I leaned in close to the speakerphone, trying to feel connected to the disembodied organizers scattered around my territory on the other end. "When the story of this election gets told, California will be a big part of that story. If we win, and win big as we are aiming to do, it will be because of all the work we are are doing in California supporting battleground state campaigns. And our region will have been a huge part of California's effort."
I had been giving some variation of this pep talk to my volunteer teams all through the month of October. I was constantly needing to ask them to do more, to go beyond the incredible numbers they were already posting. I wanted to given them a sense of the bigger picture - how their work added up to something never before seen in Presidential politics.
But I wasn't just telling them this to make them feel good. I believed it 100%.
I've been sharing my experience of working on the campaign during August and September. Today is October. I plan to finish up with GOTV, then the Aftermath. As I wrote in my earlier diaries:
There are some things I feel I can't share, either because they are other people's stories to tell, or because they really belong to the campaign. But what I can give you is a sense of what it felt like to me having a front row seat to history. And it will help me make sense of it too.
August began with a rapid-fire introduction to campaign life, and ended with the entrance of Sarah Palin. In between I had to build a structure and start running a field plan, while learning my new job at the same time. And August was probably the least intense month I experienced. . . .
September kicked off with an outpouring of post-Convention volunteer interest. September was also the launch of an intensive schedule of Camp Obama trainings - huge logistical challenges with even bigger personal and field payoff. By the end of September, the pressure was building and the challenges mounting. I was worried I couldn't keep up the pace. I should have known it would only get worse.
By late October, my teams and I had built a serious phonebanking machine, trained hundreds of new organizers, and scoured the Bay Area for talent we could deploy around the nation. Changes in goals, priorities and structure were coming fast and furious, testing everyone's flexibility. And I was trying to remember what my family looked like.
9400 Minutes
More than 9400 minutes. My cell phone bill for the month of October. That works out to approximately 5 hours per day, every single day, for a whole month. Talking on the phone.
Fortunately, by October I had also became a full-on new media junkie, thanks to the influence of my much younger team members. My new habits inolved massive amounts of texting, Twitter, and gchat, to supplement the steady stream of e-mail traffic. That's probably what kept it down to just five hours a day of phone calls.
Apparently, 90% of my job had become talking to other people. No, not the voters. Just talking to the people who talk to the voters. Or the people who talk to the people who talk to the voters. No wonder I was losing my voice.
Feeding the Monster
Much of that talking, e-mail, texting and everything else was about phone lists. By early October we had plenty of phonebanks up and running and it was rapidly becoming our core activity. If California had been known in earlier elections as "one big ATM," it was now probably even better seen as "one big phonebank."
The running joke among the field staff was that phone lists were "crack" for the RFD's. We had to have them, and the more we got, the more we wanted. We would do almost anything to get them, and were frantic whenever there was the slightest risk our next "fix" would not come through in time.
I would sit there, late at night, hitting refresh on my e-mail and wondering when I would get the lists to allocate for the next day. I would send requests up, based on what my RFO's thought their phonebanks would do, but I didn't always know what I would get. Once I got my regional pool of phone calls, I had to figure out how to split it up, to make sure that there was virtually nothing left over but that no one ran out.
I called it "feeding the monster." Because it the demand was voracious. This was, on one level, a good problem to have. It meant we were being very successful at establishing phone banks, recruiting volunteers to make calls, and building up capacity. But we had built far more call capacity than could be filled by the one state we were assigned to support. We were sometimes left scrambling to make it work, improvising ways to keep phonebanks going. "Are we going to call other states?" people asked me. "We will have to" was always my answer. We were going to keep growing, and there was no way the campaign would fail to take advantage of that. And indeed, by early October, we were supporting multiple state campaigns. Our first forays involved unofficial outreach, but our formal field plan rapidly evolved beyond a single state. Eventually, we would call into every battleground state at least once. This meant lots of flexibility, lots of changes. Some volunteers did better than others at this.
In a recent Off-the-Bus piece, one of our volunteers working in Southern California described this transformation, and explained what California's monster phonebank operation ultimately accomplished:
Fewer than 20 paid staff members were hired in September (compared with 100s in battleground states), a handful of offices opened and a minuscule budget approved. So it may come as a surprise that the California team actually pulled off what can only be called a field operation coup: on election day, California volunteers got on their own phones and managed to make an astonishing 2 million calls into battleground states -- a number that outstripped the calls made by all other Obama phone banks in all other states, combined. They called from coffee shops, from houses, from parks. They called from baby groups, from pajama parties, from book clubs. In the end, the state logged a total of 10 million calls between Obama's nomination speech and his victory speech.
Every week I watched the numbers come in, and sometimes couldn't believe them myself. Every weekend in October, I issued what felt like a semi-insane goal to my teams. 50,000 calls in one weekend? 100,000? More? By mid-October, the state of California was making over 500,000 calls in a weekend to Western battleground states and my teams had a big piece of that effort. Thus I felt confident telling them that California really would play a key role in electing Obama.
Rally Phonebanks and Other Crazy Ideas
As our operation ramped up the state director tossed us a new idea - rally phonebanks: massive one-time phonebanks in parks and public squares. The campaign had already experimented with having crowds at rallies make a few phone calls each. This was something different. The idea was actually to run a real, serious phonebank and do signficant voter contact as a public event. I thought it would never work.
But I enthusiastically volunteered to pilot test the model. My theory was that it would not be a great phonebank, but it would be great visibility and volunteer recruitment for the "real" phonebanks. We set up a park in Oakland on a sunny Sunday afternoon to try it out. We went to great creative lengths to organize the event, scrounge resources and even set up a wireless network in the park to do data. My basic idea was to use our Camp Obama phonebank model, where we put people in small groups with facilitators and enabled a couple hundred volunteers to quickly get on the phones and fire off several thousand calls. Some stellar volunteers, including one of my RFO, took that skeleton idea and turned it into a sophisticated organizing structure with dozens of phonebank captains, runners and managers. We printed a crazy # of pages of phone lists. I couldn't figure out which nightmare I was more afraid of: either no one would show up, or we would get so many people we would overwhelm the cell phone networks and not be able to make any phone calls.
In the end, several hundred people showed up, which at first seemed a little disappointing. We had prepared for a much bigger crowd. But it was a beautiful day to be in the park, and the photos show how much we all enjoyed it. We put every organizer, phonebank captain and even the data entry team on the phones. I sat on the grass in the sunshine and made voter calls for the first time since the primary and it was great. OK, I thought, not much of a phone bank, but a wonderful treat for our volunteers, who have really earned it. Then we put the data in, and I logged in to see how many calls we made. I had to add it up twice to make sure I wasn't reading it wrong. What seemed like a causal small crowd at the park made 5000 calls an hour. Suddenly, there was no bigger fan of the rally phonebank. We did it again the next weekend in San Francisco, with even better results.
Caffeine, Red Meat, Scotch and Mobile Broadband
When I posted my "GBCW" (Going to Obama Campaign for aWhile) diary, Casey Morris posted one of the best comments - which apparently became widely circulated among Obama staff and volunteers - offering some advice from the perspective of an experienced campaign hand:
As a political professional and veteran of every single job there is on a campaign, bottom to top, I really want to share with you and anyone else here who goes to work on a campaign what I have learned. hopefully, this will help to fast track your campaign worker learning curve so you can really be focused on the most rewarding and hardest best work ever (outside of parenting).
Here's my very best advice for working on a campaign.
1. Eat healthy food. Crap food will drain you faster than anything I know of.
*****
5. I've survived on caffeine, pizza, adrenaline and sex--but they are not the four food groups. There are much better ways to treat yourself and your body during the last 90 days of a campaign.
*****
Good luck, and remember, the first ninety days are the hardest. :)
Very, very good advice. Especially that healthy food part. Totally failed at that, frankly. I tried pretty hard to keep healthy snacks in the office, especially fresh fruit and lots of water. But something odd seemed to be happening to me. I was living so hard on adrenaline and so deep in the fight that I embodied aggression in my daily habits.
For me and a number of the core members of my team, our four survival elements were not "caffeine, pizza, adrenaline and sex" but rather "caffeine, red meat, scotch and mobile broadband."
We drank crazy, crazy amounts of coffee (or other caffeinated beverages) and tons of red meat. This is particularly ironic for me as I had only a few months earlier began to transition from a complete vegetarian diet. Regular meals were few and far between, but when they happened Adkins would have been proud. Besides coffee and red meat, we were sustained by the bottle of single malt Scotch I kept in the closet, and brought out after we got through particularly rough patches.
But the real critical fuel for us was the internet. We simply couldn't function without it - no email, no lists, no Google Docs, no MyBO. The office network going down would cause a complete work stoppage, and I asked every office and phonebank location to find two backup places with wireless where we could take laptops and keep working. We had a stash of routers and would routinely set up our own networks in hotel rooms, at Camp Obama, in borrowed spaces all over the Bay Area.
Even that approach had its limits though. By mid-October I finally broke down and purchased a mobile broadband card for my laptop. Within 48 hours I couldn't believe I had survived so long without it.
Don't Coast!
In early August, I tacked a photo above my desk. It showed Michael Phelps winning his seventh gold medal in a photo finish. While the second-place finisher is on a final glide to the wall, Phelps is in motion, taking the extra stroke that brought him in first. The fellow Obama supporter who gave it to me added the following caption: "don't coast!" It was a reminder that even if we were in a strong position we had to fight for every inch until we reached the finish line.
But folks were starting to feel pretty confident. The McCain campaign seemed to be floundering. My prediction that Sarah Palin could not withstand the national spotlight seemed to be coming true. I thought of this as the "five thirty eight" effect - watching the simulations trend stronger and stronger toward Obama brought on a sense of complacency. Attendance at phonebanks dropped, and so did the numbers. We were coasting, and I didn't quite know how to get people out of that. I threw it back to me teams - what should we do about recruitment? How can we get the phonebanks full again?
Recruitment, recruitment, recruitment was a singular focus the last weeks of the campaign. We made flyers and posters. We dedicated the last hour of many of our phonebanks to calling volunteers for future shifts. I was happy every time I got a phone call asking me to come in and phonebank. One of my RFO's brainstormed a giant election "countdown" banner with the # of days remaining until the election. We hung it in front of the office, reminding people that time was of the essence.
The renewed focus, perhaps also bolstered by the ticking down of days until the election, eventually brought the numbers up again. Just in time for the phonebanking goals to get completely out of hand.
Trying to Hang Onto My Marriage and My Family
I recently had a conversation with the state field director, herself a mother of two young kids. We were trying to figure out how we had done it, because now we were off the campaign and our lives were totally full. When could we have squeezed in 7 days a week, 16++ hours a day for the campaign? "We ignored our families for three months," I said. It wasn't a joke.
As time went on, I had less and less time and emotional energy for my kids and my husband. Even when I was home I wasn't really there - either because I was constantly on the phone and computer or because I was totally distracted by the work and the stress. My wonderful spouse would go to bed, I would be up late working, and crawl in an hour or two before he had to be up and leaving for work. I would sleep until the kids stirred, then race to get them to school and hop on my daily 9 a.m. conference call. More and more I would not be home until long after they were in bed.
Until the very end, I held onto one small space in the week. Thursday nights I took my daughter to her gymnastics class after school, and picked my son up from his soccer practice. Even defending one night a week from conference calls or meetings was a huge challenge.
But overall, as I said repeatedly, "my kids love coming to the Obama office. They can have the junk food they don't get at home, and the mother they don't get at home either."
My husband didn't even get one night a week. He was last in priority. First was the campaign, then the kids, then a minimal level of self care, then the marriage. It was one of the more painful sacrifices I made. I tried to find moments to reconnect, but they were few and far between.
Next: November, or I didn't know the human body could do without sleep for that long.