- David Plouffe sent out the video showing that 100,000 people contributed in direct response to the negative ads and rhetoric of last week -- 1/3 of these first time contributors.
- This interesting Washington Post piece details the field operations in Virginia, noting that Obama has opened 25 offices in the state, and has 10,000 volunteers working across the state.
- A key goal in Virginia is registering new voters -- there are now 150,000 registered since the start of the year and Obama intends to double that to 300,000. In an interesting calculation, they estimate that this would translate to a vote gain of 60,000, or 1.75% if turnout ends around 3.5 million voters
These events feed into one another in a way that we haven't seen before in the campaign of a Democratic presidential candidate. There is a huge grass-roots organizing structure, buoyed by enormous sums of money coming from small contributors. These numbers tells the whole story: in response to Republican attack ads, 100,000 contributors on July 31 -- 25 staff offices, unprecedented paid staff, 10,000 volunteers in Virginia -- 300,000 new voters targeted, which by itself would make a 2% difference on election day. And the possibility that some of these new voters will also make small contributions, making it possible to open up more offices in Virginia -- or Georgia, Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, Florida, etc. -- which could further reach and energize more local communities.
Obama's email to contributors got little attention -- it wasn't the normal way to "fight back" in the face of attack ads. Nor did the press pay much attention to that crazy number of 100,000 contributors giving millions of dollars to the campaign in one day. But crucially, Obama has also changed what this money "buys" -- not just more TV ads in a few predictably contested states, but ads in an large number of states previously neglected; offices opening up in small cities that haven't seen this kind of political action in decades; paid staff nurturing tens of thousands of volunteers often in a single state.
So often the average citizen is totally shut out by the back-and-forth of TV ads from high-paid consultants that defines Presidential campaigns. Obama has brought us in, radically expanding the map, the process and the participants in the campaign.