For those of you who haven't headed over to FiveThirtyEight.com yet today,
a must read is Sean Quinn's The Big Empty.
Quinn has been on the road visiting campaign offices throughout the season, but his final piece is a stunning portrait of the McCain ground game - or lack of one, to be more exact.
I highly recommend reading this, before you head out to canvass, or phone bank, or do whatever needs to be done in the final days.
This will definitely put a smile on your faces and a zing in your heart.
The pictures alone are worth thousands of words.
He writes:
Offices in Troy, Ohio were closed on Saturday October 11. With perfect coincidental timing, two elderly women dropped by to volunteer but found the office shut. At Republican state headquarters in Columbus later the same day, one lonely dialer sat in a sea of unoccupied chairs. In Des Moines on September 25, another empty office. In Santa Fe on September 17, one dialer made calls while six chatted amongst themselves about how they didn't like Obama. In Raleigh this past Saturday, ten days before the election with early voting already open, two women dialed and a male staffer watched the Georgia-LSU game. In Durango, Colorado on September 20, the Republican office was locked and closed. Indiana didn't have McCain Victory offices when we were there in early October.
I was amused by his explanation of GOP "enthusiasm":
When Republican volunteers talk to us about how much enthusiasm and participation they notice in fellow volunteers, they mention how many people have come to pick up yard signs or bumper stickers. We haven't yet seen a single Republican canvasser. (The one in Cortez, CO was staged; she said canvassing is the kind of thing she would do, and we made a decision to do the picture because we were concerned with not presenting "balance." There is no balance in the facts.)
The pictures are a stark contrast to those we are used to seeing here, and depict the polar opposite of the hundreds of diaries from busy Kossaks who canvass and call and bust their butts.
Don't want to spoil the rest of it - head on over and show him some love, but he concludes:
But the other story, the story on which we've had a running eight-week exclusive in 36 separate On the Road pieces and counting, is that John McCain's ground campaign is just not happening. It hasn't been happening, without Sarah Palin there might be four or five volunteers across the entire nation left, and now, per Mosk's piece at WaPo, it looks like it will be happening even less.
GOTV!
We're almost to the finish line.