themselves aren't as important as the lack thereof. Around here there are only 3 conceivable reasons a candidate would not have a sign in front all entrances to a polling place.
- They're running for dog-catcher and/or unopposed.
- The campaign is run by disorganized highschool students.
- Everyone hates the candidate so much that someone took the sign down in broad daylight, without anyone in the community saying a word, or while others cheered (this typically happens to Bush signs). Removing a candidate's sign(s) is our way of saying "fuck you" to that candidate and their supporters.
Any of these 3 cases reflect poorly on the candidate, which is why putting signs at polling places is important.
Refusing to fund our existing grass roots infrastructure was a huge problem, and a big part of how he lost this state so badly.
The way it works here is that there's a grass roots infrastructure built out of people in mainly lower income communities, while people in wealthier communities tend to donate money. The money donated from wealthier communities is given by the campaign to fund the needs of the grass roots organizers in lower income communities. That's what I call teamwork. They have something we need, money, and we can do something they don't want to, which is go door to door. It's the job of the campaign to put these things together to win elections. Obama's campaign refused to act in that capacity, which is absolutely despicable, lost him Pennsylvania, and will lose him the national election.
"My ward's going to be an Obama ward," Paulmier said. "We've had to buy all our literature, buy all our street signs, and we haven't bought as much of it because we can't afford to. . . . We've raised $1,500 to buy yard signs and literature to canvass our community."
What does the Obama campaign charge him for street signs?
"They're seven dollars apiece, including shipping," Paulmier said. "So without those street dollars, we're going to have a hard time producing the turnout we'd like to produce in this election."
Philadelphia Inquirer: Word on the street: No election $
Considering it's a lower income community where the hell are they supposed to get that money from? Go door and collect the money themselves? Coming up with that money isn't their job, it's the candidates; even school board candidates know that volunteers shouldn't have to spend a dime of their own money working on your campaign. I'm sorry, Obama's not running for dog-catcher, and his campaign better quit acting like it. His campaign has raised a quarter of billion dollars, yet he doesn't want use a cent of that to pay for yard signs in lower income communities? If he'd rather give his money to AOL-Time-Warner than to the people putting themselves in harms way for his campaign, his priorities are backwards and upside down.
"One of the ways we've operated in every state is we don't pay people just to get paid," Obama said. "We're not going to pay for votes or pay for turnout, we're going to do it the old fashioned way."
Of course in Philly, paying street money is the old fashioned way...
Philadelphia Daily News
I don't think I've ever heard such backwards, twisted, logic coming from a Democrat. "Pay people just to get paid?" Somebody's been in DC way too long. Philadelphia has the highest murder rate in the US, and one of the highest, if not the highest, in the developed world outside of a war zone. More like "Pay people to work their asses off, and risk their life for your campaign". The idea that "street money" is some kind of bribe is utter nonsense. If every one of these people was paid 10x what they are, they would earn every cent of that money. Every one of them is putting in a 14 hour day of exhausting work under perilous conditions. Going door-to-door can be difficult & dangerous work anywhere, but what I do here, in Pittsburgh (though equality exhausting), is nothing compared to what the people in Philadelphia deal with. The volunteers and campaign workers on the streets of Philadelphia put themselves on the line sake of the campaign, and have my unconditional respect and admiration. Every single one of them, paid or unpaid (many are paid by nonprofit organizations), deserves to be commended for their extraordinary work; the least Obama's campaign can do in return for their heroic effort is pay for them to go out to lunch.
I can't think of a more insulting or despicable statement a candidate could make about the people on the ground working for them, than to imply the work they're doing isn't worth being paid for. Of course the volunteer work people do is worth paying for, their not getting paid for it is a contribution to your campaign you should be grateful for, not something that's to expected or assumed. I have little doubt Obama's campaign managers get paid, so the "it's an all volunteer operation" excuse is a load of crap. The people on the streets of Philadelphia are doing at least as much work as his campaign manager does on election day, under far more hazardous conditions, and they deserve to be paid as well.
If using money to get the greatest possible number of people to vote for you is wrong, then what in the hell do political campaigns raise it for?
Getting out the vote in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia is critical to winning PA in the general election, by balancing the votes from Republicans in central PA. It's takes a ridiculous amount to work, and it's perfectly reasonable for the people doing this work to be paid something. Refusing to put money into getting out the vote on the grounds of "people shouldn't need to be encouraged to vote" will cost you PA's electoral votes, end of story. That's not a threat; PA is a blue state on a house of cards, don't blow on it, don't touch, or pull cards out, and expect it to stand. Are you willing to sacrifice 21 electoral votes over this 'putting money into getting out the vote is wrong' nonsense?
The way we've been doing things in PA works. The Obama campaign came here and told us to do something else, pushed the people out who know how win an election in PA, then lost by 10 points. We can't rebuild the party in time for the general election, we don't have time to try, and we can't afford this kind of infighting over tactics if we're going to win in November. If you don't want to "do politics the way it's always been done, because it's always been done that way", fine, do it that way for the sake of winning the election. The way we do things has evolved over time because it works for us; leave it be. Don't come into someone else's house and try to change their ways. We have a war to fight, we don't have to time to relearn the rules of game, and you don't have time to teach the nation a new set of rules.